May 27, 2015
Great cultures
Fortune’s 100 Best Places to Work issue was recently published. It was fascinating to see that a recent global poll of by Deloitte showed that executives consider culture even more important than leadership.
I thought I would include a few highlights:
1. Ritualize what’s most important
Companies like Marriott have 15 minute daily stand ups. It’s so important to take anything that’s valued and create a ritual so that it’s never forgotten. What are your daily / weekly / monthly and quarterly rituals? (For quarterly I recommend Open Space).
2. Location matters (and not how you think)
Twitter decided to move its headquarters to a part of San Francisco with decrepit hotels, strip clubs and most of the city’s homeless population. The company’s execs say they are not only committed to staying in the area, but also encouraging their employees to help the local population – and claim the desire to do so is actually enticing workers.
I think the most innovative companies are going to come out of Detroit. It’s extremely cheap. Entrepreneurs won’t have to eat ramen and can even buy houses. And the city is very encouraging of new businesses. If you want to build a tight team that is involved with the community, this is going to be the place.
3. Small to medium sized companies are going to lead the way.
Accuity, a small Wisconsin insurance company debuted at number 3! They provide unlimited education reimbursement, compressed work weeks, 10% contribution to 401K, quarterly town hall meetings and “Lunch with an officer” – face to face meetings with execs for all employees. They also gave away $1 million dollars and involve all employees in strategic planning.
If you’re a big company, how can you empower a group the size of a small company? If you’re small, do you have a “wish list” for your culture?
May 22, 2015
Great cultures
If you can hack your own beliefs, you can be a culture hacker. Click To TweetApril 30, 2015
Great cultures
Think of any conference you’ve been to. How much of the content can you tell me about?
For most of us, it’s hardly any. But we remember what we felt. We remember who we met. We remember who we liked.
It’s so easy to focus on content when we’re planning an event or even writing a book. But what do you want people to experience? What do you want them to feel?
Soon I’ll be hosting a panel of executives speaking to their leaders. It’s easy for executives to talk at a very high level about strategy. That kind of talk is so abstract that none of it is memorable.
Rather than telling us about the successful new program roll out strategy, tell us about those moments when you weren’t sure. Tell us when things went sideways. Tell us about what surprised you. And bring us into those moments with you. Describe what you saw, heard and felt.
If you simply stay at a high level and tell us what you learn, then we tune out. If you take us with you on your journey, we’ll hang on every word.
April 13, 2015
Great cultures ,Popular Articles
I recently wrote about taking a 3 month class in stand up comedy (link here). Since then I performed in a club, and the video is below (note: It’s all about dating, and I use two or three swear words).
Here is what I learned in regards to culture:
Feedback loops are always at play
Once feedback loops start they get momentum. With an audience they quickly determine if they like you, and if they do, they are open to laugh. If they don’t, they shut down and it’s much harder to bring them back.
The same can be said of culture. That first interview, meeting, phone call – can make or break anything and how you start those conversations are critical. In the Culture Blueprint I share a template for that first conversation with an employee.
Energy is everything
Culture is a feeling, and whatever feeling you bring with you has a big impact on the room. So what we do before we enter the room makes the difference. On this particular night I was really excited because my friends were there and I got there early to connect with other comics. By the time I hit the stage it felt like I had warmed up for the game.
What do you before you perform at your work? How do you take care of yourself outside the office? It has a big impact when you arrive.
There are formulas and frameworks to success
The first times I bombed it was because I had no real appreciation for the rhythm of comedy. But even long stories that keep you laughing use a series of set-ups, adding in context, delivering a punch and then adding bits called tags. Here’s a graphic I created to illustrate it.
Recognizing systems and flow has had a huge impact on my work. I use frameworks and models such as open-space that allow cultures to self-organize and scale the business (all while having a lot of fun).
PS – As a result of this work, I am expanding my offerings to include an MC role for events, as well as hosting live conversations on stage.
March 28, 2015
Great cultures
The millennials will make up 50% of the 2020 workplace. I’m compiling my thoughts and notes about this transition. Until I talk more on it, I found this helpful guide on how to work with them:
March 18, 2015
Culture of Chaos ,Great cultures ,Popular Articles
Everything you know about change management is wrong. (Part 1)
In 1996, John Kotter rocked the business world with his international bestseller, Leading Change. Considered by many to be the seminal work in the field of change management, his 8-step process (outlined below), gave meaning and order to what felt like pure chaos through any big corporate change (a merger, a turnaround, a new system, an enterprise-wide software change – anything that requires a massive change in behavior).
Kotter’s 8 steps to transform your organization are brilliantly conceived. But that doesn’t mean it will work for you. A strategy cannot succeed without the proper culture, thus the famous adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
In fact, without the right culture, the 8 steps can cause more damage than if you had never followed it.
Any military commander can tell you there’s a well-crafted battle plan, and then there’s what actually happens on the battlefield. So what happens if soldiers are handed the plan without the skills or resources to deal with the inevitable situation when the train goes off the rails? They’re dead in the water. That’s what happens and that’s why most transformational efforts either fail or simply have lukewarm results.
Here are the three reasons why Kotter’s plan may fail you.
Basic behavioral psychology shows us that unless a change is universally positive, it will produce an emotional response. It will provoke denial, anger, resistance, and avoidance before it finally turns to acceptance.
Asking people to let go of the past way is asking them to move on. And when people are attached, moving on doesn’t happen without grieving.
And where does an 8-point strategic plan include the space to process the emotions of grief? It makes no sense, unless one is so focused on the future that they want to forget the past. That may seem like a good intention, but letting pain remain unprocessed is the equivalent of telling someone in a hospital bed to just get up. Resentment remains, and that can derail cooperation.
Kotter’s plan makes us feel comfortable because we think that we simply have to follow 8 steps in sequential order and then we’ll have our new initiative in place. But change doesn’t happen that way.
Change is messy. Change can look like moving backward or sideways, or in zig zags before moving forward. Change can bring up a lot of painful conversations. The 8 steps are an attempt to process people like they are part of a linear supply chain management procedure.
That’s why operations people love the 8 steps so much. They don’t want to hear about the most effective way to get messy. They want to clean things up as fast as possible and move on.
In reality, you may not get the vision right the first time around. You may need to return to it based on experimental data. The coalition team you assembled may fall apart. Those “short-term wins” may turn into short-term losses and people start to give up and want to “return to Egypt.”
At this point, you as the leader will have lost credibility. Your people will have lost faith in you, and the board will want to replace you with someone who can “drive it through.” But there was nothing wrong with your leadership. You were just trying to follow a strategy, rather than working with the culture first.
One of the most insidious beliefs in corporate management is that we can make people do things. If that were true, there would be no need for an 8-step process in the first place.
People can drag their feet in all kinds of ways, from being unproductive to outright sabotage. And most of it will happen below the radar.
So what happens if we give up entirely on the idea that we can make people do things? What if everything were optional? What if all meetings, initiatives, projects and tasks were voluntary?
Some people believe this would be total chaos. But if you have strong people who care about your company, what might happen if you set them free?
And if you don’t have strong people you believe in, then you have a much bigger problem than any new initiative. Luckily, there are three stages of real change for natural leadership to emerge. That’s for a future post.
