In our quickly expanding, technologically reliant world, uncertainty and interdependence are far more common now than, say, 30 years ago. This rapid change has given way to agile organization structures, functioning in more democratic or flat ways. Frameworks (i.e. Scrum, XP, Lean) have aided these sort of initiatives, and the need for them has become increasingly more relevant.
An interview with Dr. Jim Ludema
Jim Ludema, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Values-Driven Leadership and a Professor of Global Leadership at Benedictine University. He’s also an expert in organizational culture and values, and a globally-recognized pioneer in the field of Appreciative Inquiry. Here, we ask him about leading culture change.
Guest article written by Kelly Andrews
We all talk, but do we really say much? Perhaps it’s that conversation by the water cooler, the whispering of the coworker across the cube, or better yet, the post on social media that tells more about your company than the values uttered every week during team meetings.
There is an average of 12 job-related fatalities every day in the U.S., according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). 893 incidents are listed on their website so far in 2016 alone, each involving a serious injury or fatality to one or more employees.
If you spend every workday sitting in front of your computer with the occasional walk to the break room to top off your coffee, safety likely is not top of mind. Yet, for millions of workers across the globe, their jobs can put them in some extremely high-risk environments where valuing safety can mean the difference between life and death.
I saw the impact of unethical behavior firsthand when I grew up in Moscow during the late 80’s and early 90’s. As a result of the establishment of the Russian Federation, private businesses were created. And during the transition, economic inequality, increased corruption, scandals, and bribery became the new norm.
I moved to the U.S. in 2006 for my own freedom and an opportunity to have more than two pairs of jeans in my wardrobe, and I immediately recognized differences both in geography and culture.
For leaders in the tech space, velocity is the name of the game. And for the last few years, pioneers in the industry have been evolving how technology is developed and launched in some pretty dramatic ways.
Birthed out of more established methods of developing software like waterfall and Agile, the DevOps movement builds upon the best practices of these methods in order to drive performance in today’s digital economy. In a world where technology touches nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives, evolving the ways these organizations deliver value to their customers quickly can mean the difference that separates the next Google from the next Yahoo.
Imagine coming out of a meeting and thinking about how honestly people shared their opinions, how disagreements were met with understanding, and how you took a few tough nuggets and differing perspectives and heard everyone. What was happening was real dialogue — the kind of conversation where raw opinions can be out there and no one is judging anyone.
I can already hear you: “Not in my organization,” you say. Not in the kind of hyper-structured/way-too-polite/distrustful kind of place I work.
In 2011, Wells Fargo was forced to pay $85 million in fines for selling higher interest rate mortgages to customers who should have qualified for lower rates, and falsifying loan applications in the process.
Not five years later, Well Fargo finds itself faced with a strikingly similar scandal. Last Thursday the bank announced that it reached an agreement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to the tune of $185 million in fines for opening deposit accounts and transferring funds without customers’ consent. This settlement started a landslide of commentary, calls for deeper investigations, increased regulation of the banking industry and questions around how such unethical behavior might become the norm of acceptable behavior across an entire organization.
Guest article written by Levi Nieminen, Ph.D.
In a previous article for the Transform series, I wrote about the work that is ongoing within the University of Michigan Health System to empower a group of Cardiology Fellows to build the program, training experience, and culture that they want, a concept the Program’s Director, Dr. Peter Hagan, has described as a “culture of builders.”
During the humid summer months of 1954, twenty-two 11 and 12-year-old boys were randomly split into two groups and taken to a 200-acre Boy Scouts of America camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma.
Over the next few weeks, they would unknowingly be the subjects of one of the most widely known psychological studies of our time. And the ways these groups bonded and interacted with each other draw some interesting parallels to our understanding of workplace culture.
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