Category Archives: culture

Looking at your Organization and Culture as a Lens for Strategy

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Many strategic thinkers look at strategy from two perspectives: the external environment, including industries and competition (PEST or STEEP analysis is a well known tool for examining the external environment) and the internal environment, focusing on what resources and capabilities the organization has to deploy (SWOT analysis is a standard tool for the internal environment). Peng and his colleagues suggest a third leg as a tripod for strategic management and execution. They suggest that a main element to think about is in situations where formal constraints are unclear or fuzzy, institution-based norms (culture)  and informal  networks will play a much larger role in guiding individual’s behavior.

How does this impact you as a strategic leader?  Especially in times of turbulence, the informal signals you send about what is important and valued (or punished) will have a large impact on the success of your strategy. One example I heard in programs focused on whether people get promoted or punished for risk-taking. No matter how much senior leaders talk about wanting to be bold and take risks, one of the clearest indicators of how much senior leaders value risk-taking comes from whether people who take risks and do not achieve the hoped-for success, or fail.

(Source: “The Institution-Based View as a Third Leg for a Strategy Tripod”, Peng, Sun, Pinkham, and Chen, Academy of Management Perspectives, August 2009.)

The Great Repeatable Business Model

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As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful.  Zook and Allen offer some insights below:

  1. Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”.  Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
  2. Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.

Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:

  1. Ensure  you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
  2. Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
  3. Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
  4. Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values?  Are they adhered to on a daily basis?

The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.

 (Source: 2011, Zook and Allen, Harvard Business Review)

5 Key Thoughts and Principles of Leadership (part 4 of 5)

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(Note-you can find the first post that outlines the background of this series here and here. This is the fourth in the series.

4-WHAT IS YOUR PHILOSOPHY OF LEADERSHIP? The CEO I listened to noted this as a cornerstone of leadership: ” I believe in lots of servant leadership. I try when people come in and sit down, I ask a 5 word question-“How can I help you?” (NOT What do you want?).  I mean that-think about how those words sound.  This sets the stage from the start.  People come to you because they may be anxious, fearful, afraid of you or what you might do.  I get it but I don’t get it.”

“You have to create an environment where you can get at the issue and solving it.  It is at the core of servant leadership.  It is a primary job to serve.   If you are not deploying your skils in the service of others or the organization, you will be less effective.  History is filled with all sorts of leadership styles-fear ultimately destroys the leader and those around him or her, even if the cause was righteous.”

Three Keys to Accelerating Your Team’s Effectiveness

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Earlier, I mentioned my admiration for Jon Katzenbach on organizational culture.  Another person I follow is Rob Cross, who focuses upon social networks (Not social media-but the face to face social networks that all of us work within).  I ran across Rob from a trusted senior leader who recommended his work after noting, “the higher you go in an organization, the more your success lies outside of your organization.”

Cross and Katzenbach  (May 2012, “The Right Role for Top Teams”) suggest that the most effective teams, especially those within multiple organizational units set themselves up as hubs surrounded by spokes of formal and informal subgroups to address specific issues.  Here are three key findings:

  1. Invest in intentional informal networking: this is enhanced by specifically and intentionally building relationships among different subgroups during formal and ad hoc meetings and events.
  2. Deal with inevitable tensions and conflicts within the network by focusing on the constituent level (who in which subgroups have investments in a particular course of action and can sabotage certain initiatives who are also well connected to other subgroups).
  3. Make disciplined choices about when you need subgroups with real-team accountability and focus, and when the clarity and speed of a single-leader unit is better;

What are some tactics and strategies you have found effective in working with people outside of your immediate organization?

How do experts shape culture? 6 key insights from Jon Katzenbach.

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One of the giant thinkers on organizational culture is Jon Katzenbach. I’ve set up a Google alert for any of his work on organizational culture.  Periodically, I go back and review some of his insights on organizations and organizational culture. I’ve summarized 6 insights from an article he wrote on organizational culture and change

1. The existing culture can be a powerful source of energy and influence for behavior change. Culture is rarely “all bad”.

2. If you don’t have to overhaul or replace a culture, don’t! A deeply embedded culture does not change very much, very fast. Moreover, a major culture replacement requires extensive programs and structural redesign.

3. Start with changing behaviors, not mindsets. It is much easier to “act your way into new thinking” than to “think your way into new actions.”

4. Focus on changing only the few critical behaviors at different levels within key populations. This is less disruptive than attempting wholesale change — and certainly more manageable and sustainable over time.

5. Use viral (i.e., cross-organizational) methods to motivate behavior change, not just formal top-down programmatic methods. Storytelling social media, and informal tools enable and accelerate formal change methods.

6. Mobilize both rational and emotional forces to reinforce the new behavior patterns and achieve lasting change. Both the rational and the emotional elements need to “jump together” to yield sustainable change.

To what extent do you agree with his perspectives on culture and change?