TALENT · Contrast for a moment John McPhee’s vivid descrip-tion of the late Frank Boyden, from 1902 to 1968 head-master of Deerfield:

TALENTQuarterlyThe Culture Issue

CRACKING THE CULTURE CODE

TOP TALENT AND CULTURE

LEADERS GET CULTURES THEY DESERVE

What is it and why do we keep getting it wrong?

I T ’ S N O T T H I S

CORPORATE Culture

SHOULD A FIREFIGHTER ALSO HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HIS RETIREMENT?Recent years have thrown so much into question. Like whether those who protect us, teach us and care for us can look forward to a secure financial future.

At BlackRock, we’re working with some of the world’s largest pension funds, 401(k) plans and financial advisors to make sure that millions of investors can have the retirement they deserve.

No matter how the financial landscape shifts, we will help provide an answer to the one question on everyone’s mind:

The answer not only impacts what you do today, but what you will be able to do tomorrow. That’s why BlackRock is working to ensure that if you’ve spent your life working and saving—or even fighting fires—you can spend your retirement doing just the opposite.

Call 1-855-BLK-8880 for more information. © 2014 BlackRock, Inc. All rights reserved.BLACKROCK, SO WHAT DO I DO WITH MY MONEY, and INVESTING FOR A NEW WORLD, are registered trademarks of BlackRock, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and elsewhere. All other trademarks are those of their respective owners.

“So what do I do with my money?”®

THE CULTURE ISSUE | TALENTQ 1

TALENTQuarterly

CONTENTS

The Culture Issue Vol. 11

04 Leaders Get the Culture they Deserve How to Deserve Better

12 The Cultural Component of Top Talent Using Current Cultural Forces to Attract and Retain the Best

20 CEO Succession Does the Fit between CEO Leadership and Organizational Culture Matter?

28 Victory Through Organization The Why, What, and How of Organization Culture

34 Culture, Nationality and Leadership

40 Cracking the Culture Code of a Great Company

44 What Can We Do to Modernize Talent Management?

49 Start with the Science A Culture of “I Hate You Because You Work Hard”

51 Humor

04

34

20

44

l >

CLO

CK

WIS

E F

RO

M T

OP

; VIE

W-M

AS

TE

R: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/C

AT

HE

RIN

E L

AN

E, S

LID

E IM

AG

ES

, CLO

CK

WIS

E F

RO

M T

OP

LE

FT: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M (A

LL),

/NIK

AD

A; /

AP

HO

TO

ST

OR

Y, I

MA

GE

S_

BY

_K

EN

NY

, /C

HA

NA

WIT

, /V

ELH

OJU

NIO

R, /

FIL

IPE

FR

AZ

AO

, /P

OW

ER

OF

FO

RE

VE

R; I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

KO

KO

UU

; IS

TO

CK

PH

OT

O.C

OM

/MA

RT

INW

IMM

ER

; LE

FT: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

PAU

L C

OW

AN

2 TALENTQ | TALENT-QUARTERLY.COM

ABOUT TALENT QUARTERLYOur mission is to make organizations more successful by providing their leaders with the science-based, insightful and practical information to make critical talent decisions. We accomplish that mission by publishing serious, provocative and practical articles and interviews that raise the quality of dialogue about talent.

We believe the current dialogue on talent issues provides few insights and little guidance to senior level leaders. We believe that an “honest broker” is needed to adjudicate the claims made by consultants and academics about the effectiveness of talent management practices and products. We believe that serious dialogue on this topic requires more than 500-word stories.

Print and digital subscriptions, issues and articles are all available at www.talent-quarterly.com.

Talent Quarterly is published by The Talent Strategy Group, LLC, One Penn Plaza, 36th Floor, New York, NY 10119. Talent Quarterly is protected by copyright and no part of it may be reproduced in part or in whole without the express permission of The Talent Strategy Group, LLC. All opin-ions are those of the article authors and do not indicate endorsement by Talent Quarterly or its publisher.

ON THE COVER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY: ELENOVSKY/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Corporate culture certainly existed before Ed Schein’s 1985 landmark book Organization Culture and Leadership, but its publication established culture as a real, dynamic, important and controllable thing. This new thing was given a

relatively precise definition but it quickly became a buzzword and an empty vessel filled by whatever definition a CEO or HR leader felt would best serve their purpose.

