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Budget For Culture: How Investing In Your Team Drives Results

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
budget for culture

As a leader, every decision you make shapes your organizational culture, and when it comes to budgeting your limited resources, these decisions send powerful messages to your people about what’s most important. After all, money doesn’t just talk — it shouts your priorities through a bullhorn. You have to make budgeting decisions that drive your business’s strategy and goals. But too often, the technical aspects of your strategy are prioritized over the most important facet of your organization’s long-term performance: the people.

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The best plan in the world won’t survive if your people aren’t on board. But if you support your employees and nurture their enthusiasm, they’ll take care of your business. In fact, investing in your people can reap rewards that ripple across your entire organization and beyond. According to Gallup, organizations with above-average levels of employee engagement reap 147% higher earnings per share. Furthermore, when they engage both customers and employees, organizations experience a 240% jump in performance-related business outcomes. Clearly, you need to start investing in culture.

The concept may still seem abstract, so here are six concrete aspects of organizational culture to focus on:

1. Recruitment, orientation, and the employee experience: A new team member’s impression of how you treat employees is set from the beginning. Even during the recruiting process, the way candidates are treated sends a clear message about your company culture. These messages about expectations and a person’s value are reinforced during the onboarding process. With this in mind, you need to be thoughtful about your employee experience throughout their tenure with you and make it as seamless and supportive as possible. This kind of investment will pay dividends down the road.

2. Professional and leadership development: It’s not uncommon for business leaders to create strategies that require a significant shift in employee behavior to succeed. However, if you’re asking employees to do things differently, you need to anticipate their apprehension.

By setting aside resources to train your employees in the knowledge, skills, and abilities they’ll need to implement your plan, they’ll see that you’re serious about your changes and are willing to support them through the transition.

3. Compensation and incentives: Compensation is a massive and complex topic in business — one that can’t be underestimated. As a professional services firm, the lion’s share of my company’s budget goes into compensation. Our team members are expected to dedicate a lot of time and energy to the success of our clients, and they’re paid as well as possible because we value and trust in their abilities.

People’s total compensation (not just their base salary) will drive all sorts of behaviors, but your plan must be designed thoughtfully. If it’s not, you may find yourself in a no-win situation with employees behaving in ways that maximize their personal gain but don’t move your organization forward.

4. Rewards and recognition: Like compensation, rewards and recognition require resources, but they also send clear messages to your people about what behaviors are acceptable and encouraged and which are not.

Finding creative ways to recognize people who are creating value in your business is worth its weight in gold. Rewards and recognition aren’t one-size-fits-all strategies, though. Different people value different things, so you must take the time to get to know your team members and develop an understanding of what incentives will be the most appreciated.

5. The physical environment: The space in which people work can promote desired behaviors, but it can also be used to reinforce what’s most important to you in less direct ways. Put careful thought into the design of your office space. If your strategy dictates significant changes in how people do their jobs, you may need to make extra room in the budget to align their workspaces with your expectations.

6. Tools and equipment: When you’re budgeting to drive your strategy, a final key consideration is whether your people have the proper tools and equipment to fulfill your expectations. Outfitting your team with the wrong equipment will lead to disaster. You can’t ask your team to get to the moon with a roll of duct tape and a spatula; it will only hold your team back from accomplishing your overarching goals.

If you fail to think more holistically about the “what” and the “how,” your perfect business strategy will be left on the launch pad, unable to take off. Don’t let all that planning go to waste by ignoring the needs of the people who make your strategy effective. Investing in ways that communicate how much you value team members will drive the behaviors you need to reach your goals this year.

this article originally appeared on Forbes

How Culture and Leadership Pave the Road to the Super Bowl

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

As we head into Super Bowl 49 this weekend, we at gothamCulture can’t help but think about a professional football team’s culture and leadership that has (or has not) helped teams get to the big game.

Like a corporate organization, NFL football teams’ organizational culture is largely made up of leadership, team members, and the brand. Each of these plays a unique role in a successful (or unsuccessful) team on the road to the ultimate goal every year: a chance to win as world champions in the Super Bowl.

Leadership

Formally, the Coach provides a great deal of the leadership, like the CEO or the Executive Director. He sets the tone along with the team’s General Manager. The owner is usually the one who is most concerned about how well the team is doing and leads the hiring and firing of those two based on the team’s performance.

