Weddings, Family, and Culture

Posted September 7, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

This past Labor Day weekend, my niece was married at the Cascade Lodge at the base of Mount Norquay in Banff National Park. The ceremony, in the heart of the Rockies, reflected the beauty, elegance, and grace that Sarah radiates in her life. Being a part of this magnificent event caused me to reflect on the value of family, traditions, rights of passages, and culture. As I witnessed the fruits of many years of focused investment of time and energy, I realized that families, like any culture, don’t respond well to quick fixes or heavy-handed solutions. I gained new admiration for my brother and sister-in-law for their commitment to family trough more than thirty-six years together.

Parenting, like any leadership role, is akin to being a gardener. It’s more about “growing” than about legislating, controlling, motivating, or coercing. No plants ever grow better because you demand that they do so or because you threaten them. Plants grow only when they have the right conditions and are given proper care. Creating the space and providing the proper nourishment for plants – and people as well – is a matter of continual investigation and vigilance.

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Ten Steps For Building An Aligned Culture

Posted August 30, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

A lot of people ask about our process for building an aligned culture. Here, in abridged form, is our process. We welcome your comments, suggestions, and feedback.

Step 1. Define your culture.

Decide on the scope of the culture that you are committed to build – that lays within your sphere of influence. Is it your company, department, division, community association, team, family?

Step 2. Define your leadership team.

Identify your 5-6 key leaders – allies that you will depend on to build your culture. These will be people who have the positional power, capacity, and commitment to make it happen. Be sure you have a Chief Emotional Officer on your team: a person with the positional power as well as the passion (a monomaniac with a mission) to take accountability for the culture.

Step 3. Get alignment at the top.

Identify your core values that you, as a leadership team, are committed to living. Have an “offsite” leadership meeting to ensure that you are all committed to living the values, first with each other and then with your entire culture. If you are a “subculture” – a culture within a larger system, you will want to take the larger organizational cultural value statements and make them real for your culture.

Step 4. Develop a team “code of conduct” with your leadership team.

Once you have decided upon your core values, you will need to develop a process that outlines your promises to each other: how you will hold yourself and each other accountable for living these values. This is about turning values into specific expected behaviors.

Step 5. Assess Alignment – And Connect to Reality.

Decide on a process for assessing your current alignment between your “vision,” your “claim,” and your “reality” as an entire culture. In order to do this you will need to pay attention to the “visible” culture and the “real” culture – your current reality. You may need to take the time to get into the hallways, the coffee conversations, etc. to get to the grapevine and current reality.

Step 6. “Roll out” your values with your entire culture.

Once you are clear about the current alignment, meet with your entire culture. Have your leadership team at the front of the room and outline:

  • Your vision as a leadership team for this culture
  • Your core values
  • Your assessment of the current reality in your culture and the degree of alignment you see between your vision, your claim, and your reality
  • Your leadership code of conduct
  • How you expect to be held accountable for living these values as positional leaders – your promised actions as a leadership team
  • An outline of the remaining process for getting these values lived at every level of the culture

Step 7. Have each of your leadership team members define – and build – their own leadership teams.

Meet with each of the leaders on your leadership team and help them define their own leadership teams, and go through the same process with their respective teams. This will continue throughout the culture until, ideally, every person is eventually assigned to a “leadership team” or at least closely affiliated with a leadership team.

Step 8. Engage your employees – at every level.

Begin and sustain the process – and build trust – through the power of courageous conversations:

  • Start – and continue – to create conversations around your core values, at every level.
  • Turn every conversation about value statements into mutually agreed upon actions and promises.
  • Tell the story. Schedule time in meetings, planning sessions, etc. to tell a story about where someone in the group recently lived one or more of your values.
  • Shine the light. Acknowledge when and where individuals lived one or more of your values.
  • Repeat the message. Find a way to get the message out there. Consider a cultural “kudos committee,” a group of committed people who find creative ways to capture the stories and get the message out there in organizational newsletters, bulletins, etc.
  • Embrace the negative. Don’t be afraid of conversations that address misalignment between the claim and the reality.
  • See mistakes as learning opportunities. Keep learning and growing together. Have high standards of yourself and others, and be patient with yourself. It’s about progress, not perfection. Keep reminding people that direction is more important than velocity.
  • Stick with the winners. Put the majority of your time, energy, and resources into the people who are committed to living the values.

Step 9. Define how you will convey to stakeholders outside the culture how you will live your values.

  • How will you convey your values to your customers?
  • What needs to be written in your marketing materials/web site, etc.?

Step 10. Get your values into every system.

