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Mission

Culture – Four Halves

by Ron Potter January 27, 2020

Yes, I have an engineering background and I know there are two halves to every whole. However, the best way to start looking at the results of your culture survey is to look at each half: left vs right, top vs bottom.

Photo credit: Denison Consulting

Stable and Flexible Organizations

The right side of the chart: Mission and Consistency, creates very stable organizations.

The left side of the chart: Adaptability and Involvement, creates very flexible organizations

The trick is to exhibit the right amount of each half depending on your situation. I’ve seen a couple of companies do this the wrong way. Both are companies that are over 100 years old and during that time have been the largest company in their industry.

Too Stable

One of the companies took an approach that was way too stable for their changing environment. As they lost market share and profitability over several years their approach was to “do things the way we’ve done them for over 100 years. That approach has weathered downturns in the past and will do so again.” Unfortunately, it didn’t weather the downturn and they became a small provider in the industry as other companies took the innovative lead.

Another company that was also over 100 years old knew they were falling behind the competition. They hired a “visionary” CEO from a very different industry to help them innovate their way back to a leadership position. This leader lept to a vision of the future that was so far beyond their current position that most people complained they didn’t even know what he was talking about. Consequently, they continued with a “business as usual” approach because they had not been prepared to function differently then they had for many years.

Just like many sports teams, companies often go into a prevent defense posture once they’ve gained the lead. There is great fear in the organization of losing the gains that have been made so they try to protect their current position.

Teaching a Fifth Grader

Because most leaders don’t want to be labeled as the ones who lost the gains that have been made over several years, I see more of this issue rather than the case of trying to leap-frog forward to an entirely new position. Becoming an innovator is tough to pull off if your company has not been prepared to let go of old habits and products in favor of a new, innovative approach.

This issue was made very relevant to me when my children were in about the fifth grade. If one or both of them (they were two grades apart) were having difficulty with a particular subject in school they would turn to me for some help. However, as I began to explain the issue from my level of understanding or education, their eyes would glaze over and they would finally toss their homework on the table and tell me that I was no better than anyone else at explaining the issue from their level of understanding. I then asked to see their textbook and read one or two chapters ahead. Once I remembered the concept that needed to be learned next, they usually responded with something like “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? It all makes sense to me now.” With that approach, I was astounded at how quickly they learned and advanced through the topic, often faster than their schedule dictated.

If you want your organization to advance quickly to the next level of understanding so that they can compete at an innovative level, show them the path. Help them see one or two steps forward. You’ll find that they will get quicker with each step along the way until you (and they) realized that they’ve turned into an innovative organization.

Need for Change and Innovation

Don’t let go of the stable side of the culture survey. No organization can get out of balance and remain successful. While I often see companies maintain the stable side of the survey, it must be balanced with the flexible side in order to obtain long term success. Both sides must be expanded in order to be successful.

Difficult to accomplish? Yes, but necessary. While some people think that leadership is easy, it never is. Balancing stability and flexibility is difficult. But that’s what it takes to be a leader. Accomplish the impossible during the day then go home and be an ordinary family member at night. It’s worth it but it’s not easy.

Internal vs External

In our next blog post, we’ll take a look at the other two “halves” that are just as difficult. Then we’ll take one last look at culture in general and how it impacts the bottom line. Stay tuned for next week.

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Blog Culture Culture Series

Culture – Mission: Summary

by Ron Potter August 29, 2019

We just finished the three segments of the Mission portion of the Denison Culture Survey. As a quick recap of each section:

Vision

Is the direction and future image of the company clear to everyone? Everyone from the leadership team down through the entire organization? Is there unity about what that vision is and how it will be executed within every part of the organization?

Goals and Objectives

Is it clear how everyone’s daily work, goals, and objectives contribute and lead toward that unified vision? If people are simply accomplishing the “task of the day” without thought of how it contributes to the vision, the mission has not penetrated the organization enough to make a difference.

Strategic Direction

Every organization is vulnerable to changes and disruptions in the market place. Is there a clear strategic direction to help guide people through those potential impacts?

Why Mission?

But, I started with Mission because Dr. Denison and his organization are great researchers first! They have continued to dig deep into the impact of culture on the performance of organizations.

One of the studies looked at six different performance issues. Those six included:

Profitability/Return On Assets
Growth Sales/Revenue
Market Share
Product Development/Innovation
Quality
Employee Satisfaction

As the researchers discovered, Mission was impactful in five of the six measurements. In other words, if your Mission:

Vision
Goals and Objectives
Strategic Direction and Intent

are not on solid footing, you don’t have much of a chance at achieving

profitability
growth
market share
quality (product or service)
employee satisfaction.