This might be similar to the board of directors or advisors in a more corporate organization. The Coach and General Manager are usually the first to take the fall if the team does badly. For example, as Owner Woody Johnson of Gotham City’s own 4-12 New York Jets said, “It became pretty apparent during the season the team wasn’t getting better and, as (Bill) Parcells said, you are what your record says you are…It was kind of obvious we had to make the change. It was obvious to me, anyway.”

Former Cleveland Brown’s quarterback Bernie Kosar reinforced the importance of this formal leadership in his recent comments, “When you have a front office that’s really uneducated, and I’m not talking about just the coach, there’s way above him that deserves this, they don’t know how to lead and organize and set a culture to play winning football, to win in the NFL consistently.”

Culture

The Owner, GM and Coach aren’t the only leaders on the team. Fans often hear about quarterbacks “leading” their team to victory. If the quarterback is having a bad day, it’s very hard for the team to do well, and often when quarterbacks are hot, the team is unstoppable.

These are the leaders in the organization who play outsized roles, whose successes and failures have ripple effects across the organization. While quarterbacks may control the game by function or role, and perhaps are the most visible of players, many other roles on the football team are critical to a team’s success.

One such example was during the NFC Championship and the Seattle Seahawks. Jon Ryan and the special teams players made a few critical plays when the team was losing badly to turn the game around. These pockets of action and success highlight the importance of the team coming together; the offense wasn’t the only one responsible for scoring points, just like one division within a company isn’t the only one responsible for making a profit.

And, even for those key opportunities for the special teams to be successful, advanced research was conducted on the opponent Green Bay Packers’ weaknesses, the coach had to be willing to take the risk to call the play, and the players needed to have the skills and focus to be able to deliver.

In corporate culture speak, this involves a culture of creativity, trust, empowerment, risk taking, and thorough market research of competitors.

Fan/Customer Appreciation

The Seattle Seahawks are also known for an organizational culture of appreciation. Their stadium is lined with #12 flags, representing their appreciation of their fans; arguably some of the most loyal in the country. They are the team’s 12th man on the field, and thereby critical to their success.

Seahawks fans are known to be so supportive and vocal that there was even a seismograph machine at both recent playoff games to measure the decibels. The fans screaming and jumping in the stadium was thought to be as powerful as a minor earthquake.

That kind of brand following is critical to organizational success.

Applying These Concepts To Your Organizational Culture

While the parallels between your corporate environment and the NFL may not be immediately apparent, there are some key concepts that you can apply to the culture of your organization:

  • The buck always stops with the formal leader; if it’s not working, don’t be afraid to make a change
  • Informal leadership within the organization plays a critical role in team success
  • A culture of learning, risk taking, empowerment and research can pay high-dividends
  • Appreciation goes a long way and leads to brand loyalty

What other relevant leadership and culture insights have you gleaned from watching football? Let us know how you’ve been inspired from leadership on the field into action in your office!

(photo credit: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images) 

 

How Can My Company Increase Employee Engagement?

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags:

Some of the most inspiring leaders today recognize that employees are at the heart of their business. As JW Marriott said, “If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers, and your business will take care of itself.” You’ve probably heard this before. The challenging part is getting past that theory and effectively engaging your team members in a way that drives your organization’s success.

How do you proactively address and overcome the challenge of increasing employee engagement? We asked our team to share their thoughts:

Samantha Goldman, Associate

samantha-goldmanThere’s no one-size fits all solution to increase “employee engagement.” It’s crucial to take stock of what your organizational values are, what you want your “Employer Branding” to be and how it aligns with your external brand. Then, think about what kind of talent you want to attract and how you can do that in the competitive marketplace you’re in.

You might realize you need to offer more perks like flexible work hours, or you might need to provide more leadership development opportunities internally. To get you started, you can take a look at your top performers and ask them what engages them most about working at your company, and what they’d like to see more of, and go from there.

It’s also important to consider the difference between employee happiness and employee engagement, as they are often confused. While the benefits you offer may keep your employees happy, engaged employees will go above and beyond for the company and its success.

Bradford Blevins, Partner

brad-blevinsEngagement from employees first starts with Leadership defining and embodying a culture of camaraderie about and around what the firm stands for and how things get done. We at gothamCulture focus on commitment, integrity and maniacal pursuit of excellence.  You can feel it and see it in how the Partners speak to clients, how project scope and product/service quality is assessed, and in the high performance expectations set upon each member of the firm, at every level, from Intern to Sr. Associate to Partner.

Healthy competition is key to finding the best solution, or most unique impactful new model of work.  This type of performance competition aligns with gothamCulture’s core value of maniacal pursuit of excellence. The pursuit of excellence that we embody can be rewarded and encouraged through verbal recognition and praise for new unique solutions that are used on client projects as a better way of doing business.

