Identifying and Building the Five Elements of a Healthy Work Culture: #2
By Craig Ross and Steven Vannoy
Second in a five-part monthly series from the upcoming book, "Leadership Gold" by Steven Vannoy and Craig Ross. (Part 1: Last month's featured article)
Becoming a Solution-Focused Workplace
Developing a healthy culture is as scientific as predicting your company's future growth, developing new products, and any other portion of your business that relies on creating and implementing strategies. Leader's who guide their organizations to long-term success understand that there is a cause and effect relationship between their organization's culture and the business results they are achieving.
Developing a healthy culture requires that leaders rely less on external motivational devices; instead, they institute a process that allows for the change to be generated inside-out. In order to make this happen, five strategic elements must be developed.
The Big 5 of the New Leader's Job, a concept included in the Pathways to Leadership® program, allows leaders to break apart the elements of their culture so that they can effectively focus and enrich the cause variables - those that have profound effects on productivity, job satisfaction, and the bottom line. This part-whole method saves leaders time and resources (efforts are truly productive, instead of generating short-lived results). Perhaps just as important, the Big 5 of the New Leader's Job allows leaders to recapture and live the vision most have always had for their professional work: serving an organization by serving its people.
Case in point: as was related in the first segment of this feature , Heska Corporation, an animal health company, began its work with Pathways to Leadership, Inc. in the middle of 2002. Prior to this time, they were on the precipice of a dark chasm that separated them from their objectives; large lay-offs were the order of the day. Lack of faith in leadership was rampant. Communication was often forced and painful. And experiencing a profitable quarter was an unrecognized dream.
CEO Bob Grieve knew there had to be another way. "If we were going to turn this around, it had to start with our people. But we needed something we could get our arms around in order to build the culture we wanted." The Pathways to Leadership program, and the tools that it includes, provided them with the means. In one year the company has seen
- a greater culture of self-discipline,
- a focus on blame and problems shift to a greater focus on learning and solutions,
- interdepartmental communication reach all-time highs,
- objectives being met with greater efficiency, and
- a stronger, healthier team identity.
Not surprisingly, Heska has exceeded their financial goals the last four quarters. While the causes for this are multivariate, Mark Cicotello, VP of HR, knows the improving health of their culture has a lot to do with their success. "The Pathways to Leadership process has become the very fabric of how we do business."
Elements of the Big 5 of the New Leader's Job
As leaders develop the first element of the Big 5 of the New Leader's Job - recognizing and building individual team members - immediate implications are in store for the culture as a whole. When individuals are less defensive, more open to change, more accountable and are better decision makers, everyone benefits. Channeling this new energy becomes a priority for the organization.
In an unhealthy culture, leaders sabotage their best intentions. We've all experienced having someone 'tell' us how to change. This approach never gets very far; when a leader tells someone they have to change there is an underlying message: you're not good enough. This is not a very empowering message! Most of us have resisted change efforts that have been flawed by this "telling" approach.
Building a Wellness Culture essentially means two traits are emerging within the company. First, participants in the culture become increasingly interested in building people and processes upstream, rather than trying to 'fix' people and problems downstream. Closely related to the first element of the Big 5 of the New Leader's Job, this step now includes building processes that leverage people and resources, allowing them to find their own solutions, eliminating the need to micromanage. This creates a solution-focused culture as opposed to perpetuating a fix-it culture.
Fix-it cultures consume vast amounts of resources and sap an organization of the energy it needs to propel itself forward. In Column A are listed some of the tell tale signs of a fix-it culture. Do you recognize any of these?
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Policies and processes are implemented that monitor progress - not for the purpose of leveraging future growth, but for the purpose of catching slackers. When this approach is taken, organizations can never implement enough policies; the consistent message to the work force is, "We don't trust you." With that unspoken message permeating the workplace, just as the fox focuses on outsmarting the hound, employees spend less and less time engaged with the work at hand. This is evidenced by Gallup's 2002 body of research that found 55% of the American work force is unengaged - and another 17% is actively unengaged.
In a wellness culture rigid policies become unnecessary as leaders focus upstream on developing individuals, relationships, trust and collaboration.
- A majority of a leader's interactions with his/her direct reports is focused on what has happened in the past and who is to blame, rather than how to insure success in the future. With the best of intentions, leaders point out the flaws they see in individuals and the work they're doing. The idea is that once those flaws have been identified they'll be countered and disappear. Instead of meeting with success, this approach often has a devastating reverse effect: because the focus is on what's not working, with little attention given to what is working, direct reports struggle to grow their skill set. After being fed ideas on how to fix their mistakes, the employee is left hungering for methods that will create different and greater results in the future. But the destruction doesn't end there. The message provided to the employee during this interaction is poison: you're not good enough and you need me to fix your problems. The downward cycle is perpetuated, as the defeated employee is burdened with messages that don't enable him/her to build and experience success.
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Training courses are considered based on their ability to "change" people. Who wants to go to a training and be 'fixed'? Not you or I. People want to be great. They want their ideas and efforts to count. When this sort of culture is created, -- one that communicates we believe in you -- motivations are tapped. And now the motivations are generated internally instead of externally. When this happens trainings have long-term, sustainable results because people aren't trying to change other people. Instead, they're growing with each other.
- There's never enough time in the day! If an analysis reveals considerable chunks of time being spent doing or checking someone else's work, the employee is working downstream. Micro-management is a classic symptom of a fix-it culture.
- Rewards are issued for personal accomplishments that do little to further the progress of other individuals or the team. This approach encourages employees to focus on outcomes, rather than what has created the outcomes in the first place. This breeds short-term thinking. For instance, knowing that providing prizes for productivity only encourages speed and not efficiency, top leaders look to reward individuals and teams for efficiency measures that lead to greater productivity.
- Consequences are rendered for actions that are unacceptable, with little discussion on how to develop greater results in the future. This focus on consequences allows a fear-based culture to fester, severely limiting future employee ownership, creativity, and risk taking by participants. The strongest leaders are those who see failure not as an opportunity to punish, but as a golden opportunity to move an individual (thus the team and organization) forward. This is not wimpy leadership! If moving an individual/team/organization forward means letting a person go, then that is the step that is taken - but it won't happen because the individual was boxed into failure. It'll be the result of clear, achievable mutually agreed upon objectives having not been met.
The second trait of a Wellness Culture: an increasingly prevalent forward-focused attitude that the organization, teams, and individuals utilize as they work through situations. Situational leadership is nothing new. But situational leadership that spawns more situations to tackle is crisis management in the making.
In organizations that are developing the Big 5 of the New Leader's Job a greater focus is placed on what's working vs. what's not working, strengths vs. weaknesses, and what can be learned vs. who is to blame. This sort of forward-focus allows teams to engage in an issue (formerly known as a crisis), resolve it, learn from it, and thus use it as a pillar for future growth and success.
Organizations taking this approach know if they are to advance their company it does not mean eliminating all issues or challenges; rather, builders of the Big 5 of a New Leader's Job know their success is fundamentally tied to how their organization responds to the issues of every day business life. This Wellness Culture approach increases efficiency, builds the bottom line, and enhances the quality of life for all involved.
Next month we'll address the third element of The Big 5 of the New Leader's Job: Unlocking Full, Free, Two-Way Information Flow.
(c) 2003 Pathways to Leadership, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