When it comes to building a great corporate culture, get your mission unified and deeply penetrated first or don’t waste your time.

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Blog Culture Culture Series

Culture – Mission: Vision

by Ron Potter August 15, 2019

As we continue our look at great cultures, we’ve seen the four quadrants of Mission, Adaptability, Involvement, and Consistency.

We’re now looking at each quadrant in more detail. In our last blog post we identified the three elements in the Mission quadrant as

Vision
Goals and Objectives
Strategic Direction and Intent.

In today’s post and the next two to follow, I’m going to look at each of those elements in more detail.

Today we’ll look at Vision. As the Denison Culture Survey digs deeper into Vision, it tends to focus on two key aspects of Vision

The depth and motivating elements of the Vision
How the Leaders respond and react to the Vision

Depth

One of the questions in this arena is a two-part question of how deeply the vision has been shared and is it clear what the organization will look like in the future.

We’ve touched on the depth of sharing earlier but it’s worth going over again here.

I was working with a Fortune 50 company. I had spent most of my time with the ranks just below the C Suite level. At that level, they were very focused on the elements that would help them continue to flourish as one of the top companies in the world. They were developing stories, creating videos and building the elements into their software. They seemed to have a vision of their future.

Then I was introduced to one of the C Suite members and listened to him tell of the great vision that the CEO and other C Suite leaders were working on. When I asked about all of the vision pieces I had recently been working on with others down in his organization he looked at me curiously and said: “I haven’t heard any of those stories but I’m excited about our vision.”

The leaders were talking about different things than the rest of the organization. The did not have a shared vision! The vision must be the same vision no matter where in the organization it is being expressed.

Motivation

Is the vision motivating? This is the second part of the vision question. There may be a vision that is unified and deep in the organization but if it doesn’t inspire people to put forth the effort to reach the vision, it’s not worth the ink it took to print it.

“Our vision is to be one of the top recognized companies in our slice of the market place!” Not really inspiring. I’ve occasionally tried a trick with some of my clients. I’ll take their vision word-for-word but put one of their competitor’s names in instead. When it’s obvious that it could apply to either company equally, it’s not inspiring. What makes you unique? What makes you different? What is something only you can accomplish? That’s inspiring.

Leaders Response and Reaction

The other questions in this section relate to the leaders’ ability to execute the vision. Leaders often talk in terms of the long-term but make decisions that obviously have short term (read quarterly) impact. They may be trying to satisfy the investors and market by hitting these quarterly goals but it hampers the companies to reach their vision.

I know that some companies have elected not to report quarterly. I wish more companies would do the same. It helps build a better vision and long-term health for the company.

Vision

Vision must penetrate deep into the organization and it needs to be motivating and inspiring as well.

Leaders must walk-the-talk. It does no good to talk a good vision then make decisions to hit quarterly goals that will hamper the companies ability to reach that vision.

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Blog Culture Culture Series

Culture – Mission: Goals and Objectives

by Ron Potter August 8, 2019

Looking at the Mission quadrant of great cultures in more detail brings us to the Goals and Objectives element.

Tied to the Vision

Before anything else, goals and objectives must be aligned with the vision. People must see how accomplishing these specific goals and objectives will move the company towards that long-term vision.

Ambitious but Realistic

Many studies of high achieving individuals, teams, and companies reveal some interesting facts. High Achievers set goals that they believe they have a 75% probability of achieving. Once these “public” goals have been stated, they will internally work hard to reach goals they think they have about a 50% probability of achieving.

This formula says there is at least a 25% chance of failure (realistic) and then when they hit a higher goal with a lower chance of probability, they achieve an ambitious goal.

But one of the more interesting parts of these studies is that if publicly stated goals have less than a 50% probability, that becomes demotivating. Corporate leaders must be careful not to set goals that are demotivating but are ambitious. It’s a fine line that great cultures achieve.

Widespread Agreement

Gaining agreement is often more difficult than it seems on the surface. Different functions within an organization attract people with varying patterns of thought. Some of the easiest ones to see are the designers vs. the manufactures. Designers are artistic. They use different parts of their brain and think about style and form. Manufactures are often hands-on engineers. Things are matter-of-fact and practical. Making the most beautiful, cost-effective product often create opposing views. Leaders must help the organization balance these conflicting goals to reach the ultimate vision.