Healthy competition promotes new ideas, which promotes energized eagerness by staff to design and implement their concepts, which leads to a feeling of higher purpose and accomplishment within the organization, and ultimately, client and firm success.  It’s a win-win.

Employee engagement also comes fromhaving Defined Roles & Responsibilities (to some extent) along with the ability to have dedicated time to think/brainstorm and design, not just get tasks done.

In our consulting world here at gothamCulture, our staff feel more engaged if they have the time to take one of their concepts and collaborate with their colleagues to implement them. The concepts move through a life cycle of:  design-test-pilot-share-learn-redesign-test-pilot-share-confirm-implement. We ensure this time and life cycle is built in to the sometimes overly demanding schedules of client facing work.

Ultimately, it ensures better service and products, promotes innovation, and ensures our team is engaged in the success of the organization.

Mark Emerson, General Manager

mark-emersonThere’s value in a lot of smaller, non-financial benefits that add up to the overall culture of caring about employees. Focus on dollars and pretty soon that’s all your employees will care about.

One huge benefit we share at gothamCulture is our incredible flexibility. We give our team ownership of their own schedule and getting the work done. To support this flexibility, we have an unlimited vacation policy, and a bonus structure to make sure they’re motivated to work hard.

Benefits to the personal and professional growth of employees are some of the most underutilized by companies today. Let’s face it; most employees are really just preparing for our next job, so the focus for most employers should be how to make the relationship as productive and satisfying for both parties while it lasts.

Google, Microsoft and Amazon are held up as having these fantastic benefits, but they are grounded in the idea that they want to keep their employees working.  They will gladly feed you, do your dry cleaning, wash your car, build a gym, take care of your kids, and a hundred other things as long as you stay focused and work!  When you have that many employees, getting them to save even an hour a week on all those small little tasks adds up to thousands of hours gained back and being productive.

At the end of the day, I believe that employees want to be a part of an organization that values their input and time and respects their personal life requirements.  A company does this with benefits like flexible time, modeling work/life balance, treating employees like adults, and sitting down with them to map out their plan for personal growth.

Above all, I think it is communication in both directions that helps build that relationship.  It goes a long way when employees can see their thoughts and actions have meaning within their organization.

Empowering Your People

True engagement begins from the heart of your business and works it’s way out through your people and their behaviors. Your employees want to feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. And it’s up to you as a leader to equip them with the right tools to empower their success.

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It starts with your core values as a compass to guide your strategy. Empower your employees by sharing your values and purpose. Allow them to collaborate with you in a way that supports their own personal growth, so they feel fulfilled in their daily work. This is the foundation for employee engagement.

Is Your Anonymous Employee Survey Doing More Harm Than Good?

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

We live in an era of oversharing. While most people are comfortable sharing what they ate for lunch, what they watched on TV, and what their relationship status is with 500 of their “closest” friends on Facebook and Twitter, the idea of telling their boss what they really think still feels pretty risky.

The traditional feedback process that’s become the norm in most businesses today relies on anonymous systems so employees can feel safe being open and honest with their employers. But there’s something fundamentally wrong if your employees are fearful to be open when providing feedback.

Meanwhile, leaders worry their employees won’t be forthcoming with their opinions unless they’re anonymous, so they default to the nameless employee survey, which limits their ability to follow up with employees who have particularly helpful ideas.

The idea of anonymity is outdated and ultimately unproductive. In fact, the confidentiality can interfere with the accountability you’re looking to build on your team and lead to other unintended consequences, including:

1. Skewed results. In most organizations, a small minority harbors a tremendous amount of anger toward leadership or their workplace in general. An anonymous survey just gives them a platform to vent. When their names aren’t attached, their feedback can be pointed, jaded, and even inflammatory, which can skew your results.

2. Misinterpreted feedback. The purpose of feedback is to gather information to help you make better business decisions. Unfortunately, with unidentified feedback, there’s no way to understand the context of issues that may only affect one department or even one employee. You may end up misinterpreting the data, which can cause you to make the wrong decisions.

3. A lack of follow-up. If a respondent has a moment of brilliance in an anonymous survey, you have no way to dig deeper into his ideas or recognize this visionary for his contribution. On the other hand, if an employee is unhappy about something, you miss the chance to have a productive conversation to identify solutions.

Non-anonymous feedback allows you to initiate that conversation and build upon the feedback loop throughout the year.

