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.
Categories: Leadership and Culture
Tags: , , , , ,

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.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
Tags: , , , , , , ,

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.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
Tags: , , , , , ,

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.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
Tags: , , , , ,

Tiger Woods and Authenticity

Posted December 7, 2009 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

Well, here is my perspective on the Tiger Woods situation…

Great Golfer to Great Person?

“I make it very, very clear that my purpose in raising Tiger was not to raise a golfer. What I always wanted was to raise a good person.”

Earl Woods, Tiger’s father

Already the greatest golfer of all time, and with the world looking upon him, Tiger has an opportunity to take up the second, more important challenge, of his father. Tiger can see his current fiasco in his front yard as the media’s degradation of his private life — the worst of times — or he can come to understand the importance of his role in the world right now as a teacher, a leader, an influencer of others, especially youth — the best of times.

In a society obsessed with image, external trappings, and the “gotcha journalism” (it is disgusting that the night after the US President committed 30,000 young people to go to war, all the media was focused on Tiger), there is an immense opportunity – perhaps a responsibility – that comes with Tiger’s position to go beyond his success as a golfer or his mistakes as a husband. With the eyes of the world upon him he could teach us all that life is more than external success; it’s also about facing the darker sides of our nature, and that the ultimate fulfillment of life is not on the golf course or the boardroom or in material possessions.

It lies at the heart of his and our souls, in his and our character, in his and our courage to meet the demands of reality. Based on the rebound from his recent knee surgery, there is no doubt Tiger is resilient and will come back as a world leader on the golf course. What I hope is that he won’t miss the opportunity to turn his debacle into a positive rather than a negative outcome, based on the choices he makes — and become the world leader and a good person just as his dad wanted. There is, undoubtedly, a lesson here for all of us.

What is the lesson for you in all this? I’d love to hear from you.

Categories: Leadership and Culture
Tags: , , , ,

Cultural Transformation

Posted October 11, 2009 By David Irvine and has no comments yet.

The focus of my work is inspiring, guiding, and supporting leaders at all levels to build strong organizational cultures. The leaders I speak with these days are not just interested in keeping people. They are committed to keeping people engaged. I define engagement as the desire by employees to go the extra mile to help their organization succeed and deem their work meaningful and fulfilling. So… just how do you get people engaged?

Culture and employee engagement is a topic for continual learning. First, engagement is not something you “get from” your organization. It’s something you bring to your organization. The people who tend to score low on a Hewitt engagement survey will tend to score low no matter what environment they work in. On the other hand, employees who say they are highly engaged will likely be highly engaged no matter where they work. That’s why the first principle of engagement is person accountability. Accountability – the ability to be counted on – means that engagement begins with ownership. When you create a place where all blame is viewed as a waste of time and where people can be counted on, there is always high, focused energy, because there is trust.

The second principle of engagement is authenticity. Authenticity is about creating a place where people don’t have to leave who they are at the door. You can be who you are when you come to work. The needs of the organization are integrated with the desires of the soul. Authenticity means the values, dreams, talents, and passion of all stakeholders are moving into alignment. The laminated Value Statements have come down from the walls and are lived. Employees have a deep commitment to the organization because they know that the organization has a deep commitment to them. Engagement is an inside job. It comes through conversation: about what matters most to you. When you are finding and expressing your passion, living your highest aspirations, and fulfilling your dreams  in the service of others, you will be engaged. Engagement is about energy. When the energy flows from a depth within you to the world around you, and then returns to its source within you, you are engaged. Nobody has to motive you.  It flows naturally.

Fostering this kind of culture is akin to being a gardener. It can’t be legislated, controlled, motivated, or coerced.  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.

These are a few my thoughts about organizational culture and employee engagement. I’d love to know yours.

Categories: Cultural Transformation
Tags: , , , , , ,