Archive for the ‘Leadership team’ Category

5 essentials to build a team culture

I could really not let this whole month go by without a reference to the World Cup.   My sister-in-law tells me that what you need as a woman in business is to develop two very good sentences on every sporting topic.  To introduce this blog I offer you mine on soccer.

As I watch different teams play, and read the commentaries in the newspapers which I get delivered each day to my Kindle, I remember the impact on performance that the culture of a team can have.  France and Germany come to mind, for those of you watching the soccer.  A lot of my attention is taken with working on the culture of larger organizations, but of course a team leader can create their own unique culture within their team.  The team sits within the environment of a wider culture, and today the English newspapers have moved on to writing about the different cultures in the national football federations of England, and of Germany, who beat them soundly.  They don’t use the word culture, but those readers familiar with the framework for building culture covered in my book will be able to spot the references to behaviors, symbols and systems.  But, with the right leadership, individual teams can operate above and beyond the culture within which they sit.

So back to teams.  What are the five essentials to build the culture you want in your team?

  1. Set standards together and agree to be held to them.  Standards need to be objective and observable.  They can relate to behavior and to actions.  ‘No interruptions’ is a standard.  So is ‘Start and end all meetings on time’.  ‘Be supportive to each other’ is not.
  2. Point out examples when the standards are exceeded, and call it when they are breached.  If people are not good at doing this, offer training.  This is a learnable skill.
  3. Line up the agendas of your meetings with the purpose of the team, which is the value the team adds as a team, over and above the value they add as individuals.  If the primary purpose of the team is to share best practice, don’t spend most of the time reviewing last month’s performance results.
  4. Select, promote and restructure team members with the team in mind.  The culture of the team matters if it is delivering a value in excess of that which the individuals could add if you managed them one on one.  A new team member whose behavior is out of line with the developing team culture can diminish the performance of the overall team.
  5. Clear the air.  Schedule time to resolve differences or unspoken resentments.  Get help from outside the team if you need it.  Internal Organizational Development people or external facilitators.  This has symbolic as well as immediate impact.  It shows that you value relationships as much as task.

If I had a third intelligent sentence to say on soccer, I would end this blog with a comment about the standards that I think England should have adopted.  But I will have to leave that to you to work out.

3 steps to show you are serious about culture

Are you a leader determined to change some elements of the culture of your business or team?

Or an HR professional who has been given the job of ‘making culture happen’?

Or a consultant wanting to give good advice to your client on getting traction on culture?

Here are some tips on how to get people’s attention and cut through any potential cynicism

1. Change a specific feature of your own behavior. Let others know that you want to make this change, and ask fo their help by giving you feedback when they see you reverting to old habits.  In describing why you intend to change that behavior, explain how the new behavior will help the business achieve its strategic intent.  For example:  “I want to become better at asking others for their opinion.  I think this is important for our business because people who report to me are closer to the customer than I am, and therefore their views will help us become more customer centric.  If you see me slipping back to old habits of telling people the answers, please point this out to me”

2. Change the way meetings are run. Meetings take up such a large part of corporate life, so a change here is highly visible.  Meetings are a microcosm of the whole.

  • Starting and ending meetings on time sends strong messages about accountability and discipline
  • Changing the agenda sends messages about a change in values hierarchy.  For example, talking about safety before presenting financial performance numbers says safety is the most important agenda item
  • Having a stated objective for each agenda item sends messages about efficiency
  • Introducing a rule that all email devices are turned off sends a message about team respect

    3. Make a significant change to your team. Bring in someone new whose approach would be seen to represent the aspired culture.  For example, if you want to become more innovative, bring in a team member who previously worked at Apple.  Or ask a team member to leave whose behaviour has continually undermined the desired culture.  Any change in personnel is seen as highly symbolic by others.

    These three steps are not expensive, send strong messages about change, and go way beyond words.  Remember culture is changed by walking your talk.  These three are ways that you can change the ‘walk’ fast and gain credibility that you intend to lead change.

    In whose eyes must you walk your talk?

    Today Lloyd Blankfein says he will review all practices in the light of recent events. We are all quick to point fingers at Goldman Sachs as we assess their behavior against our moral code and accuse them of lacking integrity. They have lost the trust of many, and fallen from their position as the golden firm of Wall Street.  What lessons can we learn from their situation?