4. Limited responsiveness. Gathering anonymous feedback is time-consuming. You must first ask employees to fill out a survey, take part in a focus group, or share opinions in a confidential interview. By the time someone has gathered and processed the data, the information may no longer be relevant.

5. The inability to hold leaders accountable.Unfortunately, some leaders will react inappropriately to feedback, which is why organizations favor anonymity in the first place. Rather than tailoring this process to ineffective leaders, you need to start holding them accountable.

An open feedback system establishes an environment where leaders must learn how to accept criticism so employees feel comfortable being open and honest.

How to Create a Transparent Feedback Loop

If you want to encourage transparency and increase engagement in your organization, it’s time to ask employees to cowboy up and take ownership of their ideas. With that said, you’re also going to have to take responsibility for creating an environment where people feel safe sharing.

Moving from an anonymous survey to a transparent feedback loop won’t be easy or painless, but there are several things you can do to make the transition successful:

  • Invest in a platform to gather feedback. Thanks to techie wizards, a variety of platforms are now available to tackle the issue of employee engagement. Software likeOfficevibe, Vennli, and 15Five allows you to gather meaningful feedback from employees on a regular basis that you can use to make critical business decisions.
  • Coach supervisors on how to respond to feedback. For this process to work, leadership must understand how their reactions to feedback can shut down an employee’s willingness to participate. In those instances when a supervisor responds inappropriately to feedback, you must be willing to take swift action. If employees can’t go to leadership with their concerns, resentment may spread within the ranks.
  • Show employees it’s OK. Such a drastic change in feedback style will be met with some apprehension. However, the best approach is to jump in with both feet and reward people who provide useful feedback. Look for ways to demonstrate how you’re using feedback to implement positive changes so employees see that it’s safe — and even commendable — to be honest.

Removing anonymity allows your employees to become active players in the decision-making process, which can boost their dedication and allow your team to benefit from multiple perspectives. When you open an honest dialogue with employees, you can expand on ideas, gather continual feedback, and arrive at productive solutions to improve your company.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

5 Ways to Align Your Organizational Strategy and Culture

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: , ,
align strategy and culture

2015: A new year. A fresh start. The perfect time to review this past year, set new goals, and determine where you want your company to head this year. It’s time to take control of what this New Year will bring by aligning your company culture and organizational strategy.

I have previously explored how your business has its own culture, which infiltrates every aspect from leadership decision-making down to daily processes. And, when partnered with strategy, this culture propels businesses to high performance.

Understanding, and more importantly, developing that culture allows you to build and achieve your strategic objectives. A well defined, established corporate culture will provide the framework for your organizational development and strategic planning. Allow this culture to guide your planning process.

Though there is no single, perfect, cookie cutter method to ensure that your culture and organizational strategy align, there are some critical pieces that should be considered.

How to Ensure That Your Strategy and Culture Align

1. Take a look at who we are as leaders.

An organization’s long term success relies heavily on leadership, its ability to embody/implement your company culture and to lead the company toward its strategic goals. Key leadership, those that set the tone for the strategy and culture of the organization, must understand their own strengths and weaknesses as leaders along with those of the entire leadership team. Without this insight, the implementation of organizational strategy will be stifled, starting at the top, from the beginning. Assessing your leadership is an important step in developing and realizing your strategic plan while creating an atmosphere where people want to work, succeed, and stay.

2. Gain a realistic view of your organization.

Just as we need to assess the leadership of an organization, leadership must assess the organizational maturity as well as the process maturity of a company. Evaluating where your organization stands and understanding its current state offers perspective of its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement. It provides a view of what your company can realistically handle and allows you to build your plan around that knowledge.

3. Plan where you are headed and how you will get there.

Developing your strategy will guide your company in reaching its ultimate goals and objectives. Take the time to develop organizational priorities, themes, and accountability as well as a process to manage those priorities.

4. What if?

Once you have some your strategies developed, test them out. Create a series of “What If?” scenarios to get a feel for how well your strategic plans are suited to real life situations. Are your plans realistic? Or are they lofty goals which do not truly guide your business? Risk management and scenario methodologies can help you create a more concrete, reliable plan to lead your organization toward your goals. Use this information to re-work and tweak your strategic plan, then test again.

5. Manage and sustain your progress!

It’s great to pull all these pieces of the puzzle together, but you need to plan how you will keep them all afloat. More importantly, you must then follow through. Keep tabs on how you are managing performance, communications, personnel, resources and all the moving parts that make your company tick. Assess, plan, re-assess, plan again… Once you have the taken those first steps in getting your company headed in the right direction, you won’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you do a self-check. You can compare where you are to your baseline and goals to see how you measure up.

