Author: gothamCulture

How to Build a Sustainable Startup Culture For Rapid Growth

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

In today’s fiercely competitive startup landscape, entrepreneurs are faced with new challenges on a daily basis. Beyond the actual viability of the market for their product or service, they must ensure that they focus on building a sustainable organization that continues to thrive as they grow and change.

Guiding a company from startup to success means finding the balance between a sustainable growth strategy, a culture that reflects your values and supports your people, and a leadership team that will help drive the change.

Finding that balance is a challenge, however. It’s not just about having a cool office or great benefits. You have to ensure your employees and your culture are aligned with your vision for growth. Your leadership has to be invested in the values and direction of the company; fostering an ecosystem that drives the behaviors you need for success.

Know WHY You’re In Business

The most important aspect of your startup culture is ensuring it aligns with WHY you’re in business. Is it about providing exceptional customer service?  Is it speed and efficiency?  World change?

Whatever it is, the culture should be reflected in what your customers see and experience. What are people passionate about, and what is the ideal environment that supports that? Some would argue attention to culture is even more important than processes, plans, and requirements.

Keep in mind: looking for culture fit is great when hiring, so long as you want to reinforce the culture you currently have. If, however, you are looking to change the culture, hiring and keeping people who embody those values and behaviors is the way to go.

Start by understanding why you’re in business and what kinds of values define your organization. Starting with an intentional and authentic understanding of this can serve as a hiring lens as your company grows.

It’s then the responsibility of senior leadership and other key personnel to give it the momentum you need to drive change in the right direction. You have to ensure that your people feel supported by the leadership and culture so they stick around.

How Important Are First Impressions?

Today’s rapidly growing startups are often pressured to find the balance between looking cool, hip and successful to attract top talent, while not blowing their budget on office space and benefits.

While a small company cannot keep up with the likes of Google in terms of benefits or campus amenities, first impressions are still critical to attracting and retaining the right people.

Careful attention must be paid to the culture that is visible. But, more importantly, the substance must be there as well. Perks, games, and exposed brick walls mean nothing if they are simply window dressing. They must serve some sort of greater purpose within the organization.

Start with ‘why’ and align your culture and your people around those values.

3 Tips For Building A Thriving Culture

Here are three specific considerations for your rapidly growing company to build and nurture a sustainable startup culture:

1. Use core values as the hiring lens. Core values should align with, and reflect company culture. If they don’t, it may be time for you and your team to do some rethinking to do on that front first!

Core values are where an organization has opportunity to reflect culture in written form. So much of culture is intangible or understood and not necessarily discussed or documented. Revisit the ideas that inspired you to be in business in the first place, and use them as a compass to guide your hiring decisions.

Put those core values to work.

2. Long to hire and quick to fire. It’s an old business axiom but it has some relevance here. Take the time to explore, inquire, test, and evaluate each candidate to ensure that they align well with your organizational culture. Do they believe in the same values that your company follows? Are they going to proactively improve the existing culture as your company grows and changes?

Having extended dialogue with each of your candidates also ensures you’re giving them the opportunity to evaluate company fit as well. Beyond just wanting or needing a job for a job’s sake, what role can your company play in their career and/or personal development over time? Does your company’s mission align with their goals as a person and a professional?

“Quick to fire” may not be as important here as “quick to ensure people are sticking to core values” and practicing the kinds of behaviors and qualities you want to see reflected in your culture.

3. Disrupt patterns through culture oriented actions and events. Reinforce your company culture through disruptive and experiential organization activities.

Internally, this means nurturing your culture among your team. Host events to discuss organizational objectives and provide opportunities for people to provide their input. Think about development programs to train on specific intended outcomes.

Externally, it means creating customer experiences that involve personnel in culturally specific ways. These are opportunities to show off your company culture to your customers, and give them an idea of how your values and your people align with your branding and customer experience.

 

It is almost too easy to ignore culture in a growing/thriving startup.  We get caught up in the operations of success, the glory of new outcomes, or the challenges faced.  Ignoring culture now, however, at this crucial juncture, more than likely creates trouble spots as the company grows.  Being mindful of using culture as a hiring lens, as a means for guiding continued development, and as a springboard for a broader diversification of experiential activities will lead to benefits not only in the maturation of culture, but in the growth and success of the business overall.

5 Steps to Preventing Brain Drain in Your Organization

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags:

When a key employee decides to leave your organization, a million thoughts fly through your head at once: Why is this employee leaving in the first place? Was there anything you could have done to prevent his departure? And, of course, what will you do without him?

If that employee had unique expertise in a specific area, losing him could be a serious threat to your organization. Don’t let important institutional knowledge slide out the door on that employee’s last day! Instead, develop a culture that values the effective and continuous transfer of knowledge so the loss of one employee doesn’t bring your company to a standstill.

