New and existing employees in an organization model what they see. This is true with respect to what an employee values about a company to his attitudes about his work to the behaviors he exhibits regarding his daily routine. Whatever the leaders are doing gives the other employees a free pass to emulate the same behavior. If a manager breaks the dress code, that makes it OK. If a director leaves at 4:30 p.m. even when a project is running behind schedule, her staff isn’t going to work any later. If an administrator walks past employees without saying hello, other will not feel compelled to be friendly either. All of these things are part of corporate culture. Poorly defined and reinforced values lead to mismanaged culture and become silent killers of the corporate landscape.
Excellent business strategies can be sabotaged by an inattention to the culture. Revenue which should have gone into expanding the business instead goes to the costs of training and re-training and re-re-training employees in key positions because of high turnover – an indication that something is amiss in the culture.
Let’s start with values. The values of an organization contribute to its mission its vision and its purpose. But they are ultimately the single driving factor to corporate culture. If the organization values rules that are set by corporate leaders, employees will behave by following them. If managers value being a productive member of a team, they will behave by staying late if something needs to be finished. If they value good relationships with their work colleagues, they will be happy to greet them in the hall or at meetings.
And defining values and putting them on a piece of paper does not automatically make them “so.” The organization has to live by those values and the leaders have the demonstrate them everyday in everything they do.
Examples of Strong Organization Values. The following list contains examples of sound organizational values: Continuous improvement, Compassion, Commitment, Accountability, Respect, Adaptability, Can-do attitude, Information sharing, Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation. You can surely name many more. Conversely, there are negative values that evolve when positive vales are neither defined nor consistently reinforced. These negative values take on a life of their own and contribute to the silent but deadly death of morale. These need to be defused immediately as they grow and multiply like a cancer. Once trust is lost it is hard to rebuild.
Examples of Negative Values that evolve in the absence of modeling strong values:
Personal Agendas usually arise when the team is not focused on the mission of the organization but more on their own security. Turf wars occur. Silos are formed. And people generally feel at war over control issues. Leaders must have deeply rooted character traits to model the way of change out of these situations. In a time of crisis is not when you will develop character. It must be present going into the crisis. So leaders need to be chosen wisely. You can rehabilitate skill. But rarely can you rehabilitate character.
Bureaucracy is a form of institutionalized control. Too much hierarchy in the decision making process stifles employee creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. Ultimately it strips away trust and empowerment. The control can halt innovation, creativity, accountability and self-actuating behavior. Bureaucratic organizations tend to lose their
competitive-edge due to the lack of trust in their talent.
Politics is simply a form of personally driven agendas coming down from leaders. Empire building creates internal competition and information hoarding which prevents open problem solving between various parts of the organization. This usually generates out of insecurity and an overwhelming desire for power. Again, the leaders are not aligned with the mission of the organization and are driven by personal gain. When in doubt, revisit your values. There you will find the focus of what decisions should be made. If that doesn’t occur it might be time to find new leaders.
Long Hours are not something that should be expected – certainly not in this day and age. People do not remain employed by the same company for 20 and 30 years like they did 15 years ago. Today the global market has made company’s much more competitive, sadly resulting in many of them being less focused on employee retention. Most employees today don’t even stay three years with the same organization. The expectation that people should work more than what is healthy shows disrespect for the personal needs of the employees. Burnout and resentment become by-products.
Short-term Management Focus can be limiting when long-term growth is compromised. Administrators may sometimes be brought in on short-term contracts which may cause the perception that they will manage differently than a longer tenured officer. A sales force or directors with short-term goals must also have a stake in a long-term strategy to balance their decisions so that there is buy-in to the long-term goals of the corporation.
When leaders of an organization recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support the organization’s goals and progress, change can occur. But change is not easy. A company’s executive team must understand the current organizational culture then decide what the organizational culture should look like to support success. Finally, the executives and respected leaders in the organization must decide to change their behavior to align with strong values of the desired organizational culture. This is the hardest step in culture change. Start now!
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Mary Lee Gannon is a cultural turnaround and leadership expert who went from being a stay-at-home mother with four children living in an unpalatable marriage behind the facade of a country club life to the reality of divorce, homelessness, and welfare. As a national guest speaker she demonstrates turn-around strategies that transform corporate cultures and took her from an earning capacity of $27,000 to the president and CEO of a hospital foundation. Her book “Starting Over – 25 Rules When You’ve Bottomed Out” is available in bookstores and on Amazon.com. Visit her Web site for a free e-book at www.StartingOverNow.com. Sign up for her free e-newsletter at info@startingovernow.com.