Your strategy and culture are yours to develop. Create the company you want through a clearly defined culture and a solid strategy for getting there. If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at our services, and talk to us about how Strategy and Culture go hand in hand.

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.

Harness The Power Of Self-Organization To Fuel Your Culture

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,

In my previous post, I discussed how self-organization (or emergent order) is the foundation for organizational success.  In this post, I’d like to propose some ideas for working with emergent orders (rather than against them) to enhance the workplace.

First and foremost, the concept of emergence can be difficult to grasp.

Emergence is an impersonal process that involves the interplay between our actions and those of others. Individually, I can only influence a small portion of the whole, but collectively our actions have a profound impact on everyone involved. We often aren’t able to see the connections among our actions, the system as a whole, and how that system impacts other people.

In studying emergence, we often become fixated the parts that are closest to us, but neglect the bigger picture of how the parts are interrelated.  Through emergence, we realize that everything is connected and the world becomes much larger than we previously thought.

Understanding the magnitude of the connections and how they are related is the most challenging (but also most rewarding) aspect of emergence.

Understanding Self-Organization

The policies and procedures put in place by leaders in any organization do not fully define the underlying culture. They help guide the organization but don’t have as much impact on the day-to-day business of getting work done; that is the job of self-organization. Whether you recognize it or not, there are always undercurrents of communication and camaraderie running throughout any business environment. While it may not be visible on the surface, the behaviors of your colleagues are often the biggest drivers of your culture.

The relationship among emergence, culture, and policy is like a garden.  If you provide the right type of nourishment and conditions, things naturally flourish.  Sometimes you neglect to provide key nourishment and the plants wilt.  Other times you may add too much and the plants suffer as well. The trick is finding the right balance to allow the garden to grow.

Similarly, policies can enable or inhibit our ability to self-organize. By clearly defining the conditions that enable self-organization to thrive, we can determine the right type of policies and procedures to channel our relationships in ways that strengthen our organizational culture. This will look different for each organization, but it becomes a powerful way for leadership to focus the existing underlying self-organization that is propelling the organization forward.

When trying to channel emergent orders, there are a couple ground rules to remember:

1. People respond to incentives: Rules and incentives guide our behavior.  We use incentives to help make decisions and plan for the future.

2. Institutions matter: Values, structures, and processes that have stood the test of time probably serve some purpose.  Although institutions may need to change, their impact on the workplace cannot be ignored.  We also cannot expect institutions to change overnight.

3. Work is social: At the end of the day, most change efforts aim to improve the way we work together.  It’s important to focus on how work is actually being accomplished: How do departments communicate? Where are the breakdowns? And who are the influencers? We cannot neglect the social aspects of work.

How Self-Organization Can Be Used to Your Advantage

The ground rules above provide a context for understanding workplace dynamics. Many change efforts fail because we neglect to appreciate the role incentives, institutions, and social networks play in our everyday lives.

For example, focusing solely on incentives (greater productivity) at the expense of collaboration can make people feel isolated and hurt the organization overall. In addition, trying to force two groups to work together without understanding their underlying (and often different) values can cause headaches and animosity.

If we have a firm grasp on the ground rules, leveraging self-organization becomes substantially easier.  People naturally organize to get work done, this may look different in different parts of the organization or when focusing on different challenges.

There isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits all strategy, but there are some general guidelines that we can employ to use self-organization to our advantage:

1. Establish clear expectations: Establish clear expectations which people can use to guide their actions and steer their interactions.  Expectations should be applied consistently across the organization.

2. Keep communication open: Since work is social, it is critical to ensure people continue to communicate. When bottlenecks happen, don’t hesitate to roll up your sleeves and help forge new partnerships. 

3. Leverage focal points: Who/where are the hubs were people/information congregate? What is happening in the hubs?  Who are the influencers? These can serve as great opportunities to spread information and implement change efforts.

4. Reward problem solving: People like to be recognized for their accomplishments. Solving complex problems involves many people cooperating across different parts of the organization. It’s important to recognize their contributions both individually and collectively as a team. It’s also critical to encourage these individuals to share best practices with others and cross-pollinate ideas (culture is contagious).

5. Think through unintended consequences: Every action has the potential to create outcomes we couldn’t have anticipated.  Before beginning a change effort, it’s important to be cautious and weigh the costs and benefits of different options. Think back to the ground rules.  There needs to be an “exit strategy” when unintended consequences happen.