In its most recent Unicorn-land iteration, culture devolved into nothing more than hoodies, Soylent, office dogs and ping-pong tables. As Unicorn valuations begin to tumble, we do our best to wrest control of this serious topic from its less than serious captors.

We pursue a more serious dialogue on this topic because we believe that culture, in short, is everything. It’s how your organization operates, looks, speaks, interacts, lunges, recovers, thrives and fails. It requires immense effort to form and to keep it in its desired shape. When done well, it yields Apple, (the old) GE, McKinsey, and Google. When left to organically develop, it regresses to the mean of how people and organizations typically interact.

Few executive teams understand the daily maintenance that great cultures require and that explains why so few great cultures exist. In this issue of TQ, our stellar collection of authors cite the few cultural standouts including the US Marine Corps, Southwest Airlines, Disney, RBC and Apple. You’ll learn how companies create and maintain their outstanding cultures and the business outcomes they generate.

So put on your hoodie, pet your dog and sip some Soylent as you peruse TQ’s Culture Issue, but recognize that great cultures are made from much stronger stuff.

Happy reading!

Marc Effron Founder & Publisher Talent Quarterly

From the PUBLISHER

FR

OM

LE

FT: E

RIC

IS

SE

LE

E/S

HU

TT

ER

ST

OC

K.C

OM

, ELE

NO

VS

KY

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M, M

IKE

FLIP

PO

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M

TALENTQ 24

UPDATE YOUR STATUS

HR LEADERS BECOME MORE VALUABLE AT THE TALENT MANAGEMENT INSTITUTETalent is today’s hottest issue – how to identify the best, build them fast and keep them “here and happy.” The Talent Management Institute (TMI) teaches you how to achieve all of that and more. In four days you get the practical insights, powerful tools and helpful feedback you need to build and execute brilliant talent processes.

It’s the “go to” course. In just four years TMI has become the most popular course of its kind. Its public and private sessions have helped nearly 1,000 HR leaders become incredible talent builders.

Register today! Every TMI course has sold out and our only remaining 2016 course (October) is filling up quickly. Register today at talentmanagement.institute and download our brochure at http://bit.ly/UNCTMI2016.

4 TALENTQ | TALENT-QUARTERLY.COM4 TALENTQ | TALENT-QUARTERLY.COM


B Y N I K O C A N N E R

LEADERS GET THE

CULTURES THEY

DESERVE

How to Deserve Better

IST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

KO

KO

UU


I’VE COME TO REGARD THEM—CEOs intoning earnestly about their “future state” cultures, and the HR heads who are all too often the primary agents of trying to arrive there—the way a psychiatrist might regard a never-married, wealthy, attractive 48-year-old, seeking matrimony without changing too much the life that he’s grown used to. Big companies are giant production functions, and part of what they’ve

evolved to produce is the cultures they have today. Real-ity is complicated, but a useful simplification for a CEO is to begin with the assumption that top management, a group of which he or she has generally been a part for sev-eral years, has produced the culture it deserves.

Contrast for a moment John McPhee’s vivid descrip-tion of the late Frank Boyden, from 1902 to 1968 head-master of Deerfield:

[Boyden’s strategy] is best exemplified by his showmanship and his pantoscoping atten-tion to detail. It has been said that a thousand details add up to one impression, and at Deer-field it is the headmaster who adds them up. He thinks in pictures. Once a picture seems right, he wants to keep it that way. Anything that mars it or changes the focus irritates him. To be handed an athletic letter, a cita-tion for academic excellence, or almost any other award, a boy has to walk up onto the stage of the school auditorium: the headmas-ter stations a teacher beside the steps to see to it that they boy’s coat is buttoned. A lengthy and expensively produced concert program once arrived from the printer with one name misspelled. “Miller” had been set as “Millar.” The headmaster had the program reprinted. He stages basketball games as if he were the manager of La Scala. Every student has to at-tend, and all are checked in at the door by masters with clipboards, thus assuring a full house. People come in from all over the valley, too, and the headmaster walks around before the game orchestrating the behavior of his boys, casting acrid glances in the direction of excess commotion, greeting all the farmers, druggists, dentists, and telephone linemen as they come through the door. Then he takes his place on the players’ bench.

A software company is not a boarding school. Differ-ent strategic visions demand unique, uncompromising cultural expressions. But Deerfield Academy in that era can certainly be said to have acquired the culture, and the legacy—at its frequent best and at its sometime worst—that Frank Boyden deserved.