You Need a Culture That Supports Knowledge Transfer

An employee serving notice isn’t the only scenario in which you may need someone else to understand a key process or how to operate a critical system. What if your office manager falls ill, leading you to fall behind on accounts payable? Someone on your team should be able to step up and address the situation to keep your company from getting hit with late fees. If your business suddenly experiences rapid growth, you’ll need processes in place to allow you to transfer knowledge and continue to scale quickly.

The best thing you can do to prepare for these situations is to develop a culture that supports the ongoing transfer of knowledge. Here are some ways to keep employees engaged in the knowledge-sharing process:

1. Develop a culture of support. Long before you ever need one employee to transfer knowledge to another, you should work on developing a company culture that’s supportive of these types of efforts. Show that you value continual learning and people’s ability to step in during a crisis. Both the trainer and the trainee should feel that their efforts are recognized and appreciated.

2. Create a checklist. As I described in a previous article on knowledge transfer, helicopter pilots go through a checklist of specific procedures before they take off. The same thing should happen during any knowledge transfer. Make a list of skills, processes, and anything else that’s important to a specific role, and use this checklist to guide training and to ensure consistency and repeatability.

3. Give learners time to transition. If an employee quits suddenly and forces you into an abrupt knowledge transfer, that’s a less-than-ideal situation to be in. In the best-case scenario, you’d give learners plenty of time to shadow the employee they’re learning from, ask questions, and gain hands-on experience for a smooth and comfortable transition.

4. Provide the right tools. While it’s sometimes good to let the departing employee help find his replacement, it’s more important that he feels comfortable in his role as a teacher. Remember: You’re essentially asking someone who’s been a doer to become a teacher, and the transition isn’t always easy. To position your team for success, train the trainer, and give him the necessary tools to teach what he knows.

5. Test the process. Don’t let the day of departure be the first time you test your process. Create simulations that force people to temporarily jump into new roles. Throughout the year, this happens naturally when people go on vacation. If a certain employee’s function comes to a grinding halt while she’s away, that may indicate that you have a gap in your system.

Ultimately, preventing brain drain and keeping your company’s collective knowledge intact rests on your culture and the value you place on people engaging in these types of behaviors. By supporting your team’s efforts to share their insights, you’ll keep all the knowledge where it belongs and ensure that your new employees are able to pick up the torch and run with it.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Manage Risk By Building Antifragile Organizational Cultures

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

Although it’s been out for a couple years, I recently reread Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s books The Black Swan and Antifragile.  When they came in out the midst of the recession, they quickly caught the attention of readers looking for answers as to why we didn’t see the financial crisis coming and how can we protect ourselves in the future.

When I picked them up again recently, I realized that Taleb wasn’t focused specifically on finance. Rather, the applicability of his risk mitigation paradigm across disciplines and markets.  In this light, he offers some excellent insights that are especially useful for shaping and enhancing organizational cultures.

What is Fragility?

Taleb defines fragility as systems that are negatively impacted by shocks, disruption, and disorder.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, he invents the term antifragility (mainly because there is not word in the lexicon that captures this concept) to describe systems that grow and flourish when exposed to shocks, disruption, and disorder.  Sitting in between these extremes is robustness, where a system remains neutral and neither gain nor decline from random events.

The concepts of fragility, robustness, and antifragility ultimately come down to risk.

Fragility comes about when we assume too much risk in a particular area. This hinders our ability to adapt when risks become actualized.  As an example, Taleb points to the financial sector during the financial crisis where firms had invested significant portions of their portfolio in high risk areas. Since they had not changed their practices from previous crises, they were susceptible to the same issue areas.

All it took was one big shock and these organizations crumbled. Hence; “fragile.”

Conversely, antifragility occurs when we diversify our risks and use failures (which are small because risk is dispersed) as opportunities to learn and improve the system. Taleb uses the airline industry as an example of antifragility.

When accidents occur, the airlines conduct a thorough after-action review to determine the root cause of the failure.  They then take that information and use it to update their systems and practices in their existing and future fleets.  Although tragic, the accident serves to make every subsequent flight safer and improve the airline industry as a whole.

At the outset, the distinction may seem fairly simple: fragility occurs when we have concentrated risks, antifragility occurs when risks are dispersed. But Taleb points out another critical aspect of the equation:

We have no way of knowing (1) the real level of risk we have (Taleb is skeptical of models, especially since we rarely consider the assumptions and limits they are based on), and (2) when risks will come to fruition (Taleb believes in the inevitability of large, unpredictable “black swan” events).

We are largely working in the dark and must act as if we will be exposed to risk at any moment. Therefore, the ultimate goal of antifragility is to determine how to live, act, and thrive in a world we do not fully understand.

