Culture is chapter one of the CEO handbook to optimize and monetize their business.
To define a culture, the technology of a powerful diagnostic analysis engine that behaves as an x-ray machine is fundamental. A diagnostic tool that analyzes people, culture, strategy, customers, and process information all at the same time. It MUST be able to correlate, slice and diced in multi ways to see each strength and dysfunction in each workgroup of your company. “If you can find it, you can fit it!” is what we like to say.
When CEOs can “see” each department’s culture, they and the managers know exactly what needs to be fixed. It is that simple!
Maybe it has always been the bosss?
Culture dictates the “rituals of the way things get done,” Judith Glaser wrote in her book, The DNA of Leadership. Her premise was that your organization will NEVER leap forward toward goals of driving worker productivity if the work environment is toxic. She went on to say, simply stated, “leadership defines the way you motivate or de-motivate those you depend upon for the development of your organization. As leaders engage with others, you either expand others’ potential and catalyze growth, or limit others’ contributions and perpetuate stagnation.”
- What motivates employees to give it their all?
- What causes them to form subgroups with defined barriers?
- What cause groups to withhold information, build turfs, lose faith in the company and themselves?
- What cause companies to go out of business?
- What causes well-intended leaders to fail to stimulate loyalty?
The most startling discovery is that each department has its own mini culture, which might, or might not, coincide with the organizational cultural strategy. If different, can they both co-exist? If the intended strategically designed culture is one of trust, openness, communication, values, yet the department is being run by Attila the Hun, will profitability be possible? The toxic, damping impact on innovation, teamwork, collaborative culture, worker “go get ‘em” spirit in that department is not only a key barrier to profitability, but will easily infect other departments in the value-chain. Amazingly, senior management will be the last to know before a large segment of the organization is irreparably contaminated. Kiss the ability to innovate successfully goodbye!
A survey diagnostic that reaches into each department is the best defense to the creeping tentacles of a poisonous culture. Beware-it can spread like the common cold in a classroom or like a raging wildfire in the dry California hills. If this be so, then culture change is the precursor to organizational change.
Stanley Labovitz, J.D., CEO
SurveyTelligence, Inc.
2640 Lake Shore Drive, Suite 1716
West Palm Beach, FL. 33404
1-508-400-4094
Author: Back From The Brink