Over more than a decade at Katzenbach Partners and at Booz & Company after the acquisition of Katzenbach, we worked on a significant number of culture change initiatives. A few were quite successful; most weren’t. In our failures, we never really helped top management deserve a culture better than the culture their company

STARBUCKS has newly-hired executives

work as baristas.

Any SOUTHWEST

team member can riff at length about what

“warrior spirit,” “servant’s heart” and “fun-luving attitude”

mean to them and mean in practice.

FR

OM

TO

P: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/K

ICK

ER

S’ I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/C

HA

NC

EB

73

7


had evolved to produce. In the successes, top manage-ment had a Boyden-like hunger—even while employing notably different methods—to deserve the culture they wanted, and the work we did to help them on tactics was just one small expression of their commitment.

HOW DOESN’T CULTURE WORK?Culture is the fabric of shared patterns of how people act, think and feel that impact collective performance. It’s the grain of how a company’s people perceive their world, pay attention to some things and not others, engage cus-tomers, spend money, treat one another.

Let’s dive deeper into what this means practically. Most work on culture begins from a small number of agreed-upon values or cultural imperatives, then tries to move an organization to align with these ideals broad-ly, across the many specific contexts in which people work. Accountability, speed, innovation or any handful of touchstone words like this are meant to crystallize a complex web of actions that together make a company tight, fast or successful in generating and capitalizing on new ideas. This seems sensible, perhaps because com-

panies with distinctively effective cultures do often use touchstone words, and employees across a broad range of contexts act in alignment with these words. For instance, Zappos talks about Delivering Happiness, and has also created a vivid sense of what it means to be a place where employees “create fun and a little weirdness” in service of that goal. Similarly, any Southwest team member can riff at length about what “warrior spirit,” “servant’s heart” and “fun-luving attitude” mean to them and mean in practice.

Unfortunately, it is almost never the case that the real patterns of how people act, think and feel take shape in this way. Almost no one derives what to do in the con-crete rough and tumble of everyday life from a few touch-stone words. In companies like Zappos and Southwest, these powerful words are condensations of patterns that are already durably embedded. This doesn’t mean that the words don’t matter. They help people internalize how the many things they observe and experience are in fact manifestations of the same big idea, which strengthens the intellectual and emotional reinforcement of these examples. The flight attendant humorously improvising or the pilot pitching in to tidy up the plane aren’t “just things those people did”: they’re distinctive behaviors that theye do routinely because they are committed to be-ing cheap and being fun. However, when these patterns aren’t already there, using a word like “cheap” or “fun” is like pushing on a string.

HOW DOES CULTURE WORK?New patterns build on already established patterns. Pat-terns at higher levels of abstraction—like “being highly accountable” or “putting the customer first”—emerge from more concrete patterns, like responding to mes-sages within a day or visiting stores rather than reading reports. Starbucks has newly-hired executives work as baristas. Several years ago, I had breakfast with a senior partner at BCG who had just joined Starbucks as their chief strategy officer, during her second week on the job. She was focused on two things: helping finish the board deck on corporate strategy and serving customers behind the counter. This fundamental experience is the soil in which other practices take root, from day-to-day deci-sions like sending a top-performing store manager out-side her district so that she can take on a more challeng-ing assignment, to big decisions, like closing all stores for three hours in 2008 to retrain partners in the Starbucks experience.

Culture spreads by analogy. Some of these analogies are immediate and local, like early franchisees in McDon-ald’s translating the way Ray Kroc would himself clean bathrooms in the stores to the need to fix any issues with the cleanliness of stores immediately and, if necessary, themselves. Some of these analogies are more concep-

CULTURE IS THE FABRIC

OF SHARED PATTERNS OF

HOW PEOPLE ACT, THINK

AND FEEL THAT IMPACT

COLLECTIVE PERFORMANCE.


tual and global. In a time when management consultan-cies were largely small, personality-driven shops, Marvin Bower instilled professionalism at McKinsey by making an analogy to law firms, such as Jones Day, where he worked after graduating from Harvard Law and Business Schools. This analogy to law firms manifested in every-thing from the division of roles between associates and partners, to the standardized format of documents, to the emphasis on “obligation to dissent” with partners or cli-ents on the basis of facts and logic.