Building An Antifragile Culture

So far, we have outlined the central ideas within the fragility/antifragility framework.  Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve covered:

  • Risks are inevitable and we have no idea when they will happen
  • Fragility = bad for growth, results from concentrated risks and lack of feedback loops, crumbles under risk
  • Antifragility = good for growth, results from dispersed risks and active use of feedback loops, flourishes from risk

How can this concept foster resilient organizational cultures?

It is not a huge leap to think that organizations and their cultures can also be fragile or antifragile. Fragile cultures are those that are unable to adapt to changing environments and unforeseen risks.

Fragile cultures are characterized by:

  • Highly centralized organizational structure
  • Dominance of one or two departments in the decision making process (all departments become exposed to the risks inherent to the dominant groups)
  • Attitudes of risk avoidance and insulation from change
  • Unsupportive of “tinkering” with new ideas on a small scale
  • Lack of (or disinterest in) feedback loops to integrate lessons learned

Antifragile cultures are those that are well versed in change and use dispersed risks as opportunities to learn more about how their organization functions under pressure and implement improvements.

Antifragile cultures are characterized by:

  • Moderately decentralized (“lean” or “flat”) organizational structure
  • All departments have say in decision making process (departments are represented in key decisions and given autonomy internally)
  • Embraces risk as opportunities for learning, disperses risks across the organization so no one risk can have a significant impact
  • High support of “tinkering” as way to test and improve the system
  • Significant interest (and use of) formal and informal feedback loops to integrate lessons learned

To illustrate the differences in these types of cultures, we can point to two real world examples.

Most large firms lean more toward the fragile side of the spectrum. Many are characterized by rigid processes, interdepartmental conflict, risk avoidance, disinterest in new ideas, poor communication, and the consolidation of risk into one or two significant projects.

Startups, on the other hand, lean more toward the antifragile side of the spectrum.  Many are characterized by agile processes, manageable conflict, risk acceptance embracing new ideas, frequent communication within and across departments, and decentralized risks across a number of projects.

This is not to say that startups are more praiseworthy than large firms. At some point, most firms will mature and transition into formalized organizations. The challenge is making this transition without jeopardizing the firm’s ability to thrive under change.

How Your Organization Can Thrive

Here are some recommendations to foster antifragile practices within your growing organization:

  1. Keep Decision Making Local: People closest to a problem are often the most equipped to solve it.  In addition, this encourages experimentation with new ideas and strategies.
  2. Encourage Frequent and Open Communications: One of the major causes of distress within organizations is the inability to communicate information across departments.  Open communication sets a precedent that new ideas are welcome and establishes a feedback loop to incorporate lessons learned and best practices.
  3. Encourage Risk Taking on a Small Scale:  Many organizations focus on “avoiding” risks, but this may unnecessarily weaken the organization in the long run.  Avoiding risk prevents us from learning from our failures, risks accumulate and overtime may become systemic.  Dispersed risks enable organizations to try new ideas without putting the entire organization in jeopardy.
  4. Celebrate Failure: Every failure is a learning opportunity for everyone.  Failures enable us to identify the root causes of the issue, correct the issue, and improve the overall system.  As long as failures are small and dispersed, they serve to benefit the organization as a whole.
  5. Hedge Against the Future: It’s difficult to accurately predict what the market will look like 5-10 years down the road.  Organizations should be cautious of ventures which could be a liability if the market takes a sudden turn.

Risks aren’t confined to the financial world, and are inherent in all aspects of our organizations, including culture.  The way we approach risk heavily impacts whether we succeed or fail in the ever-evolving marketplace.

Fragility and antifragility are two ways of understanding and addressing organizational risks. By using antifragile practices to leverage small risks as opportunities,we can improve the way we manage our organizations and enhance our ability to thrive during periods of rapid change.

How does your organization manage risk through culture development?

6 Key Steps to Influencing Effective Knowledge Transfer in Your Business

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: , , ,

Before lifting a Black Hawk helicopter off the ground, the pilot goes through a lengthy written checklist: oil pressure, fuel pump and generator switches, safety harnesses, altimeters — on and on it goes. When I flew Black Hawks in Iraq, I didn’t dream of trying to memorize this list. That would’ve been dangerous. The best way to store and retrieve that information was a notebook.

Similarly, doctors don’t recite every patient’s medical history from memory. That’s what a medical chart is for, and it could mean the difference between life and death. In fact, the Mayo Clinic employs a sophisticated knowledge management system that captures what everyone knows and archives it

Even the transportation industry is getting in on knowledge transfer. Loriann Hoffman, vice president of talent and organization development for the New York City Transit Authority, shared with me that her organization is implementing several knowledge transfer initiatives. Safely moving more than 8 million(yes, million) people by bus or subway every weekday is no small feat, after all.

While your organization may not be responsible for people’s lives, getting the right information to the right people at the right time is still a critical component to your business’s long-term success.

