Creating a Vibrant Organizational Culture

Editor's Notes

• #2: 2 to 3:15 RM – Until about a year ago, I was training manager at the Jacksonville Public Library (Jax, FL). Coordinated an initiative to engender a shift in our own org. culture. It turns out Cheryl Gould was helping libraries do similar kinds of things on the West Coast. It was to my great fortune that she expressed an interest in working together on this presentation. CG – To group – please say your name out loud. Have a one minute conversation with your neighbor and come up with at least 3 words that describe your library culture.
• #3: CG Ask a few people to share what they came up with and WE flipchart a few of their answers show of hands - For how many of you is that your ideal culture? Whatever your culture, we’re pretty sure you have some fabulous people and fabulous things happening. <a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/4849907/Library_Culture" title="Wordle: Library Culture"><img src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/4849907/Library_Culture" alt="Wordle: Library Culture" style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>
• #5: In July 2009, the company announced it would be acquired by Amazon.com in an all-stock deal worth about $1.2 billion.[4][5][6] Since its founding in 1999, Zappos has grown to be the largest online shoe store “ Responsibility fore creating an environment in which people buy into and live the Cultural Beliefs falls on … leadership…. Few other leadership acts can contribute more to an organization’s success.” (87).
• #6: a global technology leader in optical communications components and subsystems. 2010 Business Insider.com article
• #7: “ Vibrant” is literally related to “vibrate”, so it came to mean “pulsating with life or vigor”; secondary is “bright”. The imagery I want to borrow. Culture is not the same as morale, though the two certainly feed into each other. How sunny is your culture? Full sun? partly sunny? cloudy? or … so dark the forces of evil are lurking. Stop at sunny. [Do you have any openings?] An assignment. [get names] Or, how many partly sunny? It would just not be right to ask anyone to admit that their culture most resembled a black ghoul crawling towards your soul.
• #8: How to Know When the Results You Need Require a Culture Change Difficulty. “If the desired result will take more effort to achieve than the past result.” BUDGET CUTS! 2) Direction. “If the desired results signal a significant change in direction for the organization.” 3) Deployment. If the desired results “require a large scale deployment or redeployment of ... resources” (human or otherwise). 4) Development. “If the desired result demands that the organization develop a new capability or core competency.”
• #9: IDEO’s Tim Brown 2009 Interview w/ CBS News
• #10: RM - . We had just completed a new Main Library and 5 new branches– more than doubling our footprint. The public began using it in record numbers. It so happened, that was exactly the time we began to experience an unrelenting series of city budget cuts (even before the nation-wide recession). Staff were stretched and they were stressed. Every year a good number were in fear of layoff or demotion. I bet we all can find something to relate to in this story. To flourish in that sort of environment, it is imperative to have an organizational culture that is strong and vibrant.
• #12: It is not the culture that is preached that really matters; it is the real culture “ the way things are done around here.”
• #14: RM – slide points We can have lofty goals and be realistic at the same time. Won’t change every employee’s attitudes, but can change the norm, what’s typical, the attitudes pervade the atmosphere One of the most important lessons I learned at JPL has to do with the extent of the commitment required to be truly transformative. We were not naïve on this point. From the very beginning, we said, “We can’t just expect to put everyone through an eight-hour class and have them come out holding hands and singing kumbaya. We were going to have reinforcement. We were going to follow up. Guess what? Did I mention that our staff were stretched? After the second year, with new projects and new challenges and initiatives coming at us all the time, energy for DL began to wane. By the third year some people were wondering, “What happened to dL?” To compare it to human nutrition: It just doesn’t work to go on a crash diet, lose the pounds you want, and then go back to normal. To be healthy for the long term, you have to think in terms of a lifestyle change. It’s not a project. What is required is a permanent commitment to building and nurturing the behaviors and attitudes that make an org. culture strong. Won’t change everyone The BEST companies get near 50% on ratings of employee engagement Takes commitment and more than a year No other way to get such a high return on your investment.
• #15: not a very good example maybe. actually, they are a great example that it is not enough to merely say you are “all in.”
• #17: CG – slide points Here’s the key: BELIEFS. Beliefs guide actions which create results.