Culture naturally spreads from a smaller “we” to a larger “we.” If I’m an employee on the fish counter at Whole Foods, it’s easy to leap from how I relate to my spe-cific self-directed team (e.g., no one joins the fish counter team without my participation in the choice), to how I participate in the store as a whole, to what it means to me to be an ambassador for Whole Foods as a company. If I’m a teller at Citi, it’s much harder to move from sub-point #2 “challenge mediocrity constructively” of corporate value #7 “demonstrate a passion for winning” to a clear sense of what to do about the mediocrity that I happen to experience in my branch office on a given Tuesday.

MANAGERS MATTERWhile we think of culture change as something that takes a long time to achieve, culture forms and reforms quickly in contained environments when all the signals powerfully line up. As Philip Zimbardo commented on his Stanford Prison Experiment: “Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situa-tion was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme

stress.” Companies like Chipotle recognize this powerful force of a contained, powerfully reinforcing environment can be harnessed for good. “Restaurateurs” at Chipotle are store leaders who build great people culture by develop-ing and mentoring teams of top performers. Together, team members commit to and achieve high standards in every aspect of running their restaurant. When every team member is part of a strong “we” like this, initia-tive that pulls the team further toward a shared ideal is celebrated and strengthens the team’s collective stan-dard. Behavior that doesn’t meet the high aspirations is quickly addressed. People who internalize being part of this kind of “we” are more likely to recreate it elsewhere, which Chipotle recognizes: they offer the Restaurateur a $10,000 bonus any time one of her team members gets promoted to be general manager of another restaurant.

One of the most powerful experiences I’ve had work-ing on culture change as a member of a Booz & Company team advising then-CEO of General Motors Fritz Hender-son on work during and immediately coming out of GM’s bankruptcy. Henderson was too rushed and too wise to work on culture through the traditional approach of a cascade—“first, align top management, then the next lev-el…” Instead, after the first meeting launching the work, Henderson identified eight “pride builders” who embod-ied the culture he wanted to build, each one or two lev-els under his top executive team. We helped these pride builders—one of whom, Mary Barra, is now Chief Execu-tive—develop a shared understanding of what they were doing right, concrete examples of what was already work-ing, and some areas where they could push things harder and faster in the direction they were already pushing. These pride builders, in turn, identified five to ten col-leagues each, mostly two levels under them, who equally exemplified how GM needed to be. A handful of weeks into the effort, when previous teams concerned with cul-ture at GM would still have been debating the fine points of their team charter, Henderson was in a room with six dozen or so of these pride builders, committing to take ac-tion on their concrete priorities (“yes, we can get this deci-sion about a bottlenecked issue at Cadillac made within a week or two”). Like Chipotle’s Restaurateurs, these pride builders were able, with top management behind them, to move fast, surface and debate tough facts, take a stand driving decisions rather than letting things get lost in the matrix, and so on.

CULTURE NATURALLY

SPREADS FROM

A SMALLER “WE” TO

A LARGER “WE.”


The vast majority of work on “change management” emphasizes the actual, day-to-day work of management too little—and the kind of programmatic activity that the staff functions and consultants are positioned to drive from outside the chain of line management too much. Jon Katzenbach and I spent several months do-ing research in GM’s North American Manufacturing, at our own expense, almost a decade before the work with Fritz Henderson and the pride builders during the bank-ruptcy. We chose GM’s plants because we believed that if we could find motivating front-line leaders in an envi-ronment that difficult, we’d be able to put our fingers on what it looks like to develop a strong sub-culture, with-out any of the tailwind that companies like Southwest and Starbucks create for their front-line units. Through this research, we painted a picture—described in Jon’s book Why Pride Matters More Than Money—of how these leaders operated, and we were able to show that their plants performed better and were improving faster than peers. What GM needed to do with these insights wasn’t to create a change program, or hire Katzenbach Partners

to provide expert advice about how to act on the best of what GM’s leaders were already doing. They needed to make it a big part of executive leadership’s work in the manufacturing division to get their plant managers to lead the way their pride builder colleagues demonstrated it was possible to lead. Executive leaders needed to em-brace this work with the same level of urgency that Fritz Henderson later, under more desperate circumstances, embodied. GM’s manufacturing leaders agreed with our findings, they made some small investments in change programs, but they mostly focused on other things. It isn’t clear that this “off to the side” made a large or lasting difference.