    Goldman Sachs was considered to have the strongest culture of all the investment banks.  It had (has?) one of the finest statements of corporate values I have ever seen – clear, provocative, inspiring.  The firm spent a lot of time and money inducting employees in these values, and did the same when it grew overseas and dealt with different cultures.  Those who did not fit with the culture were ejected.  I have never done any consulting work there, but often quoted Goldman Sachs as a company who really cared about culture.

    As I listen to the CEO, I conclude that they did not believe at the time they were doing anything wrong.  I suspect that internally they consider that their actions aligned with their values.  This I find to be a common view of many executives when asked about their own behaviour or that of their company.  I personally have had feedback on leadership 360 that ‘I do not live the values’ when I felt I was full of integrity.  Sometimes I know I have stepped out of line – my conscience tells me that – other times my internal compass is saying ‘fine’ and others let me know otherwise.  (Or they think it, without letting me know).

    I take one lesson from the Goldman Sachs experience.  Building your culture based on a set of internally shared values is not enough.  If customers and public opinion matter to your business, you need to check out with them how they see you measuring up against your values too.  At Walking the Talk we have identified three core cultural attributes which are essential in all circumstances where you are seeking to have your culture enable your business success.  One of these is open-ness.

    Open-ness to feedback, open-ness to see the world from another’s persepctive, to test your actions on others and ask them if they measure up to their standards.

    Without this attribute, your culture can wrap you and your team in a bubble.  And sometimes, as in the case of Goldman Sachs, that bubble can wrap you in a self-perpertuating perspective which isolates you from those you serve.

    Yesterday, Lloyd Blankfein said “We understand that there is a disconnect between how we as a firm view ourselves and how the broader public perceives our role and activities in the market. To address this, we need a rigorous self-examination”.  This promises well, it opens the first door to humility, listening and aligning corporate values with customer values.

    How to hold someone to account

    I can talk at a theoretical level about a culture of accountability.  Or I can give you a small practical example from a conversation I had recently with a team leader in a retail organization.  It is the small changes in leadership behavior that send the messages that expectations are really changing.  These, added together, start to change the culture.

    This is what he said:


    “The outlets always submitted action plans but they didn’t really mean anything.  Now I have to monitor it because my boss was monitoring me.  I actually had to talk to my boss’ boss about one of my outlets. We put plans in place and then we asked what they had done and then asked again until it was fixed.  Before it was dealt with through weekly performance numbers and the underlying problems never got looked at.”

    So what changed?  Turns out the boss’ boss was new, and he had strong values of accountability and people keeping their word.  He just hangs in there and does not let it go.  He isn’t aggressive, but he walks his talk.  And of all the team leaders in the organization he inherited, only one looks like they are not going to make it.  The others had just got accustomed to a culture of avoidance.  A culture can bring the best out of people, or the worst out of people.

    Interviews are so valuable to hear the culture in action.  Pulling lots of examples like this together provides the suggestions when leaders are looking for ways to visibly walk their talk.  It is the small things that make the difference.

    Why do leaders engage in culture?

    If you are reading this blog you are probably already convinced that building the right culture can add value to the organization.  I imagine you do not find that same passion in all of your colleagues, or your clients.  Yet you need their advocacy in order to create substantial momentum. How can you successfully influence others, and engage their hearts and minds in this process?

    I have found two reasons for leaders to become advocates of building the right culture.

    Culture will help fulfill their future vision
    Culture will remove their present pain

    Each requires a different engagement strategy.  But both require the same basic ingredients:  Why, what and how.

    Why culture will facilitate the vision, or alleviate the current problem. This builds the business case.  For example, a vision of global expansion requires a culture of global collaboration.  A problem with poor customer satisfaction will be reduced by a culture where individuals take responsibility for solving problems, rather than trying to pass the buck.

    What is required to change a culture. To answer this question requires a knowledge of the elements which make up a culture business plan, covering changes to behavior, to symbols and to business systems.  Most leaders become much more comfortable, and willing to invest what it takes, when they can see a well constructed path which demonstrates that this is a hard business opportunity with a rigorous process.


    How the process has to be led. A successful culture process requires strong leadership.  A leader’s confidence builds when they can see the types of activities, and personal change, that will be needed.  Meeting peers who have taken these steps can have a powerful influence, and I recommend encouraging these wherever possible.