What if the only person who understands a critical part of your company leaves? What if the marketing and engineering teams aren’t talking to each other except casually in the cafeteria?

Are you going to rely on that? Of course not! That’s where effective knowledge management comes into play.

Develop an Effective Knowledge Transfer System

Knowing who knows what, who needs to know what, and how to transfer that knowledge is critical — especially when so much of a company’s worth consists of information. Investing in developing an effective way to transfer knowledge may, in the least, save you some headaches and, at the most, save your business.

Here are some suggestions for implementing a system for knowledge management and transfer in your company:

1. Make it formal. While water-cooler banter is better than nothing, you need consistent, clear processes and tools. As an aviator, I’m partial to lists.

My team creates documents that clearly outline how a process works. We also use checklists and sample templates to ensure that following the process is easy. This increases the confidence of the team members who know that they’re not expected to just “figure it out” when the time comes. Even something as simple as taking notes during meetings and sharing them will keep your employees in the loop.

2. Create duplication. I’m not suggesting that you need two people for every job, but you do need to plan for the worst. Cross-training can mitigate the risk of a key person leaving with a head full of knowledge. Ensure that there are at least two people who can step in during an emergency.

For example, imagine a football team. If the quarterback is injured, another player has to step into that position. But what if no one has practiced that role? Your team probably wouldn’t win the game.

3. Train, train, train. By providing your team members with formal training opportunities, you ensure that you have duplication of skills in the system. However, if you don’t have the resources for formal training, you can try this simulation: Remove a key person from the system temporarily so the team can see what happens. If things fall apart quickly, people will be eager to figure out how to prevent that failure from happening in the future.

For organizations that have effectively transferred knowledge to others, these situations present opportunities for employees to put their knowledge into practice and build their confidence.

4. Use systems. Technology can capture key information for later generations to use. They shouldn’t have to relearn what others discovered. By standing on the shoulders of those who have come before, newcomers can take the ball and run with it rather than spinning their wheels rehashing the same ground that’s already been covered.

5. Create opportunities. Set up informal gatherings where team members can exchange information and develop networks organically. Develop communities of practice so employees can work together to find and share information. This is a great way to capture and share knowledge with a broad audience.

6. Be smart when using consultants. While a consultant can be a valuable asset, keep in mind that they’ll leave after the work is through. Make sure you plan to have their knowledge transferred to internal personnel so you can carry on once they’ve departed.

For any of these practices to make a real difference in your business, you have to communicate the importance of knowledge transfer, explain how it will be done, and, most importantly, practice it yourself.

If you can do that, knowledge transfer will be a key resource and differentiator for your organization. By continuously spot-checking to make sure the right knowledge is being captured and shared, your organization can leap ahead of competitors and seamlessly transition during the departure of key personnel.

On top of that, your employees will be more engaged in their work and have a more in-depth understanding of the systems around them. When your employees feel confident in their ability to step in and help, the different parts of your organization will move together effortlessly. With effective knowledge transfer, your organization will be healthier and happier overall.

This article originally appeared on Forbes 

How Emergent Order Creates Thriving Organizations

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

The world is a fascinating place.

Ever wonder how we are able to accomplish so much without one person directing all the moving pieces? iPhones, Wikipedia, cars, the shoes you wear, last night’s dinner; all these things were made possible through the efforts of thousands of people each pursuing their own ends, and in doing so they cooperated to make our lives better.

Economists call this emergent order, more commonly known as self-organization.

Although difficult to wrap our heads around, emergent orders are actually very common. Markets, law, and language are all examples of unplanned systems that evolve naturally through our interactions. The beauty of emergent orders is that they are able to thrive because they constantly change and adapt to new circumstances.

Organizations, on the other hand, are commonly thought of as “islands of planning in a sea of emergence.”  That thought is more or less correct; organizations involve layers of managers directing employees to address different challenges. But underlying that structure are rich environments of employees and teams connecting and cooperating to achieve great feats.

Self-organization is the life force that enables “work” to happen.

Because it’s difficult to pinpoint, it often goes unrecognized. Therein lies a significant organizational culture opportunity.

Below are several examples to help illustrate the relevance of and importance self-organization:

Organizational Culture and Values

Why do different departments use drastically different terminologies for the same thing? Why are some organizations more cohesive than others?

The answer is simple, although the mechanics behind it are pretty complex: Coworkers have a lot more influence on each other than we give them credit. Our attitudes and actions are as much a product of ourselves as they are the people around us. As we intermingle, our values cross-pollinate and shape the organization’s overall culture. And in doing so, the culture can take on a life of its own.

When one person has difficulty shaking habits that have emerged over the years, changing the culture becomes challenging. But within this challenge lies a hidden blessing: with enough positive enforcement, new habits can form and shape the culture over time.

