#MeToo is one of the most powerful social phenomenons of recent years. How leaders chose to tackle this critical issue is reflective of how they chose to build and nurture their Cultures.
How Do You Balance A Culture & Business Transformation?
My wife loves Mark Walhberg.
I mean she has a very serious crush on the former Markey Mark and his world-class abs. Which might explain why we were watching one of his movies – “Shooter” – for the 4th time recently. As added context, I wasn’t closing the gap on “Mr 8-pack abs” by slurping my way through a pint of Ben&Jerry’s either.
In one pivotal scene Walhberg is coaching Michael Pena on the discipline and focus needed to be a sniper when he utters the immortal Zen sniper line:
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast”
I’ve always loved the weird mental hurdles and conflicts inherent in that saying because it perfectly articulates what I’ve seen and heard repeatedly in the Culture and Digital Transformation interviews I’ve conducted.
An organizational imperative – nay impatience – to transform at the speed of the market. Or at the speed of a market driven by 90-day analyst calls and leadership tenure of less than 3 years.
Balanced with a reality that Culture – the People part, not the Pixels part – doesn’t change with nearly that speed or with that certainty.
This reality can be a source of significant frustration for many executives and may explain why many would prefer to ignore the Culture piece entirely or seek quick cosmetic fixes that do more to impact “climate” than they do to actually transform Culture. This excellent piece from Culture University on Climate is a great read.
Addressing climate is not the same as transforming Culture.
Among many of the excellent sayings Culture expert Edgar Schein posits is this one – “Culture arises through shared experiences of success” – with the words I’ve underlined a critical component.
Shared experiences is important because it highlights that more than one individual, one team, one division must be involved if it can be considered a cultural transformation. Sure it must start somewhere and blossom but it can only be considered a transformation if it spreads and takes root across an organization.
Success is critical too. And, as any Change Management expert will attest, that often means false starts and mis-steps occur before success genuinely happens. Success means you need to have a clear definition of what success means for your Transformation. It also requires the acuity to measure and track success. Finally success needs to be sustained – particularly because many Culture Transformations go through the very real employee skepticism of “here we go again…” and “Oh boy, another Management bright shiny fad is working its way down the pipe…” Moving from your current Culture to your desired Culture requires your colleagues to see that the behaviours that epitomize “success” are actually consistent and not just episodic or a flash in the pan.
So what can impatient executive do to transform their Culture at something approaching the velocity of their Digital Transformation?
#1, acknowledge that you’ll need to address your Culture at some point and that human beings do adapt and change slower than the speed with which you can upgrade your servers or switch to a cloud-based SAAS model.
Brian Fetherstonhaugh summed it up beautifully in one interview when he said “Culture is a deliberate, relentless, often expensive and painful set of choices you make every single day.”
#2, do some type of Culture Audit or Culture diagnostic to truly understand what Culture you currently have. That isn’t an Employee Engagement Survey (sorry guys) but a genuine Audit that has both qualitative and quantitative components. Your CIO isn’t going to transform your IT infrastructure and vendors without comprehensively auditing your current systems, why would you try to transform your people without knowing exactly where your Culture is today.
#3, accept that Leadership carries a disproportionate responsibility for the efficacy and velocity with which any change occurs. That means YOU are a key determinant. Saying one thing and doing another will doom a Culture Transformation faster than a lack of funding or a poor definition of success. Leadership style – are you building trust, transparency, openness? – and Leadership commitment – are you in in for the long haul? Are you prepared to make the tough calls? – are critical and those can’t be delegated.
#4, have a realistic expectation of the speed that a full Culture Transformation will take. Factors like size, geographic spread, societal culture, industry vertical are all factors which can’t be dismissed – see #2 above – but even taking those into consideration, studies suggest it takes at least one organizational generation for Transformation to go from identification to implementation to adoption.
I was intrigued by this article by Barry Phegan on CompanyCulture.com where he suggests an exponential relationship between the number of employees and the time required - all other factors being equal. 10 employees = 1 Year, 100 Employees = 2 Years, 1,000 employees = 3 Years...and so on. If you've got any evidence to support or refute Barry's assertion, I'd love to hear about it.
That time scale shouldn’t curtail your desire in the slightest and shouldn’t prevent you from starting either.
Perhaps the most important step to ask yourself is one that Edgar Schein raises in many of his books – Why do you believe you need to transform your existing Culture in the first place?
While Digital Transformation is the business imperative de jour, I sometimes question how many organizations are doing it because it is genuinely critical to their survival or because everybody else seems to be doing it and they can’t be seen not to.