6. Be open to new directions: Emergent orders can take on a new shapes as the organization changes. Policies and guidelines should be general enough to accommodate these changes. When unintended consequences happen, we should be flexible and modify our guidance as needed. We should never pigeonhole ourselves to move in a single direction.

Although we often don’t notice it, emergence plays a vital role in our organizations every day.  Emergence is the natural outcome of many people working together to achieve common goals. It is an important (and under-appreciated) contributor to the success of every organization, but leveraging it presents challenges in that we can’t fully understand how all the moving pieces fit together.

Sometimes we aren’t aware of how our policies and processes impact our ability to self-organize; when we act, we could be hurting our organization in the long run. By being cognizant of how incentives, institutions, and social networks shape our culture, we can take proactive steps to ensure policies enable (rather than inhibit) self-organization

Time For a Change? Consider Company Culture In 2015

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags:
2015 culture change

As 2014 comes to a close, let’s take a moment to reflect on our business successes and opportunities. Maybe you’ve had a successful year. Your company hit a new milestone, or doubled your revenue.

Or, maybe your planning for next year was more about finding opportunities than celebrating success.

No matter what last year means to your organization, 2015 is a brand new year, and for most companies, it means an opportunity to do things differently. You may be wondering how to reignite the flame that drove your business in the very beginning. Maybe you need that one big change that’s going to excite your team to succeed in the New Year.

There have been a lot of trends in office design and management style come and go over the last few years. And if you’re looking for answers, it may be tempting to try one of these “innovative” ways of doing business. But, before you invest in a new putting green in your office or move to an open office design, make sure you’re making the changes for the right reasons.

Our team knows the importance of building a resilient company culture better than anyone. So we asked them to share one piece of advice for a business like yours as you head into 2015:

Dustin Schneider – Senior Associate

Dustin Schneider“Culture” was just recently named Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2014.  Culture, by their definition, represents the system of thinking, behaving, and working in organizations.

That’s big!

There is a lot of power wrapped up in that little definition, but there’s even more power in understanding it and acting based on it.  So if 2014 was the year of understanding the high-level concept, I think 2015 should be the year of diving into it.

Take a look under the hood and shine some light on the culture in your organizations.  Get out there, talk to people, hear the stories, question the underlying beliefs and assumptions, and take some steps toward addressing the elements of your culture that aren’t serving you well; whatever they might be.  If you do, I think you’ll find there’s a lot you can learn, and apply, that will have a real, tangible impact on your business.

Early favorite for 2015’s word of the year: performance.

Samantha Goldman – Associate

samantha-goldmanI recommend that every organization do a Values Audit.

An organization-wide exploration into how organizational values are reflected in policies, procedures, and day-to-day work, can be an enlightening first step in ensuring that your organization functions according to its stated values.

Solidifying this alignment is crucial to ensuring consistent messaging across the organization around what it rewards and punishes and values as a whole. This is a critical element of every high-performing culture. By auditing and refocusing your values, you’re giving your organization direction as you work toward building a culture that embodies its message.

Stuart Farrand – Associate

stuart-farrandEvery year organizations develop “new” initiatives that they plan to roll out in the coming year.  Many focus on new ways to manage the organization or more employee flexibility and autonomy.  These initiatives aim to enhance morale and get better buy-in from the workforce.

Unfortunately, much like most New Year’s resolutions, many of these great ideas fall by the wayside or don’t last very long once they are put into practice.  While there may be some logistics issues or market events that changed the original plan, not following through on these initiatives probably does more to alienate employees than if the organization had done nothing at all.

Regardless of the idea, organizations need to have a solid execution strategy that outlines the timeline, mechanics for implementation, costs, and associated risks (likelihood and impact) before the concept is communicated to employees.

Transparency and follow through are essential to success. If your plan lacks either, you may want to go back to the drawing board before announcing the next big thing.

Start At The Beginning

The biggest takeaway here is to focus on changes that align with your values and your company culture.

Painting the siding of your house doesn’t make it a more livable space for your family. You have to tear down walls, remove your old cabinets, and start rebuilding what you truly want.

Before you make any major changes to the surface of your business, like an office makeover, or a change to employee benefits, make sure it’s in the best interests of your underlying culture.

It takes a lot more work than you may have initially thought, but once you tear down the existing structure and rebuild, you’ll end up with the kind of behavior and culture you want from your people and organization as a whole.

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?