Social Networks

Here’s a bold claim: the majority of work gets done outside the traditional chain of command.

In other words, people, driven by their desire to do their jobs successfully, self-organize to achieve their mutual goals. If you look at social networks within organizations, you’ll find that it may look very different from the org chart. The hubs are not necessarily managers, but rather employees with the broadest social connections who are able to bridge the gap between departments.

Given the ability and motivation, employees will diligently seek out solutions to their problems by building partnerships and sharing ideas. This is really a textbook case for emergence.

Rules, Policies, and Regulations

Sure, a lot of rules and regulations are cumbersome. Most people grudgingly accept them, and in a lot of cases they can be somewhat arbitrary.  But, behind each rule there’s a history, an event, or chain of events that brought it into being.

For example, recently gothamCulture has engaged in a long-term effort to create a culture of safety for one of our clients. Most organizations have safety policies, resulting from years of trial and error, and a process of learning from their successes and failures.

This particular organization simply didn’t sit down and lay out an ideal set of safety policies. In many cases they had had to figure things out the hard way; piece by piece.  In all cases, accidents, as unfortunate as they are, force organizations to reevaluate the way they protect employees from harm.  Rules are constantly evolving, and policies change, bit by bit, to ensure certain standards are maintained.

Sometimes policies are well-intentioned missteps, but the process behind it involves the nuanced interplay among people’s values, attitudes, and actions over time.

Why It Matters

So why does self-organization matter? How is emergence relevant to you or your organization?

Work is inherently social. It is a rich ecosystem that is constantly moving toward some end.  We cannot effectively understand organizations, let alone start to change them, without appreciating the role emergence and self-organization played in how getting the organization to its present state. By doing so, we reveal the many different avenues to implement change effectively.

Below are some great resources on emergent orders:

I, Pencil – Leonard Read

Emergence – Jane Adams

The Use of Knowledge in Society – Friedrich Hayek

Where Good Ideas Come From – Steven Johnson

Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley

Shatter Today’s Organizational Myths by Crowdsourcing Culture

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

Think back to the last company change initiative you spearheaded. If your company is like most, you sent a survey to employees via email. Some employees might have grumbled about it and eventually filled it out; the senior leadership team then sat down and attempted to make sense of the feedback.

Unfortunately, this approach can only take leaders so far. Organizational surveys aren’t always effective because they’re limited to what leaders think is important to ask. They fail to engage the organization’s stakeholders in an active dialogue, and they only address culture at one point in the process, leaving leaders to make decisions throughout the year based on stale information.

Most importantly, this top-down approach to culture creates a cycle in which leaders do all the work — setting unrealistic expectations that doom an organization from the start.

I’m a culture guy, so the lion’s share of organizational assessments I’ve seen and led deal specifically with culture. These lessons can be generalized across most organization-wide data collection efforts, however.

Though most companies approach culture assessment and change as described above, creating a strong culture is the ultimate opportunity to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. When employees, leaders, and other stakeholders have a say in a company’s culture, the insights that arise are often the most innovative and effective solutions. After all, your employees are closest to the everyday issues in the workplace.

By tapping into and including the input of people at every level of your organization, you start at the beating heart of your company. And by engaging them on a regular basis (rather than once a year), you can leverage that collective intelligence to drive the business forward.

This is the way we at gothamCulture have long approached our work, but the recent trend in social media circles of calling everything “crowdsourcing” made me reconsider why. After all, inviting the crowd into the process can be messy, and tackling any cultural problem is much more than an item on a checklist — but that’s the point.

Looking back on our nine years of work in this space, there are several long-standing beliefs and assumptions worth challenging regarding how organizations do, and should, develop highly functioning cultures.

These myths include (but are not limited to):

1. The experts have all the answers. The days of a small group of “experts” sitting in a war room and coming up with the ultimate solution for the masses are gone. People expect more from their work experience. They want to exercise some level of control in their environment.

When senior leadership teams make decisions in isolation, they do so based on a limited amount of information. It’s one particular version of reality fed to them by others who may have their own agendas. Leaders may think they have an in-depth understanding of issues’ nuances when, in fact, they may be too far removed from what’s really going on to make the most effective decisions.

2.  The people within the organization don’t know what’s best. This is the misguided assumption that drives leaders to rely on “experts” rather than employees in the trenches. Over time, leaders may conclude that people in the organization’s ranks are unable to comprehend the complexities of their everyday tasks, but that’s seldom the truth.

In our work, we’ve found that those closest to the issues oftentimes have the most profound perspectives on them. In many cases, they’ve already figured out solutions and workarounds for some of the organization’s biggest problems. The only reason they haven’t voiced their opinions is because nobody thought to ask — or asked the wrong questions.

