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Consistency

BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Consistency: Summary

by Ron Potter

Consistency

Image result for Image of give me a lever long enough

The last quadrant of the Denison Culture survey is Consistency, “Does your system create leverage?”

We first introduced the mechanical image of leverage when we introduced the “fulcrum” of Consistency.  Most people have seen or heard the quote from Archimedes when he said: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”  As a side note, he also said “Eureka!” which meant “I’ve got it” or “I’ve found it.”  Leverage is what he found.

In the post about Coordination and Integration we talked about the lever and how that looks different in each part of the organization.

Together these two create “Leverage!”

The three sections of the Consistency Quadrant talk about achieving leverage.

Consistency is about Results

Dan Denison and his team at Denison Consulting may disagree with me, but in my mind, this quadrant is about results.

My belief is that if you’ve worked hard at each of the other three quadrants of Mission, Adaptability and Involvement, the results are great Consistency.

Take a look at some of the words within the individual questions related to each of the three segments:

  • practice what they preach
  • a distinct set of practices
  • a clear and consistent set of values
  • accountability
  • win-win solutions
  • we reach agreement, even on difficult issues
  • clear agreement about the right way
  • share common perspectives
  • coordinate across the organization
  • good alignment

These issues are results.  The organization has and develops leverage.  It creates a highly productive culture.

  • Should you set and live by a clear set of core values?  Yes.
  • Should you work hard at reaching agreement across the organization?  Yes.
  • Should you coordinate and integrate across and between divisions of the organization?  Yes.

But, if you try to accomplish these things without first establishing Mission, Adaptability and Involvement, they won’t amount to much.  There is no foundational work.  The structure will crumble without the needed foundation.

What is Culture?

We introduced the Culture Series many months ago with this start:

A dictionary definition says “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an organization.”

Exciting environments come from leaders and teams developing people to face difficulties and obstacles in innovative thoughtful ways that utilize the skills and experiences present.

Productive environments exist when teams learn how to elegantly use the resources they have to get the most out of an organization in a simple way.

Why Build a Great Culture?

I’ll go back to the name of my company, Team Leadership Culture (TLC).  These are not distinct issues that you face and corrected one at a time.  Great companies and great leaders are always working on all of these issues.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see leaders make is to assume they’re high-level managers.  One of the more difficult transitions is to shift from being a great manager to a great leader.

Great Managers
  • Work in relatively stable environments
  • Have long-term views and line-of-sight
  • Usually have clearly defined direction and strategy
  • And because of these issues, have a limited need to re-direct themselves or those who work for them.
Great Leaders
  • Spend the bulk of their time on vision
  • Develop and lead teams that manage more of the detail
  • Constantly scan the environment both internally and externally to spot the need for change early
  • Tend to be more risk-takers and have a higher tolerance for risk.

Great leaders and leadership teams create great cultures.  Cultures outlast leaders and teams.  This applies to both good and bad cultures.  Make sure you and your team are focused on a great culture.  It’s the only thing that lasts.

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BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Consistency: Coordination and Integration

by Ron Potter

This final section on Consistency, Coordination and Integration, clearly speaks to agreement across the company.

Survey Items

You’ll quickly see in the individual questions the focus on cross-company alignment

  • different parts of the organization share common perspectives
  • easy to coordinate projects across the organization
  • people in other parts of the organization share the same goals

In our first blog post about this quadrant, we spoke of levers and fulcrums.  This is the lever.  Different parts of the organization share the same goals but require different resources and move at different rates.

Levels

There is also a question in this section about alignment across levels of the organization.  Sometimes it’s a lack of understanding or different understanding at different levels of the organization rather than across the organization.

Sometimes when I would be working in one part of the organization I could see that they understood this principle.  They would invite people from other departments to be a part of their team just to make sure they were completely coordinated and integrated.

But, when I was working up the organization a level or two, they were often oblivious to the efforts being made below them.

Horizontal and Vertical

Coordination and Integration must work both ways to be effective.  Across the organization in a horizontal effort as well as up and down the organization vertically to be effective.  It must be complete coordination and integration.

Frictionless

In mechanical systems such as your car or other pieces of machinery, a great deal of research goes into reducing friction.  Friction creates heat.  Heat is lost energy.