• #19: You can require everyone to take specific steps to grow in a particular area. But if they are not personally invested … slide points. At JPL we wanted everyone to grow in the traits
• #20: ACTION VS. BELIEF RM – At the beginning of every class we would let the group know that at the end we would be inviting everyone to make a commitment to an immediate action to get the ball started on beginning to practice behaviors they had learned. Through the course of the class, we would give a boatload of examples of things people could do. But we asked them to choose only one. They would choose a partner to encourage them, support them, hold them accountable. We made a point in the class that everything was “opt in” so nobody had to complete this, but just about everybody did. We could pressure people to undergo this process, even follow up to make sure they did it -- pressure them to follow through. But without the right belief it was always going to be superficial, transitory. Compliance w/out commitment. So what is the belief we needed them to have? “Committing to taking actions to practice these leadership principles will help me achieve my goals [ something that is important to me] will help me help JPL help this community, will help me get ahead. The next step would be to figure out: What are the experiences that we can give them to move them to accept that belief?
• #21: Two Experiences: NUMBER 1 ｷ Some leaders pride themselves on not suffering fools gladly. You’d better have your blank together or expect to get cut off at the knees. Engenders one kind of culture – a culture of efficiency – people don’t waste time at meetings if they are unprepared; they don’t bring things up that are frivolous. ｷ  You are proud of your reputation as someone who doesn’t suffer fools gladly  Every time someone raises an issue at a staff meeting they are shot down or made to feel embarrassed., but realize you can’t have that reputation and also encourage people to feel comfortable sharing… NUMBER 2 Asking for employees input into strategic plan; not showing signs of considering it. NUMBER 3 Pretend you are a new employee and attend a meeting where everyone is asked for suggestions for improving customer service. Someone makes a suggestion and immediately, someone says: We’ve tried that before, we don’t have money, no that won’t work. The next suggestion is met with: that’ll never work, we tried something like that 5 years ago. And so on. What is that new employee learning? It’s not “safe” to make suggestions. That management isn’t open to new ideas and they don’t really want to hear from me. so what’s likely to happen is that employee will think twice about sharing their ideas.
• #22: There is something called the Hawthorne Effect – an increase in worker productivity produced by the psychological stimulus of being asked about or included in data gathering about work processes. In the Hawthorne Effect, management asks workers how to improve work environment and they said “the lights are too low” so they brought the lights up and productivity went up. They went back to the same group a while later and they said “the lights are too bright” so management brought the lights back down to original and the productivity went up. The moral is that when people are asked and their ideas are implemented, they get motivated.
• #23: 1. 2. “C. building will and must involve every single leader in your organization” (Connors 68) 3. 4. a. [email_address] ; blah blah blah blog 5. ( aka TRAINING) 6. “develop ethical and legal sensitivity.
• #24: RM Maybe CG – I worked with Santa Cruz Public Library on developing their own set of skills and behaviors. More on that later.
• #25: RM – One of the early steps in the planning process is to put into words the key principles that you want the staff to adopt. And there are a couple of ways to go about choosing those principles. You can start from a proven model, such as one of these three. Or the staff can choose their own key elements.
• #26: RM – JPLbased their shift on the Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner. How many of you are already familiar with this book? We called the initiative “Destination:LEADERSHIP” and it was built on the notion that everybody in an organization could be a leader in one way or the other. But the more I have learned about approaches to building a healthy organizational culture, the more these five principles hold up for me. The one element I would add more explicitly is one of the ten steps to a learning organization: “Promote the Positive.” Negativity is the single biggest poison to an org culture, so I would address that one head on. EXTRA. The one I would modify is Inspire a Shared Vision. An approach that is less threatening: Everyone can buy in to a vision of a difference the library can be in the community. Then it’s just a matter of wanting others to appreciate that vision too. Richard: Everyone can be a leader. Everyone chooses a style of leadership that fits his/her temperament. Everyone chooses for him or her self the behaviors for growth [may need to show the eval chart here instead of later.] Everyone (regardless of position, age, seniority, status) can learn from everyone. [Explains assiduous care in diverse makeup of classes – a deputy director may be setting next to a clerk, each with the same status; explains selection of trainers]. I wonder now, though, whether a somewhat more hierarchical roll out of the lessons would not be more valuable: 1) Senior administrative staff; 2) managers; 3) front-line opinion leaders. Pros & Cons. Everything is opt-in. No one was forced to be a trainer; no one forced to participate in sharing activities; no one forced to share information about themselves, their evaluations. [Eventually, resisters were forced to take the class.]
• #27: Cg – These are the 8 skills that came out of an activity done with the managers of a library in Santa Cruze, California with about a 100 FTE’s. If your staff could do all of these things, you’d HAVE a vibrant organizational culture!