WHAT GREAT FOUNDERS DOMy longtime partner Jon Katzenbach has come to be-lieve that it doesn’t make sense to work on transforming culture: that one should focus on changing a critical few behaviors, using the strengths of the existing culture as

CULTURE SPREADS BY ANALOGY

Early McDonald’s franchisees translated

the way Ray Kroc would himself clean bathrooms in the stores to the need to fix any issues with

the cleanliness of stores immediately and, if

necessary, themselves.

IST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

PAT

TY

_C


a tool to leverage in making those changes. As he wrote in a 2013 digital article for Harvard Business Review titled “There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround”: “Company culture changes very slowly, so efforts to do an about-face are inevitably a waste of time and energy: Organizations either declare victory prematurely or, in frustration, abandon the attempt.”

This is good advice for most leaders, well calculated to avoid wasteful direction of energy into poorly-specified corporate culture programs. And yet this advice flies in the face of what I’ve found worked for me as an entrepre-neur—including in my role as co-founder and Manag-ing Partner of Katzenbach Partners, where a distinctive culture was perhaps our main competitive advantage against firms with brand, knowledge and scale advan-tages. And it flies in the face of what I’ve seen work for founders and transformational leaders who have built lastingly distinctive companies at far greater scale.

Leaders who build great cultures focus on the whole institution, shaping companies where each facet of op-erations reinforces a vision not just for how the company should succeed, but of how it should engage, look, think and feel. In this respect (and perhaps this respect only), Frank Boyden and Steve Jobs were birds of a feather. Lead-ers who get culture right at the scale of a whole company recognize that every particular sends a message about what’s good and what’s unacceptable. Think of Ray Kroc cleaning bathrooms as he drove around the country vis-iting McDonald’s franchises, or Sam Walton setting a powerful example of thrift even as he became one of the nation’s richest men.

As these examples show us, great cultures that scale tend to be extreme. An environment that constantly re-inforces something far from the norm, across far-flung operations, can only produced by a set of distinctive ideas translated into an encompassing set of habits and practices. These cultures are usually produced by found-ers, although the story of Frank Boyden, who became headmaster shortly after Deerfield’s one-century mark illustrates how it is eminently possible for a much-later leader to have a founder-like influence by demonstrating a similarly pervasive focus on manifesting core ideas in every aspect of daily operations.

SO, YOU WANT TO CHANGE YOUR CULTURE…

The CEO who wants to change culture needs to want it enough to change his or her life for it. Culture change plans need to look less like the programmatic lists of values, forums and activities we’ve all seen so often, and more like an uncompromising articulation of operation-al and behavioral litmus tests to which top management and every other layer of management holds themselves accountable. Culture Change, of the “Capital C” kind, means digging into the specifics of how people in criti-cal jobs deliver on the company’s distinctive way of creat-ing value. This isn’t Citi’s meaningless maxim “challenge mediocrity constructively.” It’s the specific number of minutes it takes Southwest to turn a plane, or the way Starbucks works through every aspect of what it means for a front-line employee to be a partner—from the way they come to own shares to the way they learn customers’ names.

Top management in companies that shape or reshape great cultures constantly confront the gaps between their vision for how the company should operate and how day-to-day realities play out on the field. More im-portantly, they create an environment in which team members at all levels confront these same gaps in a simi-larly unrelenting way. There’s no place for mediocrity to hide on the specific dimensions where the company is geared to excel. Companies who shape great cultures elevate everyday operations. There isn’t a less demanding way, and the leaders who shape these cultures wouldn’t wish it otherwise. TQ

THE CEO WHO WANTS TO CHANGE CULTURE NEEDS TO

WANT IT ENOUGH TO CHANGE HIS OR HER LIFE FOR IT.

ShinyShimmerySweet

Attractive qualities in a light dessert; less attractive in your consulting advice.It’s easy to be distracted by consulting firms’ colorful claims when searching for solutions to your toughest talent issues. Unfortunately, the products and services they say are proven to be effective often lack one thing – proof.

At The Talent Strategy Group, we believe in science-based simplicity – solving our clients’ talent issues using proven academic science applied in the simplest possible way.

The world’s largest and most successful companies rely on us to radically simplify their talent practices and to build their leaders’ capability to grow talent. Let’s discuss how we can help you.

