Culture Series

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.

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