  • Bring values into your hiring processes, your performance management system and HR practices.
  • Only promote leaders who are living the values.
  • Make it tough to not live the values.
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12 Principles For Successful Performance Management

Posted August 26, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

For many years now we’ve been helping organizations develop and implement effective performance management systems. Here are ten principles that form the foundation of our approach. I welcome input to help us add to the list. I’ve you are interested in having us elaborate on what each of these principles mean for you or your workplace, feel free to contact me.

1.  Change “performance” to “success.”

2. Change activities to results.

3.  Set high standards and make your expectations for success clear.

4. Distinguish between “operational” and “leadership” accountabilities. Operational accountabilities are unique to your specific job. Leadership accountabilities belong to everyone: they are promises to live the espoused values.

5. Demands and support need to be kept in balance. Results have a much better chance of growing in the soil of trust.

6.  Communication should be so frequent that there are no surprises in the success review.

7.  Give corrective feedback early.

8. Without passion, accountability is drudgery; without accountability, passion is fantasy; passion with accountability is destiny.

9.  Negotiate consequences before you have to.

10. Stay positive in public and keep the negative in private.

11. Hire slowly; fire quickly.

12. Have a clear, explicit process for follow up.

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Leadership, Renewal, and Being Present

Posted August 14, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

It’s been a good summer so far. Usually I spend my down time taking on new projects, marketing, or writing. I like keeping myself busy and productive. But I resisted that this summer, and gave myself permission for some unproductive time. For the entire month of July, I just hung out with my family, got caught up on some reading, made time for friends, and visited my grandson. No expectations. No agenda. I also took time to just be present to the experience of life. I made room to enjoy some of the simple things of life I often neglect in a hectic travel schedule. I sat and actually listened to the sound of the creek in our back yard. I watched the finches build a nest outside my office window. I took in BodyWorlds with my seventeen-year-old daughter and pondered the absolute wonderment of the human body. I cheered on my 14 year-old’s two soccer teams. I listened to the wind and the rain. I watched an eagle teach her youngly to fly. And I took time to listen to the sound of silence. I took time to just be.

I feel rejuvenated and ready to gear up for a busy fall, determined to bring a deeper sense of presence to my work. My three-year-old grandson’s sense of awe and innocence inspired me to observe the world through a new set of lenses, and engage in it as if I were experiencing it for the first time.

As living organisms, we all need time for renewal. There is no better way for me to renew myself than to be present in the present, for this is my source of inspiration and discovery. I am truly excited about bringing a renewed perspective to my work this fall. One aspect of leadership and organizational culture I’m curious about is how being fully present to the experience of life in each moment impacts the leadership experience.

What are you doing to renew yourself by bringing yourself more fully into the present? What is your practice to come back to yourself? Not just during your holiday times, but also in the busy times.

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Great Cultures Start With Conscious Action

Posted August 2, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Culture is ultimately about energy – the energy that emerges from the experience of participating in the culture. We are drawn to places – as a customer, employee, patient, or member – that have a high frequency of energy, places where people are engaged, vibrant, and alive. Conversely, we are repelled by places that are bureaucratic, listless, and dead. While positional leaders affect the energy level in a culture, every person – either inside or outside the culture – who participates in the culture contributes to the energy of the culture.

Regardless of what you say or do what face you show to the world, your mental-emotional state cannot be hidden. Everybody emanates an energy field that corresponds to his or her inner state. Most people can sense it even though they may be unaware of it’s effect or unable to articulate it. It’s not what you do, but how you do what you do that determines whether you contribute or  drain energy. The way that you act each moment, regardless of your position or your role, represents a certain vibrational frequency. I’ve learned from Eckart Tolle that if you are not in a state of acceptance, enjoyment, or enthusiasm in any task you do, then you will be creating suffering for yourself and others.

I used to hate housework, and yet I knew that doing housework was a way to contribute and feel a part of the family. Being at war with myself, I would find myself resenting doing any housework, causing stress and suffering to myself and my family. Frankly, I was a pain to live with whenever there was cleaning that needed to be done.

So, I made a decision to accept the simple act of vacuuming. I stopped complaining and resisting and made a decision to stop hating it. In the process, I have actually grown to enjoy housework, and have an improved marriage! Two for one! The enjoyment in the work came, not because the nature of the work changed, but because I changed. I became more present to the experience.

Take an audit of the work you are doing – at home, at your office, or in your community. Become conscious of the actions you are taking and the state of mind you bring to those actions. If you can neither enjoy nor bring acceptance to what you do, then stop doing it. If, on the other hand, you decide that it is important to do this work at this time, then decide to change your state of mind. Becoming conscious of the actions you take and the effect that your inner state has on yourself and those around you, begins to build a new culture, starting with you. Taking this kind of personal accountability – action with consciousness – is not only the core of a great culture. It’s the core of a great life.

