Changing Corporate Culture — the show about nothing

In January of 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded on take-off killing all seven crew, and grounding the American space program for two years.  Of the exhaustive investigations that took place (that led to a significant number of changes for NASA, and how they conducted their business), perhaps the most important change was that for the first time, talking about changing corporate culture was fair game.

The engineers and investigators determined the technical causes of the explosion, but when they dug deeper to understand why those technical issues were not addressed in advance, they ended up in the uncomfortable place of changing corporate culture.  It turns out NASA had a culture whereby many qualified people knew there was a significant risk of disaster, but none chose to voice those concerns, even if they would have been listened to.

I call this an “uncomfortable” conclusion because highly technical people in any organization want to discuss things they can see, touch and/or count.  Changing corporate culture is something that nebulous and messy.  It’s difficult to define, impossible to measure, and probably the most important element of performance in an organization — as NASA found out the hard way.

So how do you go about changing corporate culture?

You don’t.

Much like Jerry Seinfeld dominated television with a show about nothing, organizations need to get about doing what they do.  I was recently in the NBC store in New York, more than a decade after Seinfeld left the air, and discovered that a significant portion of the wares were dedicated to Seinfeld’s “nothing”.  The Soup Nazi, Vandalay Industries, and Kramer’s hair all testify to the enduring quality of Seinfeld’s “nothing”.

Changing corporate culture is a lot like the show about nothing.  What people do, how they interact with each other, how they manage conflict, what gets rewarded, who gets promoted, how success is measured and a score of other things all add up to your corporate culture.

The silliest thing you can do is to declare a change in corporate culture to some virtue you read about at some other company.  The culture you have now is a product of the things above.  If you want to change your corporate culture, you need to address those things.

And don’t think it will happen in a hurry.  It will be a decade more before Seinfeld is replaced at the NBC store.

Bad Bosses? Not to criticize, but you’re stupid!

Larry was my boss back when I had a real job – the kind of job where you show up every day (in body, at least), work as part of a cog in a huge corporate wheel, and try to attach meaning to mundane tasks.

The world was black and white for Larry:  if he thought you were a hard worker, he could be charming and funny.  If he didn’t like the way you worked, your life at work quickly descended into a living hell.  In the core skills and talents of the business we were in, there was probably no one stronger than Larry.

Larry did many things right as a leader;  he was not burdened by the need to have people like him, he got lots done, he was an excellent teacher, and he consistently produced the desired results.

As you can imagine, he also did a number of things wrong.  His treatment of people he didn’t like would clearly fall under the definition of harassment if it happened today.  I still remember the day when he repeatedly shouted at one of his direct reports (in front of many others), “You’re stupid!  You’re a stupid, stupid man!”

No one knows how many potentially good people he chased out of the business because his first impression of them wasn’t good.  And his volatile demeanor often took a minor incident and exaggerated it into a major crisis that required more time and energy by all involved to finally get resolved.

The company did invest in Larry by sending him off to corporate charm school, where he learned to soften his feedback:

“Not to criticize, but you’re stupid”

When I went on to leadership roles, Larry was a role model for me – both for what he did well, and by serving as a warning beacon for things he didn’t get right.  Here are some lessons I learned from Larry, that still guide me today:

  • If you want a lot of friends, or have a high need for the approval of others, you need to stay in an individual contributor’s role.
  • You always need to treat people with respect.  It doesn’t mean, however, that you don’t hold them accountable.
  • You need to be absolutely clear about your expectations, and then dole out both positive and negative consequences when things go right/wrong.  Leaders who think they can over-acknowledge good performance, and not deal with poor performance, are weak and will fail.
  • What you do is far more powerful than what you say.
  • Leadership is hard work

Larry retired many years ago, yet his impact on me (and a great many others) is still felt.  I’m sure if I asked Larry, he would have absolutely no idea how profound his influence was on me or anyone else.

So one final lesson from Larry: As a leader, you have a significant impact on people’s lives… perhaps for decades to come.

The Power of Persuasion: Selling Your Ideas

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Why Sell Your Ideas?
  • Your projects, programs, and career turn on the difference between “no” and “yes.”  Part emotional intelligence, part politics, and part psychology, selling ideas is not like tricking someone out of his money.   It’s about helping others to see things your way— engaging their minds and imaginations.  (Richard Shell, author of “The Art of WOO – Using Strategic persuasion to Sell Your Ideas”)
  • On today’s knowledge based workforce – “In our world, the right to give orders has largely been replaced by the need to facilitate, lead, and exercise influence.” (Klatt, Murphy, Irvine)

Influence Pre-Work

1. Establish Credibility

  • Authentic professional relationships
  • Expertise
  • Trust

2. Plan

  • Know how you are perceived by others.
  • Know your audience – what do they value?
  • Inside an organization selling your idea is likely to be a series of interactions rather than one single “pitch”

The Pitch

1. Context

  • Frame Your Idea
  • State the opportunity

2. Clarify

  • Explain the details
  • Why should they act?  (in their frame of reference)
  • Supplement numerical evidence with stories, metaphors, analogies that will speak to the heart as well as the head

3. Create

  • Deal with concerns or objections
  • Seek and share ideas

4. Commit

  • Determine Who will do What by When

5. Close

  • You’ve already closed the “selling of your idea” and have commitment.  This is more about ending the conversation appropriately, saying Thanks.  Don’t keep selling at this point …. Get out of the conversation and move on.

