The Leadership Capital Index by Dave Ulrich

Author:Dave Ulrich [Ulrich, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-18T23:00:00+00:00

Behavioral Agenda: Employee Actions Align with Culture

A great leader once said, “We teach people correct principles and let them govern themselves.” A culture transformation occurs if and only if it changes behavior throughout the firm. This is the bottom-up, behavioral agenda for managing culture. Words, phrases, concepts that resonate without changing behavior create cynicism. Generally, employees who experience day-to-day business problems know what to do to turn cultural concepts into actions. Developing mechanisms to engage employees and to enable them to figure out what behaviors to change creates enduring culture. Investors should look for evidence that the intellectual agenda of culture translates into specific employee behaviors.

It makes a difference if leaders impose behaviors or allow employees to determine which behaviors go with the desired culture. When a top leader demands that the team practice participative management, it keeps them from taking personal ownership for the culture—and the innate hypocrisy will filter out through the organization. By contrast, when people are involved in an activity, they are more likely to feel ownership. Owners almost always feel far more intensity than agents. In the Work-Out program (the 1990s cultural change at General Electric), for example, the leadership team articulated the desired culture of speed, simplicity, and self-confidence, then engaged tens of thousands of employees in determining how they could turn these corporate aspirations into their personal actions.21

Investors also monitor the extent to which local managers encourage employee behaviors. An obvious and well-tested experience in union relations is to avoid having corporate leadership attend a local unit meeting to try to convince employees to be nonunion. Union relations improve with local, not corporate management. Local managers build long-term relationships and embody the values of the corporate leaders. When local leaders behave differently, employees believe in the new culture.

Finally, investors can look for small behavioral changes that add up to larger culture capability. In tipping-point logic, changing a lot of little things may not have much impact in each instance, but then when a few more little things are added, overall patterns begin to change fast. Crime in New York City began to fall rapidly after a lot of relatively petty crimes were attended to (graffiti tagging, windshield washing, panhandling, and the like). A tipping point occurs when a lot of small changes culminate in large systematic change.

When employees behave as if they are committed to the desired culture, they will more likely become committed. As investors observe a culture permeating a targeted organization, they can observe employee behaviors that are consistent with the desired culture.

Possible indicators:

Do employees personally define how their own behaviors reflect the desired culture?

Does the desired culture show up in day-to-day employee activities?

Do employees take personal ownership of the culture (refer to “my culture” as opposed to “management’s culture”)?

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