    Those of us who advise, and those of us who follow, leaders have a responsibility to help them be successful.  Our influencing skills contribute to their success.  When your leader does not respond the way you hoped, ask yourself how you need to change to influence successfully, rather than being tempted to ‘blame’ the leader for not getting it.  There are always ways in which we can improve.

    5 questions to ask about your values

    It saddens me to hear what is happening to Toyota right now.  They have been such a strongly values driven company, and it seems they became focused on growth and did not see the scale of the quality problem.  And what a cost they are paying now.  How can they even calculate the damage to their brand, their sales, the consumer’s trust in their cars?  Consumers will be scared that their accelerator pedal may jam down, causing their car to speed up uncontrollably and result in some of the horrific accidents now described in the media.  Compare what is happening now to Toyota to the legendary  recall of their product Tylenol, which cemented their reputation with consumers and employees as being a company who truly lived by their ‘Credo’

    Growth or values? What happens when they appear to be in conflict? What do values really mean in the corporate context?  There can appear to be many shades of gray.  Most people belief they are doing the right thing, or persuade themselves that this is the case.  It takes a level of self awareness to be willing to question ones own actions, and a culture which welcomes constructive challenge to question those of others. Here are five questions to ask in relation to values, and the extent to which you are prepared to be values driven in your approach to decisions.  They can form the basis of a whole workshop.  In the strongest cultures they are always in people’s minds.

    1. What are we NOT prepared to do to pursue a profit?
    2. Are people supported to say “no”, or ‘blow the whistle’?
    3. Are our values a means to an end or an end in themselves?
    4. Are we doing this because it is simply the right thing to do (rather as just a means to an end)?
    5. Do we avoid tough conversations because they would expose whether we are really behaving in line with our stated values?

    The Toyota experience builds the case to demonstrate the cost of becoming less vigilant on adhering strictly to values.  The link to the article at the beginning of this blog provides some powerful evidence of just how large this cost can be.  We can all become better at demonstrating the return on investment in culture, and here is another piece of powerful evidence.

    What is "walking the talk"

    When searching for a name for my book, my editor at Random House told me the name should describe the essence of the book’s content.  Hmmm, a good challenge for someone who has just written 100,000 words on the topic of corporate culture.  What was the essence of leading culture successfully?  Of course, it was to walk your talk.

    Culture is built and maintained because people pick up messages about how they need to behave in order to fit into the community of which they are a member.  They adapt their behavior accordingly, and so the perpetuation of culture continues.  (As an adviser who visits the offices of many organizations, my whole luggage packing strategy can a complex operation to combine in one trip a Silicon Valley look, a New York banking look and a factory floor manufacturing look.  Oh, the trials of consulting!)

    Companies use their brand advertising to communicate what they stand for.  Leaders want to communicate the culture they expect, and most use road shows, slide packs, videos and meetings to do this.  But it is not what they say that people pick up on, it is what they do.    “What you do speaks so loud”, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “that I cannot hear what you say”.  Whilst communicating intention is an important part of building the brand and the culture, it also turns up the ‘talk’ dial, shining the spotlight even more on the ‘walk’.

    How does the ‘walk’ show up?  In three ways:

    Direct behaviors. What people observe in meetings, in emails, in one to one conversations.  The ratio between inquiring, listening and presenting.  The way mistakes are handled.  The resolution of conflicts.  Setting tasks and holding to account.  The topics of conversation.  How customers are treated.

    Symbols or choices. Decisions made.  Choices which demonstrate the organization’s (and the leader’s hierarchy of value.  How precious time is spent, how resources allocated, who gets the promotion.

    Business management systems. Goal setting, planning, reporting, rewarding, developing.  Product design, service processes. How the organization organizes itself and its people to service its customers.

    When the ‘walk’ and the ‘talk’ are aligned, the output is trust.  From customers, community and employees.  People follow leaders and brands that walk their talk.  From a brand perspective, this results in high customer loyalty.  Internally, people align their own behavior when they see congruence between walk and talk, and the desired culture is created.

    On the other hand, when an organization does not walk its talk, the result is mistrust and cynicism.

    It’s a worthy goal, to learn to walk your talk.