Culture happens

Your company's culture is a result of years of conscious and unconscious actions. Did you know that, at the average company, 70 percent of employees are disengaged? Do you know how engaged your employees are? Have your written values kept up with the current needs of the business? Are you really hiring according to your values? Are you hiring stars, or team players? We suggest you read David Siegel's article, The Culture Deck, and score your company's culture against today's leading lean/agile companies. When a company is only 20 people, it's easy to have both autonomy and alignment. But as a company grows, hierarchy enforces alignment by removing autonomy, and that's where cultural erosion starts. 

The norms and rituals matter. At Spotify, every six months they delete all standing meetings and common practices. Those that are important will come back, while those that weren’t very useful are discarded. About the most important thing a CEO does is hire great people and get out of their way. Micromanaging great people doesn’t work, yet many engineers feel micromanaged. Marc Andreesen said for the year he worked at IBM, there was one building that had no signs anywhere. This was the planning building, where dysfunctional engineers went to make plans and draw flow charts. He said no one from outside the group ever went in there, especially customers, so they didn’t need any signs. Some companies mix groups, making sure marketing and engineering are near each other so they can have more contact.

An audit will get you started toward a more agile culture. You can't learn what's really happening in your company using performance reviews and surveys - people won't tell you what's really important. Using modern methods of elicitation, David Siegel will come and interview people, turning their stories into micronarratives that can then be turned into data and viewed from both high and low. You'll get a score on the 22 aspects of an agile culture and suggestions for how you can start moving toward a more agile culture. This is something your HR people can't do, because they are part of the system - you need someone trustworthy to come from the outside and elicit true stories.

Once you have the initial score and story patterns, you start to change. It's not a big, disruptive, top-down program. There's no planning, phases, or road maps. Culture change that starts at the bottom is real culture change. David and his colleagues will work with your employees to move your score up, point by point. You will be surprised how this process engages employees, who will gladly volunteer to do most of the work. You don't need that much consulting. As the culture starts to improve, it will gather momentum, and you'll need even less consulting. Read how Vineet Nayar did it at his company of 30,000 employees in his book, Employees First, Customers Second. 

Contact us to discuss your culture needs today.