Track Progress

Goals and Objectives don’t carry much value if we don’t know where we are on our journey.

This is a personal story that I’ve shared before, but I have used many times with great success to help teams move forward along their journey.

When my children were very young, we lived in Utah, but much of our family resided in Michigan. Every summer we would make that 1,600-mile trek, often in a small car. It seemed to me that we hadn’t even reached the border between Utah and Wyoming when I would hear the question from the back seat, “are we there yet?” I soon banned that question from our family vocabulary. But I did give each child a detailed map and told them they could ask, “Where are we?” as many times as they wanted. They quickly figured out that when they plotted the first point on the map that we had a long way to go, and the frequency of questions diminished rapidly.

People want to know where they are on the Trek.

Measuring progress:

Identifies accomplishments on a regular basis
Identifies goals to be accomplished next
Motivates them to work harder on the next goal
Helps accomplish the overall journey sooner.

Goals and Objectives

Tied to the Vision
Ambitious but Realistic
Widespread Agreement
Progress Tracked

These elements of Goals and Objectives are another aspect of great cultures.

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Blog Culture Culture Series

Culture – Mission

by Ron Potter July 25, 2019

Everyone has a different definition of Mission, Vision, Values, etc. I’m not here to promote one definition or the other, I’m just going to use the definition found in the Denison Culture Survey.

Mission

Mission is the title of the first quadrant.

“Do we know where we are going?” is how Denison describes this quadrant. Whether you call it mission, vision or whatever, that simple question gets to the heart of this quadrant.

Clarity and Alignment

Do the people, including the leaders, know where they’re going?

What are they trying to accomplish?
Do they see the big picture?
Are they simply trying to accomplish tasks?
Can they give the “elevator” speech about where the company is going in the future?

There’s an old story about the early days of the space mission. As one of the scientists was leaving the building, he walked past a janitor sweeping up in the cavernous assembly building. Wanting to be friendly, the scientist asked, “What are you doing there?” The person sweeping up replies “Haven’t you heard? We’re going to the moon!” Regardless of the position in the company, every person knew the mission of the company.

Vision

Vision is about keeping an eye on the long-term vs the short-term. I’ve seen many corporate leadership teams make decisions that no one thinks will be healthy for the company long-term, but it will help them meet quarterly reporting to wall street and investors.

Some of the corporate leaders I’ve talked with this about will reply that their mission and vision is to make money. I’m sorry, but it’s not! Simon Sinek, one of my favorite authors and bloggers, clearly states the profits are not “why” we do something, profits are a result of what we do. It’s always a result. It’s only a result.

Goals and Objectives

I love golf analogies. They speak to so many aspects of life. One of the differences between average golfers and really good golfers is their image of the target. To the average golfer, the target is often the ball. We end up concentrating on hitting the ball rather than producing a swing that will launch the ball toward the true target, that spot down the fairway or the green.

In average corporate cultures, the target is often getting to work, doing your job and going home at night. All too often, there is little thought about what the real target is and everyday work is going to help achieve the desired results.

Great cultures help all employees understand how their work will advance the corporation toward the goal.

Do people really understand the connection between their daily goals and objectives and the long-term goals and objectives of the corporation or team? Great cultures do.

Strategic Direction and Intent

The world changes rapidly around us.

Competition changes. We talk about this change with words like disruption. A competitor invents something new or puts a new twist on things that disrupt the entire industry. If a culture has good strategic direction and intent, they are constantly looking out for and watching competitors so they don’t become a victim of disruption.
The consumer changes. The Consumer Packaged Goods industry has been dealing with this over the last few years. If you look at the pre-packaged food industry, you’ve seen CEO changes, Board changes, buy-outs, and consolidation. Everyone is looking for a way to combat the disruption. Many times it happens because these companies have had tremendous success for decades and it’s hard for them to think that the strategy that got them here won’t get them through this next threat. You can’t think that way anymore. Consumers are changing too fast.
The industry changes. I could go down many paths on this issue but I’ll choose one, government regulation! When regulations change it can affect an entire industry almost overnight. Great cultures are prepared.

Scenario Planning

One approach that I’ve seen work well to combat all of these shortcomings is scenario planning. Pick a few “worst-case scenarios.” Even if no one on the team thinks this could possibly happen, make a list of the worst possible events the team can think of. Then do some scenario planning. Spend some time talking about “what if” parts of or even the whole scenario were to happen, what would we do?

Teams that have gone through these scenario planning sessions are more apt to see changes sooner and less likely to make panic moves to counter the change once it’s obvious. They feel like they’ve already faced this issue and know in general what they need to do to counter or mitigate the negative impact. And they did it during calm times, not times of panic.