Being completely frictionless in either the mechanical or corporate world is impossible.  You’ll never eliminate all of the friction.  But you can reduce it as much as possible.

I grew up in the era of muscle cars.  We often talked about someone who “blueprinted” their large V-8’s in order to make them more powerful. they were reducing friction by milling the various parts to tighter and more precise tolerances.  Less friction, more power.

Corporations are artificial structures that have been created to bring a great number of people together to tackle large projects.  There will always be friction!  If there is not an efficient design, touch-points between parts of the organization are rough and ill-defined.  They’ll create friction.  When there is too much friction, people will feel that it takes too much effort to work with other parts of the organization.  Sometimes they’ll just not exert the energy it takes to work through the issues thereby focusing on their own needs rather than the needs of the company as a whole.  Other times they’ll duplicate what they need within their own boundaries thereby spending more money on duplicate resources.  For example, did you know that 65 agencies that have their own police force within the Federal Government?  Why?  It’s likely easier to create their own force rather than coordinate across department lines.  That’s a lot of heat.

Sources of Heat

If you’re getting low scores on this portion of the culture survey, look for the heat.  Heat can exhibit itself in the form of

  • tempers
  • burn out
  • long wait times for approval or response
  • just taking too long to get anything done

If your coordination and integration is in good shape, you’ve minimized the heat-causing friction.

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BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Consistency: Agreement

by Ron Potter

Agreement that leads to commitment is a long, arduous process.  It requires building great teams that listen to each other, respect each other and use a great process to reach agreement.  Agreement leads to commitment which leads to better execution.  This commitment happens in the face of initial positions that may be counter to the final agreement.  Reaching agreement is hard work.

Culture Elements

Items that the Denison Culture Survey asks about include:

  • win-win solutions
  • consensus or agreement is reached on difficult issues
  • while the process may be long and arduous, it’s always easy to reach agreement in the end
  • is the agreement in line with the core values
Intact Teams

These questions are focused on teams that work together.  We’ll look at building coordination and integration across the corporation in the next blog post.  But coordination across the organization never happens if we aren’t able to reach agreement within teams first.

Agreement and commitment were the subjects of a series of blogs that I wrote in the first half of 2019 on building great teams.

Respect

Reaching agreement within teams requires a great deal of respect for each member of the team.  Good leaders should expect that each member of a team has either a slight or dramatic different point of view.   This diversity of thought is what leads to great decisions.  But only if there is respect within the team for each person’s point of view.  If there is an element of right and wrong or someone believes they know the “truth” while everyone else simply has a different perspective, a true agreement cannot be reached.

Culture Survey

The culture survey does a great job at pointing out the symptoms of agreement or disagreement.  It doesn’t actually help us solve the problem but clearly identifies if a problem exists.  If the culture survey indicates there is a lack of agreement, that should serve as a big red flag that lots of internal work is required to build up the respect and processes of teams.

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BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Consistency: Core Values

by Ron Potter

In just about every company I’ve worked with over the last 30 years, their values were printed somewhere.  Some times they’re in the employee handbook or other printed document but the majority of the time they’re printed in a beautiful art form on the front wall in the reception area.  They were there for everyone to see.  But employees don’t see them.  They probably saw them for a few days after the reception area was remodeled or repainted but then they walk right past them every day without notice.

Actions Speak Louder than Words

I’m not sure who first spoke those words but I believe it came from direct observations.  People will say almost anything for various reasons.  But their actions demonstrate what they really believe.

Printed words mean nothing in the face of behavior.

Words of the Core Value Culture Survey

Some of the words from Core Value questions include:

  • managers practice what they preach
  • there is a characteristic management style
  • a consistent set of values
  • held accountable
  • ethical code guides behavior

You’ll notice that only once do words come into play.  They practice what they preach.  And the focus is not on the words but on the practice.

Printed Words Mean Nothing

The only time printed words become meaningful is when they’re violated.  Few people believe words.  Everyone believes actions and behaviors.

One of the simplest explanations I’ve seen of corporate cultures and values is a straight line drawn left to right.  This line represents the current level of values or culture.  This is where the “bar” is set.  If someone violates one of those values and there are no consequences for that violation, the bar was just lowered.  Corporate Culture is less valuable when that happens then it was prior to the lack of accountability.