• #28: Would be a little
• #31: “ C. building will and must involve every single leader in your organization” (Connors 68) With dL -- in which we were seeking to foster the belief that anyone could be a leader -- we were intentionally did not choose our team to lead the effort exclusively from the highest level of the organization. Connors stresses strongly the points of Cummings and Worley and our experience bears this out. To be successful, every single senior manager must participate fully -- in demonstrating their commitment and in modeling the culture. “ Developing the leadership competency to accelerate the change effectively and then sustain the culture over time is the never-ending role of leadership. You can exclude no one. Culture building will and must involve every single leader in your organization” (Connors 17). Executive team inspired to share the vision. I think this piece is essential. compliance, but not commitment involvement, but not investment One of the foundation principles of our philosophy was that everyone on staff was of equal value, everyone can be a leader. And so we started by selecting a core team from every classification and category of staff. In essence we skipped over this step of ensuring commitment and investment from the senior team first. Depending on the makeup of your executive team, this could take some time. My advice: Take the time. Don’t rush it. The staff will take their lead from their attitudes, their commitment. It is essential to the long-term success. “ The most common mistake leaders make in the Cultural Tansition Process is failing to integrate as soon as they begin to implement…. [The two parts] mutually reinforce and depend on one another.” (177).
• #32: What if you have one or more leaders who are part of the problem? You can start w/ a subculture -- a pilot project -- build the cultural change in one department.
• #33: “ The most common mistake leaders make in the Cultural Tansition Process is failing to integrate as soon as they begin to implement…. [The two parts] mutually reinforce and depend on one another.” (177).
• #34: [example: Policies & procedures. If you are seeking to establish a culture of empowerment, your policies and proc. will look very different than if you are seeking a culture of uniformity. culture of trust]; culture of trust might also require allowing more working from home (Google -- they come and go whenever they want) Meetings: Eastside HealthPlans, one of the great success stories in “Change the culture; change the game”: EVERY meeting; employee newsletter; employee blog -- recognition, story, tip, or progress report. FEEDBACK: For Connors & Smith, one of the critical elements is seeking, getting and acting on honest feedback from the staff. Jay Graf, he leader of a company called “Cardiac Pacemakers, Inc.” S. focused feedback was the most important element in the process, the one with the greatest impact. Managers were expected to ask for feedback from their staff on whether the ideas will work, what else needs to be done, etc. At every senior team meeting, he began by asking: “What feedback have you received this week that you found valuable, and what are you doing to act on it?” “Did not hear anything useful” was unacceptable.
• #37: RM – One of the best things we did to keep the skills in people’s minds was to build a rewards program around them. Every quarter, someone could win the Model the Way Award or the Challenge the Process Award or one based on any of the five practices. We gave them a certificate and used Friends money to buy a gift card. This year, we added a new award, because we wanted a way to recognize a lot more staff for taking risks, being creative and trying new ideas, so we created the JPL Innovator award. Any manager could give these out at any time. The winner gets a JPL Innovator button and a certificate of recognition. It’s those kinds of things that help keep these principles alive.
• #39: Amy’s ice cream distinguishes itself by a fun atmosphere – play, performance, fun, entertainment. The built creative fun into the application process – This initial experience declares the culture. (take these four common household items and make a game out of them or something.)
• #40: RM - JPL’s approach to training: Lou Wetherbee prepared a cadre of 24 staff trainers. We held one class per month until everybody had taken the class. I love the idea of training all the staff at once, but budget cuts put our all staff day on hiatus and this was the only realistic way. All 24 of our trainers were courageous, willing and committed to what we were trying to achieve. They represented the complete diversity of our staff (race, gender, classification, department.), but the fact is we asked some to do more than they were ready for. It is absolutely essential to provide a high-quality learning experience. Do less telling, create experiences and the learning happens in the debrief. The trick is to create a safe, nonjudgemental environment so people can try new behaviors. Includes New Employee Orientation Refresher training and advanced training.
• #42: Consultants are not big on evaluations. Like this better than (or in addition to) self-evaluations. We didn’t do this for dL. (extensive 360 self-evaluation, but they cost $$ and there were problems with a number of the questions so we did know follow-up eval.) So we were left with only anecdotal evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of our initiative.
• #43: RM – It’s a lifestyle change, not a crash diet
• #45: CG - How do we move from pulling against each other to all pulling in the same direction. There are plenty of external challenges to face. If we pull against each other. I don’t think we’ll make it.