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Good Boss, Bad Boss: Be a Better Boss

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Why care about Leadership?

  • Retention – Unwanted turnover = 1.5 – 2.5 annual salary
  • Capturing Discretionary Effort  – What the value of 10% more productivity?  How about 100% more?
  • Less stress

Realities of being the Boss

  • You are under a microscope
  • The blame you get, and the credit you get are both exaggerated
  • Most people land in leadership roles because they were good technicians or practicioners of their work
  • Leaders underestimate the impact they have on others

5 Things you can do right now to be a better Boss

1. Be a better listener

  • Take the time
  • Don’t multitask (especially PDAs)
  • Seek to understand… not to plan your response
  • Paraphrase without being a parrot

2. Be a Teacher

  • It may take more time in the short-run
  • Don’t micro-manage
  • Tell people why
  • Connect them to something bigger

3. Give and receive feedback in abundance

  • Look for opportunities to offer feedback on a daily basis
  • Ask your direct reports for feedback frequently – and act on it
  • Offer both positive feedback, and corrective feedback

4. Be crystal-clear in your expectations

  • Write important expectations down formally at least once per year
  • Constantly reinforce expectations
  • Use several different media to describe important expectations
  • Practice what you preach at all times

5. Provide consequences for both good and poor performance

  • People will do what gets reinforced
  • You are currently getting the performance you are asking for
  • Be absolutely consistent with consequences
  • Apply consequences to reinforce both good and poor performance

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Leadership Boot Camp

Find out all about the Wily Manager Leadership Boot Camp:

  • Why bother?
  • What it’s about
  • Who should participate
  • How it works
  • What’s covered

Listen to the ‘Leadership Boot Camp’ Podcast:

: Download Podcast (MP3)

Leadership Boot Camp Podcast Slides

Download the Leadership Boot Camp Brochure:

Wily Manager Leadership Boot Camp Brochure


Why Most Leadership Development Activities are a Waste of Time

It all starts off with noble intentions and great expectations.  Organizations invest thousands to send a manager off to some Leadership Development Training, with high hopes of getting a return on their investment, and of seeing some measurable change in managerial performance.

The normal result is a large invoice for the training and related costs, and a new PowerPoint slide hung on the wall, with some convoluted model or diagram that’s supposed to change our lives, and solve all organizational ills.

How do managers and organizations get is so wrong?

They have the right idea, but they make the same mistake that any of us that has ever been on a diet before has made.  We think that some temporary action, and new package on an old bit of knowledge will make a difference.  Here’s a blinding flash of the obvious:  if you want to lose weight, eat more veggies, eat less of everything else, and try to exercise more.  Most importantly, make these changes habits rather than a temporary intervention.

Organizational and Leadership Development is no different.  Figure out what behaviours you want your managers to display, and take action to make those behaviours into habits.  This is incredibly easy conceptually, but much harder in practice.  You need to look at your reward systems, development systems and processes.  Part of your answer may include training, but only then as part of the solution.

We did some work with PepsiCo, who are generally well recognized as very competent at Leadership Development Activity.  Their development model calls for 10% Leadership Training, with the balance of development activities taking other forms such as coaching, job-shadowing, special assignments, and secondments.

Don’t get me wrong – I absolutely believe that quality leadership is the stargate to better production, increased quality, improved safety, and better cost control.  I just think that organizations that attempt to bridge their leadership quality gaps via training are taking the easy way out, and burning shareholder money to boot.

Just like most of us don’t need another diet book, but rather the discipline to use one of the 44 we already own, leaders don’t need another day in a classroom – they need help making habits out of the things they learned last time.

The von Manstein Matrix

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Who Cares About von Manstein?

  • Career military man who finished his career advising the West German government
  • He assessed top performers on how they got things done
  • Provides guidance on how to organize our time

The von Manstein Matrix:


The Pareto Principle:

  • 80% of your results will come from 20% of your efforts
  • You need to work hard to identify the 20%

How to Get “Lazy”:

  • Don’t fall into the activity trap.  Nobody cares how busy you are, they care what you produce
  • You need to do more than just work hard
  • Decide what NOT to do

Applying the Matrix:

  • Don’t try to keep all people happy all the time
  • Have a work plan
  • Practice saying “no”
  • Assess your direct reports on the matrix
  • Fire the hardworking, stupid ones

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Solutions to Office Layout Disgruntlement

We’ve heard many managers compare their jobs to that of baby-sitter.  The only difference being when the kids upset you, you can send them to their room, and the snacks and TV-watching options are better for the baby-sitter.

It is true that managers of people get dragged into all kinds of trivia, and much of it should be ignored.  There seems to be no more emotional issue than that of the office layout.  Several years ago, people were mourning the loss of office walls, as many organizations transitioned to cube-farms.  Now people fight over the size and location of their workstation.

