The Performance Improvement Blog

Culture vs. Control

The dust has settled a bit on the working-from-home issue which was stirred up about a month ago when Yahoo's 11,500 employees received an email from the HR department putting an end to “work-from-home arrangements” throughout the company. Apparently, Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, is trying to change a culture that had lost the nimbleness and creativity that it needs in order to compete in the world today. Whether you agree with this action or not, it is clear that she needed to do something about Yahoo’s workplace culture and reign in the behavior of some folks who were taking advantage of Yahoo’s work-at-home policy.

Unfortunately, the media debate quickly focused on the future of telecommuting and the plight of working-mothers rather than on the real issue which is creating a culture in which everyone is focused on innovation and results. Sometimes, to change culture, especially in a large, complex, global organization in a fast-changing industry, one has to exert greater control in the short-term to create a culture in which collaboration and teamwork will be how work is done in the long-term.

In a results oriented culture, how one works is determined by what one needs to achieve. If that goal can be achieved by working from home, then that could be an option. If achieving a particular performance goal is best done by face-to-face contact with other employees, then being in the office is probably the answer. 

For example, if my work objective is to write code for a particular Web site transaction and I can write that code from home just as well as I can from the office, then maybe working from home is a good option for me. If my goal is to create a new look and feel for an online news service, and I need the creativity that comes from give and take with other employees, then I should be in the office.

The problem is not with working from home per se; the problem is how to achieve the intended results. To start with location without consideration for the performance goal is to put the proverbial cart before the horse.

If a CEO is concerned with how employees are using their time, then she needs to talk with her managers about helping these employees set goals and be accountable for achieving results. Often, employees are not clear about what is expected of them. In the absence of this specificity, they (like all of us) fill the void with their own ideas of what they should do and how they should do it (within a general policy). When their actions come into conflict with the goals of the organization, then leaders may have to institute controls on behavior until managers can shape the expectations of employees and create a culture that is aligned with intended outcomes.

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Culture Change is More Than Skin Deep

Culture and Creativity

Culture Change is More Than Skin Deep

The new Pope appears to have made culture change top on his list of priorities. He has shown surprising humility in his words and actions, riding the bus with his Cardinals, rejecting wearing some of the elaborate vestments worn by past popes, and stepping out of his car and engaging with the crowds.  These are signs that Pope Francis is taking steps to change a historically secretive institution; one that has recently suffered from leaked internal documents that imply palace intrigue.

Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo, received notoriety recently when she instituted a new policy that ended employees working from home.  The media were abuzz with debate about her actions which, on the surface, appeared to be swimming against the tide of flexible work hours and locations. However, the action may have been part of Mayer’s plan to change the culture of a company that was losing market share and stock value.

Bob Flexon, Dynergy CEO since July 2011, has instituted many new policies to change the culture of this $1.3 billion electric power producer that has only recently emerged from bankruptcy. He has eliminated some of the expensive trappings of executives, moved managers out of private offices and into an open work space, and re-instituted annual performance reviews. Using Dynergy as an example, Joann S. Lublin writes in WJS:

Increasingly, leaders of troubled businesses try to fix the company's culture along with its bottom line. Since the financial crisis struck in 2008, CEOs have sought to improve collaboration and decision making, recognizing that a strong culture is "a critical component of their long-term success," says Nick Neuhausel, a partner at consulting firm Senn Delaney, which advised Dynegy.

While each of these leaders, from the Vatican to Yahoo to Dynergy, recognizes that culture change is
essential to the future success of their organizations, they would be well served to recognize also the complexity of organizational culture and the necessity of going beyond symbols and artifacts. For lasting  organizational change they must confront underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values of employees .

Dan Denison, CEO of Denison Consulting and co-author of the new book, Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations, writes that culture should be examined at the three levels identified by Edgar Schein:

(1)    the deep underlying beliefs and assumptions that are often difficult for insiders to articulate

(2)    the values and principles that structure action

(3)    the symbols and artifacts that are visible on the surface for all to see

People act on the basis of tacit knowledge but they are often not aware of how daily behavior is shaped by this knowledge. It’s simply “how we do things here.” Underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values become routines that, over time, go unchallenged. Those routines may or may not serve the best interests of the organization and its customers. Culture change must confront the link between the thinking that drives behavior and the effects of that behavior on organizational success.

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Learning Organization is Culture, Processes, and Leadership

Harry Levinson 1922-2012

Are Classrooms Obsolete?

Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED prize, says, “Schools as we know them are obsolete.” His conclusion is based on his research with very poor children in India who, when given unfettered access to a computer, learned English, math, and science without being in school. Mitra calls this SOLE – a self-organizing learning environment. You might conclude that although SOLE is the future for poor kids in India, it is not the future for kids in urban centers in the West. I think that would be a naïve assumption. Development of the hundreds of millions of children who live at the bottom of the pyramid will have a profound effect on the rest of the globe. How they learn and how they learn to learn will shape the cultures of all global organizations.

 

And the challenge to traditional classroom-based education is not coming only from K-12 educators. Educational leaders, parents, policy makers, and students themselves are demanding results from their investment in colleges and universities.  Computer technology is beginning to provide a solution and it is not in the classroom.

Tom Friedman, in a column for the New York Times, writes:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.

Online course (free!) providers, such as Coursera, are starting to offer options for measuring competency and thus recognize “stuff learned” and not just “time served”.

The training and development industry needs to change also. The method of training is still based predominately on a centuries-old model of teacher-centered, classroom instruction while most of what employees need to learn would be learned more effectively if it was a combination of “elearning” and on-the-job coaching. It might be, as Mitra suggests, that even “knowing” is obsolete because anything we need to know can be found in the cloud within a few minutes.

I say all of this with a strong caveat. Some knowledge and skills are best developed, or at least supported, in a structured classroom environment, such as much of the social sciences and literature, subjects in which a facilitated discussion is essential to learning. So I think the classroom, whether in a school, college, or business, still has a place. However, currently we rely much too heavily on this method of developing young people and employees. As I wrote in a previous blog post, “Throw out the course catalog.”

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