Corporate leaders must be vigilant in protecting the values and culture of the organization.  It slips away very rapidly through simple acts of violation with no accountability.

Bankruptcy

I’m reminded of the old story about someone who went bankrupt.  When they were asked how that could happen they said

Well, I had a missed payment here, made a bad decision there, made a bad loan to an old friend and pretty soon I was bankrupt.

Bankruptcy, like lost values, doesn’t just happen one day.  There were little things along the path that were pointing toward an eventual bankruptcy.

Core Values in corporate cultures are not just lost one day.  There are always little things along the path pointing toward the bankruptcy of values.

Mile Markers

I was once consulting with a division of a large corporation.  Things were going quite well at the moment.  Sales were up.  Marketing seemed to be clicking with potential customers.  Productivity costs were down.

But my final report after spending two weeks with the leadership team said that they were in trouble and headed for disaster.  I based that assessment on what I observed as the constant erosion of Core Values even over a short two week period.

My report fell on deaf ears.  All they could see were the positive numbers and metrics that were happening at the time.  They wrote me off as not knowing what I was talking about.  Two years later they were hemorrhaging.  Most of the leaders had left, numbers were bad and getting worse.

It turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.  The leader of that group left when times were good to become president of another company.  He only lasted a couple of years.  The division went from being profitable to being sold.

Pay attention every day to Core Values.  Don’t let things slide.  Don’t just let “this one” go!  You will slip into bankruptcy quicker than you think.  Protect the Core Values with every bit of your fiber.

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BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Consistency

by Ron Potter

Our final quadrant is “Consistency”.  The subtitle here is “Does the system create leverage?”

Photo credit: Denison Consulting

Without Consistency

It might be easier to think about this quadrant in the negative.  What causes the system NOT to create leverage.  Archimedes is credited with saying “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I will move the earth.”

When you can create leverage, substantial movement can occur.  Without a lever or a fulcrum not much happens.

Where do leverage and fulcrums come from in corporate culture?

Corporate Fulcrum

A fulcrum is a solid base.  It’s substantial, heavy and solid.  You can think of a block of concrete.  Because of my civil engineering background, I know something about concrete.  One of the parallels I’ve drawn through the years between concrete and corporate cultures is what happens to them under pressure.  When you’re doing a large pour of concrete that will eventually hold up a large building, you must test it for strength under pressure.  It was always interesting to me that when concrete finally fails (it always will under enough pressure) it tends to shatter.  It doesn’t break into large chunks, it breaks into hundreds of pieces each going its own way.  Corporate teams and cultures often do the same under great pressure.  Each member heads their own way.  There is no more unity.  There is no more functioning as a single whole.  Everyone scatters.

Under pressure, concrete and cultures can lose their integrity.  There is no more possibility for leverage.

Corporate Leverage

Beyond losing the integrity of the fulcrum, leverage requires a long lever.  But, if you’ll notice, different sections of the lever move at different rates.  While the end of the lever may be moving great distances at a higher pace, sections close to the fulcrum may not be moving fast enough or far enough to even notice.  Different sections of the lever must be willing to play their role to reach the maximum leverage.

So, to answer the question, does the system create leverage we have to ask about the solid foundation (fulcrum) and the willingness and ability to support different parts of the organization moving at different rates over different distances.

Three Sections of Consistency

To get at these issues, the Denison Culture survey asks questions in three different areas:

  • Core Values:  This is the solid foundation portion.  It requires great values and a desire to protect and propagate them.
  • Agreement: This is the integrity part.  Without agreement (and I would add commitment) there is no integrity in the organization.  Without Integrity, there is no leverage.
  • Coordination and Integration:  This is the part that allows different parts of the organization to move different distances at different rates.  Without Coordination and Integration, one part of the organization may become jealous of other parts.  And what seems like a more common occurrence to me, each part of the organization attempts to maximize their portion.  They do this with little regard for how those resources may be used for greater leverage in a part of the organization that needs to move faster.

So over the next few blog posts, let’s take a look at each of these individually

  • Core Values
  • Agreement
  • Coordination and Integration

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