3.  Annual surveys and focus groups give us the right information at the right time. How could we ever assume that an organization’s lifeblood — its people — only have something valuable to contribute once a year? The traditional annual survey limits the amount and type of information you can get from stakeholders and reinforces a skewed perception of reality.

Leaders take that information, sort it, and make sweeping changes that affect the entire organization based on a few data points. The collected stories and feelings of various team members, in conjunction with quantitative assessments, result in better conclusions than those arrived at through paper surveys or digital tallies alone.

Successful businesses of the future will leverage technology to drive constant input and feedback from all stakeholders. These continuous feedback loops will increase inclusivity of people and ideas, freeing leaders from relying on annual surveys to drive their decisions. This collective approach will also reveal opportunities and red flags earlier so they can be addressed in a timely manner.

We’re starting to question organizational norms that have existed for decades, and it’s just the beginning. As more Millennials enter the workforce, companies are realizing that today’s stakeholders expect continual involvement, and they’re being forced to adapt quickly to the changing tide.

To successfully evolve and deliver on your stakeholders’ high expectations, you can’t hold on to antiquated practices and continue making decisions based on outdated beliefs and assumptions. Organizations that adapt to leverage new values and the input of their stakeholders will come out on top. They’ll mine the crowd to form a truly accurate sense of their environment, they’ll be better equipped to make more accurate and timely decisions, and they’ll be much more adept at engaging their stakeholders through a collective and crowdsourced organizational culture.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Onboarding New Employees: How To Build A Sustainable Process

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

In rapidly growing companies, hiring and retaining the right employees is one of the hardest things for effective leaders to get right.

On one hand, your company needs the right process in place to hire and keep the right people. There has to be an appealing lure to attract them, and the benefits have to be worthwhile enough to keep them.

On the other hand, the company branding and benefits you offer can only tell them so much of the story. The everyday behaviors that shape your organizational culture will have an ongoing effect on each one of your employees.

It’s important to realize that your people are your company’s most valuable asset, and finding the right “fit” between company and that most valuable asset is paramount to success.

There are bigger things to consider than benefits and bonuses when bringing on new people. Your workforce, particularly the millennial generation, wants to know what your company stands for.  They want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

The way you communicate your benefits and purpose to them from the beginning may be the most important part in setting them up for success.

So, how do you give your new employees an accurate picture of your company’s brand, its values, and their place in the overall picture of the organization?

Here are 3 points to consider when building a sustainable onboarding process for your growing company:

1. Does It Scale?

When you’re small, as in a startup, it’s much easier to find the right people and orient them quickly with the rest of your team.

It’s likely that small companies thoroughly vet their candidates for cultural fit when they hire. But, as an organization grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the same processes. A strategy that works for a group of 20 people may not scale to a company of 200 people.

Make sure your onboarding processes are built to last. Rapidly growing companies who plan ahead of these changes will see more success, particularly as they delegate these onboarding processes to other hiring managers as they grow.

2. What Information Do You Include?

Onboarding and orienting employees is challenging.  Organizations face a balancing act between conveying large quantities of information and keeping new employees engaged and interested.

Considering most employees will only really understand the organization’s culture once they are officially on the job, picking and choosing what information to share during the onboarding process adds to the challenge.

Most people today like to digest snackable information, not an entire meal at once. Consider keeping the information segments of your process short, so employees can take away the bite-size nuggets and figure out where they might want to ask questions to get further insights.

One recent example is Samsung’s orientation rap video that went viral to mixed reviews. While Samsung’s effort to communicate a lot of information in an engaging, short format should be applauded, the execution left something to be desired.

Their video is a perfect example of why it’s so important to keep the context in mind. Your employees are there to be professionals; to further their careers. If your presentation is too slapstick or silly, you risk losing people to it as something that is nonsensical, or not a fit for the organization and its people.

On the other hand, a completely dry delivery of rules, stats, and facts about your company can put your new hires to sleep, causing them to disengage before they start their first shift.

Your challenge is keeping them interested and engaged in a way that both reflects your culture and doesn’t turn people off.

3. What Is The Employee Experience?

Are you sitting your new employees in front of a computer to go through self-directed orientation? Are you personally illustrating your values and guidelines on a whiteboard? Do you partner them with a senior member of your team to learn the ropes?

These first steps of the onboarding process are not just a way to convey information. They also give your brand new employee a taste of what your culture is like on a daily basis.

They can walk away feeling motivated, supported, and comfortable in their new environment, or they can leave feeling overloaded and confused.

Empowering Your People

There’s no doubt that your organizational culture is based largely on the everyday behaviors of your people. Finding the right people who fit into your overall strategy and vision is a challenge in itself. Once you find them, however, your challenge becomes empowering them to carry out your vision to every customer they meet.