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Learning To Lose Is Part Of Learning To Live

Posted July 26, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Chandra, our fourteen-year-old daughter, who plays competitive soccer, pointed out an article to me this past week in Canada’s MacLean’s magazine, entitled “How A Team Loses Actually Matters” (July 26 edition, pp. 48-49). It’s a good article that reflected on the World Cup in South Africa this summer. “The World Cup,” Stephen Marche stated,” produced one winner and 31 losers, many more if you include all the teams that never made it to the tournament. And while Spain will go down in history, the rest will be forgotten. Which is a shame. The losers, after all, make up the bulk of competitors and the way they lose is so much more revealing than the way they win, each defeat a minor insight into national characteristics. To steal from Tolstoy: all victories are alike; every defeat is miserable in it own way.”

The article lead to some thoughtful discussion in our home about the importance of learning how to lose in life, which includes learning how to fail. I’ve heard it said that circumstances don’t determine a person, they reveal them. The way you lose, or stumble, or fail (or whatever you want to call it) provides some insight into your nature. For sports fans, how you deal with the loss of “your” team also reveals aspects of your true character.

To steal from Marche: Anybody can join in a victory parade. Only failure reveals true passion for the game and passion for life. But the lesson goes even beyond winning and losing. True living means that our lasting worth comes from inside. Attachment to external sources (such as a sports team or whether you win, or achievements and whether you “succeed”) for our sense of identity is fruitless. Winning or losing is temporary and will pass. Success and failure teaches us that everything outside of ourselves, including our possessions, our achievements and accomplishments, and our roles, are all temporary. Learning to lose is part of learning to live.

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Finding Balance And Health In Your Culture: Wisdom From A Yogi

Posted July 12, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Did you ever have a bad day where everything seemed to go wrong? Although our tendency is to blame something in our external environment, it is the state of mind that you bring to your work or your life that determines whether the day is “bad” or “good”. You can train your nervous system to be depressed or angry or pessimistic, just as you can train yourself to be hopeful, loving, and optimistic. That is, you can teach yourself to let life get you down or choose to use whatever life sends you to find a lesson that will move you forward.

The same is true with cultures. Have you ever been in an environment that is not as productive as it could be or living up to it’s potential? How often have you been in an organization where you found that there is far more talent, brainpower, wisdom, and resourcefulness than the job required or even allowed? Just as people can be ruled by emotions, cultures can take on an emotive “state,” because cultures are made up of people.

Culture is essentially an interplay of energy and yoga, the practice of moving into stillness and focusing your energy, can be instructive in understanding organizational culture. According to yoga there are three basic qualities or energies: rajas, tamas and sattva. Rajas is the energy of action, change and movement, while Tamasic energy is associated with a state of inactivity and inertia, heaviness and darkness. Sattva is light and uplifting and indicates a state of harmony and balance.

In order to find balance, we must start on a journey towards sattva We do need rajas and tamas energy, but in their proper proportion and at their proper time. If we didn’t have rajas we would not have energy to move towards sattva.  If we have only tamas, we become “lazy” and never get anything done. However, we all want more balance and harmony in our lives, both corporately and personally, so we must ingest more sattva both mentally and physically.

In Yoga, as in life, the greatest obstacle to our growth towards a state of sattva is the continuous fluctuations of our minds.  The mind is always busy and it can flow in two directions – upwards towards sattva or downwards towards negativity. Patanjali, a great yoga sage from 200 BC gives a simple method for turning to sattva. He says when negative thoughts are encountered we must immediately replace them with the opposite positive.  Simple, but not easy! This is a practice of the mind. It is hard work and takes practice!

This has many implications for corporate culture.  We must not entertain negative thinking.  Gossip, slanderous talk and negativity of any kind work to undermine a positive mental framework, and makes most of us ineffective and generally miserable. A first step, and something infinitely practical is to breathe. A simple practice of mindful, deep breathing can be performed in any office, anytime of the day, in any meeting, at any moment, and thankfully it can be instituted without scrutiny or negative consequence.

We all make a difference to the environments we live and work in. Having ways to connect with sattvic energy can be a way to positively impact those around you. A healthy, balanced culture starts with you.

Note: Thanks to Jeff Lichty, my Yoga teacher (www.ashtanga-yoga-victoria.com) for writing this article with me!

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Entitlement: Greatness Run Aground*

Posted July 3, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

I have noticed that every time a great culture is built, there appears to be an opposite and equal reaction to greatness: entitlement. It seems to be human nature. If you give your kids a lot, they want more. I grew up with telephone party lines, with one line for up to five or six residences. There were times when you had to wait 1/2 hour to make a phone call. Now I get impatient with my cell phone provider when I get a dropped call and have to redial with the push of one button. It used to take a winter to travel across this country on chuck wagons and horses. Now, as expectations have been raised, I find myself getting upset if a plane is thirty minutes late. Living in a great country, with world-class health care, education, law enforcement, and political systems seems only to increase our craving for more. Meet our needs with a high standard, and we raise the bar with a demand for more. I’ve seen the same dynamic in organizational cultures. The more the organization gives us what we want, the more entitled we feel. The best cultures I have worked with all experience the challenge of entitlement.