Unfortunately, most managers have very little time/patience/control over the office configuration, so the best they might be able to do is offer some advice to disgruntled cube-dwellers as to how to cope with the physical office reality.  Here are some ideas:

Define Your Office Boundaries. This worked for Les Nessman at WKRP, and it can work for you.  Don’t acknowledge anyone unless they knock at your pretend door, and certainly don’t put up with people walking through your pretend walls.  You might even want to suspend wall paintings from the ceiling to line up with your pretend walls.

Engage in Closed Office Behaviour.  Make loud personal telephone calls.  If you feel the need for a nap, close your pretend door and sleep like you would at home (unless you sleep in the nude).  Need to pick your nose?  You’re in the privacy of your own office – go for it.  If someone tries to talk to you through a pretend wall, look towards the pretend door, and shout, “I can’t hear you.  Would you like to come in here?”

There’s No Place Like Home. Most people spend more conscious hours in their workplace than they do in their homes.  You need to make the place comfortable.  Buy a portable fridge to put under your desk, as well as some small kitchen appliances (start with a toaster, blender, and espresso machine).  You probably don’t control much in your work-place, so make your 8 X 8 part of the empire a castle.

Of course with this new-found freedom, you will also have to respect and ignore others engaging in the same behaviour if the illusion is to be complete.  Here’s a YouTube clip on office layout that outlines the perils of being too interested in what’s happening one row over on the cubefarm.

Office Design – Enclosed Offices vs. Cube Farm

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Office Types:

  • Enclosed Offices
  • Open Space Concept
  • Cubicle Farms
  • Alternative

Why Getting Out of Offices is Great:

  • More and better communication amongst team members
  • More direct contact – you end up knowing people better
  • Space can be modified quickly and easily
  • Usually people have more access to natural light
  • Some companies have found it reduces cost because you can put more cubes per floor than offices. (Cisco reduced costs by 37%)
  • It’s harder for employees to slack off

Why it Sucks:

  • Reinforces negative notions of hierarchy when some are in cubes, and others in offices
  • It’s not possible to close a door for privacy
  • Meeting in your “office” is more difficult
  • Constant noise and disturbances
  • To do it well, isn’t really any cheaper than building offices
  • It lowers morale and productivity
  • Unless the work environment requires a high level of interaction with others, the lack of privacy is a distraction that negatively impacts productivity
Making it Work:
  • Over communicate any office-space change.  This is a very big deal to people
  • Be very clear about your reasons for making a change, and make sure you consider the pro’s and con’s
  • You need much more meeting space in an open concept than with offices
  • Hire someone to help you through the transition
  • Ensure white-noise
  • If you go open – everyone must go, from the CEO on down
  • Research it well – there is no shortage of information arguing both for and against open office space

One Solution:

  • If employees spend the majority of their time working individually, put them in offices
  • If employees spend a great deal of time collaborating, put them in an open office configuration.  Perhaps in offices of four to eight people.
  • If you want you employees to spend most of their time reading Dilbert, put them in cubicles.

Last Word from Robert Probst:

  • Before his death, the inventor of the cubicle apologized for his contribution to “monolithic insanity”

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Making Difficult Conversations Easier

How do you tell someone they smell? Or that they need to stop handing out religious pamphlets at work?  Maybe an employee dresses inappropriately at work.  Perhaps an employee’s spouse calls the workplace several times per day.  What about your assistant’s drinking problem?

You could do what some managers do:  ignore the behaviour and hope it goes away.  Now, hope rarely works as a strategy to solve a problem, but let’s give it a try and see what happens:

They Smell:  If you don’t act they’ll keep smelling.  If you’re in a retail business, you’ll almost certainly lose customers.  If the aroma is only affecting co-workers who have brought the problem to your attention, they will know for sure that you don’t care and/or that you lack the courage to deal with a relatively simple problem.

An employee is pushing an opinion or unwanted material on co-workers.  This one is a bit more tricky  — you need to balance an individual’s right to speak freely with his coworker’s right to not be harassed at work.  This one is a level of degrees, but suffice it to say that if you’ve received complaints, the behaviour is probably already perceived as being too aggressive.

An employee is dressed inappropriately.  When I was in university, I worked for a retailer who had a strict dress code.  This included a ban on earrings for male employees.  This was fine until one of the senior executive’s sons showed up with an earring, and the facility manager would not address it for fear of reprisal.  Now, there are a whole bunch of things wrong with this scenario, but needless to say, when the manager displayed his cowardice in this regard, he had a facility full of male employees wearing earrings out of protest within a month.  Rightly or wrongly, the dress code fell apart, and the manager lost all credibility.

In these, and in perhaps most cases, it can look (at least at the outset) that it is easier to NOT engage in these difficult conversations.  In the short term, it probably is easier.  Longer term, you create all kinds of problems for yourself as a manager if you don’t tackle difficult conversations.  You erode trust, you lose credibility, and frankly you’re not doing your job as a leader.  Consider this one of the “burdens of leadership”.

If you want help with this difficult part of the job, listen to our podcast, and visit our page on Difficult Conversations.

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