- Summary of articles
- Leadership is creating a world to which people want to belong
- Do you really know your organisation's world?
- Managing as a creator of Worlds
- Create sales contacts through your breakfasts
- Mergers
- Create a dynamic vision, keystone of your Desired World
- Secrets of CEOs/salespeople out to conquer your Market World!
Do you really know your organisation's world?
Understanding and assessing your organisation's culture or “world” can mean the difference between success and failure in a fast and complex business environment. In the same time, senior managers often have a view of our organisation's world that is based more on hope than a view grounded in objective facts.
Imagine you were asked to describe your organisation to an outsider. How would you answer the following questions ?
- Around here what is really important, what makes you great?
- Around here who get promoted? On which principles?
- Around here what behaviours get rewarded?
- Around here who fits in and who doesn’t?
- What ten words would you use to describe your company?
In reality, what management pays attention to, and rewards are often the strongest indicators of the organisation’s culture and way of behaving. This is often quite different from the values it verbalize or the ideals it strives for.
- Does your management encourage or discourage innovation and risk taking?
- Does it reward employees challenging old ways of doing things?
- Is rapid change the norm or does management protect the status quo?
- Does the organisation value excellence in depth or is the mentality simply “just ship it”?
- Is well being of employees a deep concern or is management completely focused on task performance and KPI ?
This kind of inquiry on your actual world can give insight into the real way your organisation is running and some of its underlying values and norms. It may not even resemble the world management thinks it has created!
Don’t fool yourselves!
It is critical that you find out who you really are as well as striving for you want to be. Our World assesment can provide measurable data about the real organisation values and norms that can be used to foster transformational changes your company may need. It can dispel management’s illusions about what really matters and will tell them how far off the mark things really are. Management may find that it is not practising what it preaches. However telling the CEO the truth about the organisation he run is often dangerous to your career progress. Delivering such a message needs a bullet-proof methodology, communication skills and a willingness to take risks and confront conflict.
The content of your today’s world drives your practices and behaviours.
Your world operates at both conscious and unconscious level. Your world drives your organisation and it’s actions. It is somewhat the “operating system”. It guides how employees think, act and feel. It is dynamic and fluid. A “world” could be effective at one time, under a given set of circumstances and ineffective at another time. There is no generically good / bad world. Some worlds are fitting your strategy and your business environment; others are just driving you in the wrong way at full speed!
One of the critical factors in understanding a corporate world is the degree to which it is leader-centric. If the CEO avoids conflict and tend to sweep it under the carpet, don’t be surprised if you see avoidance of conflict played out throughout organisation. The behaviour modelled by the management team profoundly shapes the culture and practices of the organisation. What managers emphasize, reward and punish tell you what is really important. Their reaction in a crises as well as what they routinely talk about, all sets the tone of the culture. The CEO could play the role of the guardian of the old world or act as a change agent set up to drive the company into a dramatically new world.
Why assessing your own world?
If you want to maximize your ability to attain its strategic objectives, you must understand if the prevailing culture supports and drives the actions necessary to achieve it’s strategic goals. World assesment enable a company to analyse the gap between the current and the desired world. This picture can be used to design interventions (bridges) to close the gaps and bring specific elements of culture into line. You may only need to change some practices and values while keeping a few precious core values intact, rather than embarking on a futile change to change the entire culture.
A dominant world might be pervasive throughout a big organisation and across business units and borders. But often subcultures coexist. They can share certain characteristics, norms, values and belief, or be totally different. They can function cooperatively or be in conflict with each other. They can differ by function (engineering vs marketing), by business units or by geographic region.
It could be both undesirable and unrealistic to try to homogenize the worlds across the whole organisation. Still a thoughtful assesment of the different current worlds can facilitate identity building and alignment of values and strategic goals across subcultures
Corporations that are growing fast must hire a large number of new employees. It is critical that these new hires get a good fit with the current world. If an individual is out of synch than the organisation’s cultural antibodies will attack. However there must also be a good fit with the world that you are trying to create. We could help providing assesment of the compatibility between the candidate’s personality, values and behaviours and both the current and desired world.
In more and more business change pace is increasing. Only organisation that adapt to this fast changing environment can survive, however, as Built to Last, by Jim Collins has demonstrated, enduring great companies are built on both a solid foundation of timeless core values, but also on the ability of their behavioural practices, secondary values, norms and cultural symbols. The secret of a lasting company is its ability to manage both continuity and change. Getting a profile of the today’s world and the desired one will enable your organisation to cope with technical or markets changes, deregulation and aggressive competition, new business models, growth, mergers and acquisitions.
Executive are frequently analytical and quantitative in their orientation. Having short and clear data on the world’s challenge they have to cope with is critical for them. P-VAL can provide theses deep insights in a few days and help top managers to behave as real leader that is act as the creator of a world to which people want to belong
Laurent Dugas is a partner of P-Val. He wrote books about complexe selling and articles about cultural transformation. He works for big international companies.