It takes more effort than simply putting warm bodies on the sales floor or in the call center. You have to equip them with the right tools to do their job well, carry your vision for success, and feel a purpose behind what they are doing for your company on a daily basis.

“If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.” –JW Marriott

[starbox id=”Cary Paul,Stuart Farrand”]

Mapping Team Effectiveness Through Data Visualization

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

Companies are taking creative measures to counter ‘meeting fatigue.’ From cutting meetings to a magic length (at Google, this is 50 minutes) to stand-up meetings (yes, standing vs. sitting), leaders are trying everything to improve efficiency and effectiveness of meetings.

Yet, how often do we still leave meetings dissatisfied with the outcome?  It was too long…didn’t result in a decision…was monopolized by one or two players…left attendees with more questions than answers.

Leaders know that good meetings are a product of good leadership. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all formula for effective meetings, objective attention to the flow of your meetings is important for team development.

Mapping Opportunities With Data

We recently approached a client leadership team meeting as observers. Combining data-orientation with an eye to group dynamics, we plotted discussion milestones, determined topic frequency, and tracked specific players involved in the discussions that led to decision-making.  We then mapped the trajectory of the 2-hour discussion, broken into 10 minute increments.

The result is a data visual (see below), which we reviewed with the participants to better understand the conversation flow and decision making process. In the software, this content is linked. This enabled the participants to understand which conversations drove key milestones and which participants were involved in those decisions.

To see the fully interactive visualization, click here

Discussion_Overview

This model of provides a simple, but effective way to review what occurred during the meeting, pinpoint where the conversation may have moved in an unproductive direction, and identify opportunities to improve meetings. In the chart above, for example, the first 30 minutes were spent jumping from topic to topic. Only after 45 minutes did they start to discuss the connections between the topic areas.

Our meeting datafication pilot highlighted some important takeaways for the client’s leadership team. Here are 5 highlights:

1. Open with a check-in – Get it out on the table. Where is everyone mentally? In the course of their day? Are they ‘bought in’ to the topic at hand? Sharing an agenda pre-meeting with opportunity for attendees to provide feedback helps ensure everyone is satisfied with the game plan before they enter the room.

2. “Parking Lot” ideas They are good ideas, but they aren’t helpful for this conversation. Make note of any ideas to be rainchecked. They certainly shouldn’t be lost, but they also don’t need to derail this meeting’s conversation if they aren’t relevant to the agenda or decisions that need to be made.

3. Stay out of the weeds This is easier said than done. But when we reviewed our pilot meeting map with our clients, they were struck by the amount of time spent hashing out details.  A take-away after reviewing their discussion data was that they got stuck in the weeds when trying to come to consensus.  They settled on accepting 80% consensus and moving on rather than drowning in minutiae.

4. Hear from everyone If a certain participant’s point of view isn’t imperative to the discussion, they shouldn’t have been on the meeting invite. If you haven’t tapped all of the voices in the room, there could be critical data that isn’t being considered in decision making.  Be deliberate about inclusion.

5. Ensure actions have owners If participants walk away without specific actions and clear accountability, seemingly productive meetings will have little impact.  Regardless of whether there are tangible actions that need to take place or simply giving deeper individual thought to certain ideas, team members should leave meetings assured of their next steps.

Visualizing the discussion process prompts teams to reflect on their meeting effectiveness AND group dynamics, which will improve team effectiveness overall.

[starbox id=”Ashley Klecak,Stuart Farrand”]

Leadership While Daydreaming

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
leadership daydreaming

Guest Article Written by Andrea Learned

Even though we hear a lot about how much leadership is changing, one thing still holds: leaders don’t take enough unscheduled time (or, we aren’t hearing about it).  In a recent McKinsey Quarterly interview with Tom Peters, he cites the book Leadership the Hard Way, by Dov Frohman, and notes:

“The two things I remember from that book are, one, that 50 percent of your time should be unscheduled. And second—and I love that this is coming from an Israeli intelligence guy—that the secret to success is daydreaming.”

The digitalization of productivity that we can get so excited about has a downside. It speeds up processes and planning, but it also crowds out the unstructured thinking time humans need to re-charge or think big and new.

Yet, many organizations build their culture around these questions: Why not fit another call in to your already-packed 10 hour day?  Why not say yes to a meeting request even though it is scheduled over your only possible break for lunch? How can you not say “yes, yes, yes” to all inquiries, when everyone in your organization can see your schedule has white space in it?

Organizational Culture Follows Your Lead

This is where personal agency comes in, and where leaders have the opportunity to start to model this for their teams. If there is no perceived allowance for junior staff to manage their own schedules to achieve their best levels of performance, they cannot be expected to stop the madness.

If employees don’t see that the occasional mind-freeing use of unstructured time is important to leadership, they may well not take the necessary breaks they need to absorb, get ideas, reflect on mistakes and just process their days. The pressure cooker will cook itself.