Companies that constantly keep these three things in mind create Great Cultures:

Vision: Does everyone in the company know what the desired future looks like?
Goals and Objectives: Does everyone know how their daily work impacts that long-term vision?
Strategic Direction and Intent: Does everyone know that the future is filled with challenges but we’ve tried to think through many scenarios? Are they able to raise the alarm if they see things happening that could trigger one of the disruption scenarios?

You’ll note that I started each one of those segments with “Does everyone….” That’s the point of building a great culture. It’s transparent. It’s well known. People can speak up from everywhere if they see disruption coming.

One of the best CEO’s I’ve seen would spend time walking and talking with people throughout the company. He often said that he got the best early warning signals came from the truck drivers and people who worked in shipping. They seemed to be intuned with “the street” and if he would ask, they gave him early signals of things changing.

Culture means everybody, not just the leadership team and their direct reports. Is the whole organization aware of the Mission?

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Blog Trust Me

Leading a Great Cause

by Ron Potter December 11, 2017

Commitment involves rising above our own needs and perspectives to grab hold of a greater good.

Standing for something greater relates directly to the values and vision of an organization. A leader’s stance for something greater not only meets his or her personal desires, but it strongly resonates with peers, direct-reports, and others who have a stake in the organization.

Just having personal commitment to a great cause is not enough for a leader. The vision for “something beyond” must be successfully transferred to the entire group, whether it be a small staff, a department, an entire organization, a state, or a nation.

Many companies start with the right motivation. They talk about their values and they create high aspirations, but these same companies don’t really live by them. People do not like to be put in boxes, and just as important, people do not like to be in the dark, outside the door where company values and vision are shaped. People are less energized and tend to drift when they are unsure of how they should be operating within an organization. People need to see their leaders’ commitment to values, and they want a part in helping to shape their organization’s core values and vision.

Leaders who form corporate values, vision, and strategy in a vacuum or just in the executive suite lack the humility and commitment to move beyond themselves and include others who have solid ideas and opinions on what should define the company’s values. When leaders don’t talk about the company’s values and vision, people feel alienated and less energized.

When working to plant a vision and sense of a greater cause in a team, you must first ensure that values are understood and owned. This is accomplished initially by cataloging the personal values of individual team members. When the personal values of individuals are understood, team values begin to emerge.

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Blog Trust Me

Do You Know What You Want?

by Ron Potter November 13, 2017

It’s surprising how many people, even those in leadership roles in large organizations, do not really know what they want. They are good people with good motives and good ideas. They work hard and get a lot done. But their values are inconsistent; their vision is not clear. They are wandering in fog.

To ultimately realize the power of commitment, you must be sure of where you are going and what attitudes and behavior will ensure that you arrive at your destination with your head held high.

Commitment has its origins in clearly perceived values and vision.

Simply stated, our values reflect what we consider important. Usually, they have developed over time and reveal who we really are. Values are motivators; they give us reasons for why we do or don’t do things.

Values drive behavior. Typically, we chase what we love. Jesus said it well: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Too often we get it backward and find our behavior driving our values. We allow our actions to dictate our fundamental values rather than creating a set of values and standing firm in them. In this situation we allow our “want to” to overtake our “ought to.” Since these values usually do not match, we give in and are controlled by the short-term “want to” rather than the longer-term “ought to.”

Let’s define vision in this post as, “uncompromising, undebatable truths.” The emphasis on truth is important because values are not always the more positive human attributes. An example of such warped values is the practice of some inner-city gangs who require members to commit a robbery or worse to prove personal courage and loyalty to the group.

Stephen Covey, in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, writes,

The Character Ethic [set of values as used here] is based on the fundamental idea that there are principles [values] that govern human effectiveness—natural laws in the human dimension that are just as real, just as unchanging and unarguably “there” as laws such as gravity are in the physical dimension.

Commitment is not worth much if you have a distorted vision and rotten values. It is crucial, then, for leaders to develop the right core values. Right actions flow out of right values such as integrity, honesty, human dignity, service, excellence, growth, and evenhandedness. This set of values will determine much about the vision that leaders create and how they work with and through people—essentially how they lead and to what they are committed.

Developing and committing to values is only part of the equation. Leaders also need to form a vision. These two ideas—values and vision—are inseparable. Vision flows from our values, and the values we live by form the platform for our vision. A leader’s strength of commitment determines how well he or she will stick to either one.

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