The reverse of this also seems true. My mother lived through the depression in a 900 square foot shack with ten siblings, enduring years of unimaginable poverty, and was void of entitlement. When she was close to death I asked her how she felt about dying. “After seventy-eight years, I accept death. I was fortunate just to have lived!” Joyce did not even feel entitled to life itself. Hard times are an ally in battling entitlement.

All the recent attention to building great cultures, empowering employees, and developing leadership capacity so people feel engaged seems to have unintentionally reinforced our love of entitlement. Living in great cultures has somehow fostered a belief that we have a right to get whatever we want without any obligations in return. Doing our own thing and expecting rights without service is self-serving. In the name of a great culture, we see people ask for such things as more pay, more freedom, greater recognition and privilege, more flex time or a risk-free environment without any reciprocating accountabilities.

This is simply wrong. Just because we are attempting to build cultures of trust that encourage you to find your authentic voice doesn’t mean you will get everything you ask for or have absolute security. Cultures of trust require a partnership, a commitment to a dialogue, not acts of concession. Accountable, authentic cultures of trust are based on reciprocal agreements. There are no licenses granted.

At the heart of entitlement is the belief that “my wants are more important than the culture and the culture exists for my sake.” At some point each of us needs to grow up and discover that our self-interest is better served by doing good work than by getting good things. Entitlement also rests on the belief that something is owed us because of sacrifices we have made. In reality, entitlement claims rights that have not been earned. It diminishes self-respect and constrains our freedom. The only way to reclaim what we have lost to entitlement is through acts of commitment and service to an entity larger than ourselves – the culture we work and live in.

When you see entitlement in the culture you live or work in, there are four steps to counter it:

1.     See entitlement as a sign of growth and greatness. You won’t find much entitlement in poverty and highly bureaucratic systems that have been suppressed for years.

2.     Identify the value or values you want to replace entitlement (e.g. self responsibility, service to others, gratitude).

3.     Find the allies in your culture who live by the values you are committed to and support them to foster these values with others who trust them. Like parenting, you only influence the values of people with whom you have a strong, trusting relationship.

4.     Get the values you want to instill off the wall and into people’s hearts through conversations and clearly defined actions. Then make a promise to live and work in accord with these actions, while being open for ongoing feedback and learning. Then shine a light an actions that are self-responsible, committed to service, and exude gratitude. Tell the story. Keep the renewed values fresh, making it difficult to be entitled.

*Thanks to Peter Block (Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest, Berrett-Koehler Publishers) for his inspiration behind many of these insights.

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BRIDGES OF TRUST and Entrepreneurs

Posted June 19, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

This past week I completed our two-day BRIDGES OF TRUST program in lower Vancouver Island and the Okanagan with my good friend and colleague, Jim Reger. Four different groups – 270 people from 90 diverse organizations went through our program. Represented were amazing companies with amazing leadership at every level. Entrepreneurism is well and thriving in this country and making a significant contribution, at the local, community level, as well as world wide. If you want information about the Bridges of Trust Program, call or email me.

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Baseball, Character, and Perspective

Posted June 7, 2010 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

I love baseball. It parallels, in so many ways, the human experience. When umpire Jim Joyce missed a critical call at first base this past week that cost Detroit Tiger’s pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game, it renewed debate about video replays in baseball, whether umpires should be able to change after the fact, and about whether baseball commission Bud Selig should step in and fix the mis-call.

A no-hitter is important to a pitcher. A perfect game is so rare, it has happened only twenty times in 135 years of major league baseball. The oddity of this call is that there’s no dispute about it. The only argument is about the tradition of umpires not changing their minds. No one, but no one, would argue that Galarraga doesn’t deserve his perfect game. But this story ultimately goes way beyond baseball.

After the game, umpire Jim Joyce and Detroit Tiger’s pitcher Armando Galarraga met at the plate to shake hands, reminding us all about the real purpose of sport, about the virtues of sportsmanship and about human decency and civility.

Joyce apologized afterward, and after his team’s initial explosive anger, Galarraga’s post game comments and smile neutralized the situation. Even the crusty umpire teared up as the crowd applauded, “Everybody makes mistakes.”

Galarrga responded, “I’m sure he didn’t want to make that call… He felt really bad… When the other umpires were long gone to the showers, Jim was still sitting there saying, ‘I’m so sorry…’”

The experience reminds us to lighten up, maintain a sense of perspective, have more respect for each other, bring strength of character to everything we do, and be a little more patient in all our connections. We are all doing the best we can.

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