Organizational culture is set by company-wide values that are demonstrated and committed to by leadership. You are the boss. All the written guidelines in the employee handbook mean nothing if leaders don’t authentically acknowledge and live the power in unscheduled time.

A few ways leaders can indirectly model this behavior for their teams:

  1. Purposefully reference books or articles you’ve read – especially those not obviously connected with your core business – that inspired you or gave you new perspective.
  2. Do not respond to every email within seconds, it sets up ridiculous expectations. And, take some obvious time and attention in replying to at least a few internal emails a day, especially with junior staff.
  3. Be somewhat vocal or visible when you are leaving the office to workout, take a walk or meet your spouse for lunch in the park.
  4. Leave town and be unreachable. When you do it (and get management team members to do it too), others in the company will notice and be more inclined to do the same.

Structural Support for Organizational Change

The way a leader manages his or her own time can be a strong indicator for employees about an organization’s values. But, in addition to the above somewhat less traditional markers, the Hay Group has conducted research on the more structural changes to help that cause.  And, the guidelines they suggest go beyond flexible work schedules and telecommuting.

A selection of Hay Group findings for leaders include:

  • Provide clear direction regarding organizational priorities to help employees focus on the highest-value tasks.
  • Implement policies and practices consistently to ensure that workloads are fairly and equitably distributed.
  • Emphasize high levels of teamwork within and across organizational units to provide employees with access to support from co-workers in coping with work demands.

Daydreaming To A More Productive Team

The move to a completely digital world does not automatically lead to increased productivity and improved life. Without the “white space” of time that has nothing to do with schedules and deadlines, you can’t be leading at your best.

Because your team takes its cues from your work-life style as a leader, a thriving organizational culture will depend on both your actions and the policies and procedures that support a bit of unscheduled time.  By reading, delaying, walking and vacationing yourself, you demonstrate the values your team members can learn from.

A little daydreaming can go a long way.

 

Andrea

Written by Andrea Learned

Andrea Learned is a sustainable business thought leadership strategist and writer with a gender lens. The co-author of Don’t Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy and How To Reach Your Share of This Crucial Market, Andrea regularly shares her unique perspective and curates business leadership topics via her Twitter feed and blog, Learned On.

Organizational Development: Balancing Analytics and Intuition

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
analytics and intuition

For years, businesses have relied on experience, trial and error, and heuristics to make decisions.  But, change is in the air. Data analytics has added a new dimension to the decision-making process, giving business leaders access to new, previously unavailable insights.

Unfortunately, there may be a split in the business world regarding its use.  While some are skeptical about the move toward analytics, others believe it should be the primary tool for business.  In both cases, they tend to miss the bigger picture.

Analytics was never intended to replace intuition, but to supplement it instead.

A Beautiful Combination

The beauty is in the combination. Analytics provides context to the insights that (most) business leaders already possess.

Two recent books help illustrate this point: The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee, and Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Great Stagnation, by Tyler Cowen. Both provide a glimpse of the many ways technology will change the workplace over the course of this century.

Both books use the example of freestyle chess to demonstrate the potential of partnering human intuition with data processing.

For those who are not familiar, freestyle is a type of chess match where humans partner with computers and compete against each other.  Not surprisingly, there are many instances where computers have defeated a chess master. And yet, humans cooperating with computers have easily defeated both humans and computers acting alone.

The reason behind this is what’s interesting. Computers use probabilities to determine an optimal move.  Humans, on the other hand, rely on their experiences and intuition to identify opportunities and implement different strategies.  The computer provides the raw processing power, while the human provides a superior understanding of the game’s mechanics.

The freestyle chess example is a simple illustration, but it demonstrates something more complex for modern organizations seeking new direction: the potential of depolarizing analytics and intuition.

The Analytics Potential

Leveraging analytics, we can aggregate, process, and understand more information than was conceivable even 20 years ago. Analytics Training is a great way to be able to be able to reach your businesses highest potential as it will allow you to have the greatest understanding of how to read your results and invest that knowledge back into the business.

However, it’s important to note that analytics is based on models. In using it as a tool, we need to understand the basic assumptions and limitations of using a model, and use our intuition and experience to fill in the gaps and enhance the analysis process.

Organizational development is a field full of data. In many cases, there is too much information available for one individual to thoroughly digest, analyze, and interpret.  As in freestyle chess, analytics uncovers the trends, but the human in the mix determines which trends are most relevant. That’s how organizations come to understand which trends are worth further investigation.

By utilizing a broader set of tools through that balance, organizations can improve their ability to process information and understand the world within their walls.  It all comes down to balance. Rather than separating the qualitative from quantitative process from one another, organizational development should be informed by both data and intuition in order to drive the desired outcomes.