Managing Organisational
Culture
Dr. John Whiteoak
University of the Sunshine Coast
whiteoak@usc.edu.au
Culture = Soft
BUT
Soft = Hard
PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE
Organisational Cultures
SOURCE: Neilson et al. Harvard
Business Review. 2005.
Passive-Aggressive Cultures
• 3 out of 10 people in the US report having a passiveaggressive cultures
• Feigning sweetness between subordinates and
supervisors
• Robotic submission to leadership
• Put in only enough effort to appear compliant
• Lack of dissenting opinion – making waves is the
ultimate sin.
• Blaming outside sources for poor performance.
• A vicious – highly effective grapevine
• Bosses use intimidation
• Very few consequences for bad behaviour
• Environment is secretive –ripe for scandals, sexual
harassment, and financial misdeeds.
What is our strategy?
Or more importantly
Why is our strategy?
Why Do Organisations Vision?
Brings people together around a common dream
Co-ordinates the work of different people
Helps everyone make decisions
Builds a foundation for business planning
Challenges the comfortable or inadequate present state
Makes incongruent behaviour more noticeable
A POWERFUL
VISION STATEMENT
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Presents where we want to go.
Easy to read and understand.
Captures the desired spirit of the organisation.
Dynamically incomplete so people can fill in the pieces.
Provides a motivating force, even in hard times.
Is perceived as achievable.
Is challenging and compelling,
stretching beyond what is comfortable.
A mission statement answers the basic question….
“So What Are You On About?”
ELEPHANT HUNTING
• The Issues, Challenges, KRAs
(The Big
Stuff)
• Environmental Scans – Conduct Research
• Doing a SWOT is not strategy
• No more than 6
• About 3 strategies per issue
• Measures and accountability developed for each
strategy
The “Big Three” “Justa”s
“The strategy is right. It’s just
a communications problem.”
“The plan is dead on—it’s just an
implementation problem.”
“Look, we’ve got the strategy
right—we just need to fix
the people bit.”
Successfully executing
strategy depends to a
great extent on how well
the organisation is
aligned with the strategy
(Darryl Krook, MD, CPEM Consulting)
“Execution
is strategy.”
—Fred Malek fffffii
Vision statements count for little
if more than half the employees
do not share the company values
SEEK Employee Satisfaction & Motivation Survey 2004
Stanford Research on Values
More effective companies have three qualities in
common around their values:
Consensus
Clarity
Intensity
Typical Organisational Values
•
•
•
•
•
•
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Career Resilience
Employment at “Will”
Select people for skills not attitudes and fit
Buy rather than make talent
Lean staffing
Periodic downsizing
Money is the primary motivator
– Individual incentives
– Pay-for-performance
• Share holder value 1st and last
Assumptions about people
• Effort averse
• Management and employee interests are not
aligned
• People are opportunistic – (self-interest seeking,
will take advantage)
• Mangers need to design incentive systems to
overcome these differences
• High powered incentives (money) are better
than low-powered
• People work for money and will comply with
management to get it
Management Hot Air
“All organisations routinely say that ‘people
are our greatest asset’. Yet few practice
what they preach, let alone truly believe it
… organisations have to market
membership as much as they market
products and services – and perhaps
more”.
(Peter Drucker, 1992)
Culture is about Getting
Good People?
– The war for talent (The Mckinsey
Quarterly, 1998)
– Get great results with
ordinary people
Value, O’Reilly & Pfeffer,1996)
(Hidden
the
most important
aspect of business
“In short, hiring is
and yet remains woefully
misunderstood.”
Source: Wall Street Journal, 10.29.08,
review of Who: The A Method for Hiring,
Geoff Smart and Randy Street
#1 cause of
Dis-satisfaction?
Employee retention & satisfaction:
Overwhelmingly,
based on the firstline manager!
Source: Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, First, Break All the
Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
“You have to
treat your
employees like
customers.”
—Herb Kelleher,
complete answer, upon being asked his “secrets to success”
Source: Joe Nocera, NYT, “Parting Words of an Airline Pioneer,” on the occasion of
Herb Kelleher’s retirement after 37 years at Southwest Airlines (SWA’s pilots union
took out a full-page ad in USA Today thanking HK for all he had done; across the
way in Dallas American Airlines’ pilots were picketing the Annual Meeting)
139,380 former
patients from 225 hospitals:
Press Ganey Assoc:
none
of THE top 15 factors
determining Patient Satisfaction
referred to patient’s health outcome
P.S. directly related to Staff Interaction
P.S. directly correlated with Employee
Satisfaction
Source: Putting Patients First, Susan Frampton, Laura Gilpin, Patrick Charmel
“Natural selection is death. ...
Without huge amounts of
death, organisms do not
change over time. ... Death
is the mother of structure. ... It
took four billion years of death ...
to invent the human mind ...” —
The Cobra Event
The greatest danger
for most of us
is not that our aim is
too high
and we miss it,
but that it is
too low
and we reach it.
Michelangelo
Mediocrity
is a
Disease
No obvious ‘Crisis’
Great resources
Management
“happy talk”
General low
standards
Denial of bad news
Complacency
Low confrontation
culture
Focus on narrow
functional goals
Internal measures
have inappropriate
performance indices
Inadequate external
reporting feedback
Management Support
• True Believer: highly committed to the
values and persistent
• Believer: supports values but other
priorities dominate
• Skeptic: doubts about values being
effective
• Detractor: open, visible troublemaker,
undermines values
Source: Adapted from McDonald, G. (1989). Manager attitudes to training. Asia
Pacific HRM, 27(4).
Manager’s 10 point checklist self assessment
In the past month I have….
1.
….Used stories to reinforce the organisation’s values
2.
….Verbally acknowledged individual’s efforts and achievements
3.
….Written a note to someone to acknowledge special effort and achievements
4.
….Had a discussion with one of my direct reports in relation to their role, personal development and career
aspirations
5.
….Provided constructive feedback to one of my direct reports on how they could improve the way they are
doing things
6.
….Invested some one-on-one time with one of my direct reports to ‘chew the fat’
7.
….Invested some face time with employees at lower levels in the organisation
8.
….Invested some time in ‘tapping the pulse’ listening to people’s issues and concerns
9.
….Had a conversation concerning poor performance and how to deal with it effectively
10. ….Prompted people to collaborate and share information and experience with people in other parts of the
organisation