Knowing the complexities of a Culture Transformation, and the potential margin for error, perhaps the best start is to repeat after me…
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
Then, in time you can graduate to
It's such a good vibration
It's such a sweet sensation
It's such a good vibration
It's such a sweet sensation**
Mimicry Is Not Strategy
Quick show of hands if you’ve ever heard this in an off-site, Planning or Strategy meeting.
“We want to be the Apple of X”
“Can you give me a NIKE-style version of Y?”
The reference point is always the latest envogue organization, talked-about creative piece or Fast Company magazine article.
For a while the catch-phrase was “We’re the UBER of Z” but considering the recent departure of UBER’s CFO and their VP of Global Vehicle Programs, as well as a raft of scandals, the bloom has come off that particular corporate rose quite significantly.
Just to see how prevalent this particular scenario is, I turned to my old friend Google to run a few tests. In short I wanted to test my WWSJD or WWEMD hypothesis – “What Would Steve Jobs Do?” or “What Would Elon Musk Do?”
How to innovate like Apple returned 772,000 results.
How to innovate like Tesla, 1,510,000 results.
And the lowly shark? 396,000 results. Evidently I'm missing something here.
Interestingly, or amusingly, in those searches one of the top 5 results was an article written by Realtor.com - which speaks volumes IMHO.
Trust me, I get the appeal of trying to pries the wisdom of Jobs, Ives, Bezos, Buffet, Munger, Musk, Welch, Gates, or even Kalanick, free and leveraging that for your own organization. Who wouldn’t?
Truth is, you can’t.
One of my favourite thinkers on innovation Greg Satell frequently refers to this as “cargo cult”thinking which is such a wonderful metaphor. The term comes from reports following WW2 that certain South Pacific groups had constructed elaborate runways, airport structures and even fanciful outfits in an attempt to summon the god-like aircraft they’d seen drop supplies to the US Army during the war. Essentially these villagers were blindly mimicking behaviours and actions they’d witnessed and were (erroneously) concluding that they merely needed to do exactly the same and they too would reap the same rewards.
More recently I was discussing the very hot topic of how organizations can build an innovation culture with two of my favourite Kiwis Darren Levy and Neil McGregor. Their point, made in classically blunt New Zealand fashion, was that it was impossible. More to the point, there was no magical “innovation culture” that merely required a convenient 10 step process to manufacture and deploy. Quite simple your organization has the culture it has. Your role as leaders is to determine the aspects of your own unique culture that are impeding innovation from occurring and address those. It certainly wasn’t about doing what Apple does (or did when Steve Jobs returned) or printing off the top 10 secrets for entrepreneurial success.
That’s just not Good Strategy
Richard Rumelt, affectionately referred to as “the Strategists’ Strategist”, is even more direct in his classic book “Good Strategy. Bad Strategy”. In it he derides most strategic plans as nothing more than laundry lists of desirable outcomes. For Rumelt, good strategy means a willingness to recognize and define a challenge and having an executable and realistic plan to address that. Sounds straightforward and remarkably obvious but Rumelt’s point is that so few organizations are willing to do that and rely more on CEO charisma and vision than a honest evaluation of challenges and building a coherent plan to tackle them.
To quote him directly, “A good strategy defines a critical challenge. The purpose of a good strategy is to offer a potentially achievable way of surmounting a key challenge”
Quite simply it’s unlikely, even impossible, that the critical challenge facing Apple or Tesla or UBER or Facebook is not the same critical challenge facing you.
Even if you are miraculously grappling with a huge war chest of cash you need to spend, plans to integrate your solar business with your car business, an imploding unicorn or the ire of brands and businesses over viewability and appropriate content, chances are your business is not a cookie cutter of those titans.
Your leadership isn’t the same. Your partners, suppliers and vendors aren’t the same. Your contracts and negotiated deals aren’t the same. Your employees, your culture and the levels of employee passion and engagement certainly aren’t the same.
Let’s be honest, even those organization’s principal competitors don’t face the same critical challenges as them. WalMart’s challenges in beating Amazon in the online space aren’t the same. What Ford and GM need to galvanize within their employees and their culture is day and night from what’s required of Elon Musk and his marauders over at Tesla to win in the arena of electric-powered or autonomous vehicles.
Trust me I get the appeal.
These organizations and CEO's have created enormous wealth, global prestige, accolades and fawning customers. Which CEO or leader wouldn’t want their name whispered with the same reverence and envy?
You still have to do the work.
On your own unique organization.
On your own unique critical challenge.
On your own unique achievable way to surmount that challenge.