Learn more at www.talentstrategygroup.com


W A R R I O R S P I R I T


The Cultural Component of

TOP TALENT

B Y J O N K A T Z E N B A C H

Using Current Cultural Forces to Attract and Retain the Best


MOST ORGANIZATIONS that are able to sustain world-class talent advantages over their competition get a lot of help from their cultures. The stand-outs would in-clude Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, Google, Apple, Goldman-Sachs, The Mayo Clinic, and McKinsey. That list would also include most elite military units like

the Navy Seals, the USMC, the French Foreign Legion, the Australian Air Force and the Green Berets. Even this obvious sampling of talent rich enter-prises highlights their diversity more than their similarity. Their cultures are similar only in the abstract notion of shared values (e.g., integrity, collabora-tion, accountability, social responsibility and customer centricity). Yet each of them still manages to get a lot of help from their cultures.

As a result, most other organizations (i.e., tal-ent aspirations are not supported by their cul-tures) face an age-old conundrum of replacing or changing drastically a cultural situation that is both complex and deeply imbedded emotionally as well as rationally. Unfortunately, such cultures do not change very much or very fast, no matter what you do. And that causes leaders of such companies to either ignore their cultural chal-lenges in upgrading talent, or to simply declare victory early based upon top-down, program-matic cultural change efforts. These invariably end disappointingly with but incremental gains in things like engagement scores that are seldom accompanied by either business results or lasting change in the behaviors that could really matter for attracting and retaining the best people.

There is another way. It is, admittedly, counter-intuitive and therefore requires a very different leadership approach than is required for strategic, operating, and organizational excellence. That ap-proach is based upon the fundamental realities about cultures that invariably underpin top tal-ent advantages (shown in the chart on the right).

Let’s explore and illustrate each of these prem-ises, and how they pertain to sustaining world-class talent over time.

Emotional Commitment “trumps” Rational ComplianceFrederick Herzberg’s work helps clarify the im-portance and simplicity of emotional commit-ment in the workforce motivation. For several decades, he and his academic colleagues probed the motivational influences on workers. One of his last articles in the HBR in 1987 captures the essence of his work in its provocative title: “One More time: How do you motivate employees?” While Herzberg’s work is not universally accepted across the academic community, it’s elegant sim-plicity and clarity is hard to ignore pragmatically. Simply put, he is telling us that changing how people feel about what they do at work daily and weekly, has the best chance of changing their lev-els of motivation and loyalty. The better they feel about the work they do, the more effort they put into doing it well and less likely they are to leave. And that stems mostly from emotional influence. Let’s explore a simple example of how that works in practice, and what culture and talent probably has to do with it. C

LOC

KW

ISE

FR

OM

TO

P R

IGH

T: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

DE

BR

AM

ILLE

T, O

LEG

GA

WR

ILO

FF

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M, C

AR

LOS

E.

SA

NTA

MA

RIA

/S

HU

TT

ER

ST

OC

K.C

OM

, WA

YN

E0

216

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M. A

LSO

US

ED

ON

PR

ES

VIO

US

SP

RE

AD

.


Several years ago I was working with Michael Sabia, former CEO of Bell Canada, in his efforts to drive a transformational change in sales and service results across the company. His primary concern was an apparent disconnect between the front-line sales and service people and the cus-tomers. Most customers at that time did not have positive feelings about their telecom service, and that was causing many of the best Bell people to relocate. At the time, both internal and external observers saw this as a major cultural change challenge.

Sabia felt certain that there were a dozen or so front line supervisors across Canada who had “cracked the code” for generating customer good feelings about Bell services. So he asked me to spend some time with several of them to learn what they did differently from peers that enabled them to motivate their people more effectively. The answer turned out to be surprisingly sim-ple: each successful supervisor concentrated on changing a few sales and service behaviors that would make customers feel good during each visit. For example, asking for immediate feed-back from the customer during the visit, and call-ing back a few days later to ensure satisfaction.

While each customer call was different, it boiled down to ensuring that each sales or service inter-action felt good to the customer.

In other words, the solution to what we thought was a “major cultural issue” was mostly emotional and behavioral. Moreover, the secret weapon turned out to be tapping into employee and customer “mutual feelings” about each visit. The ultimate result of that simple revelation led to a series of mostly informal discussions among supervisory peer groups that spread behaviors across some 1500 front-line supervisors across Canada. It actually changed a few key behaviors all across the system in less than 18 months. So wasn’t that cultural? Yes, but first and foremost, it was working on a few behaviors that could be identified, observed, and changed. Once that hap-pened, the results produced an ongoing level of emotional commitment that could not have been achieved programmatically in anything like an 18 month time frame.

The overall “change in the culture” was mini-mal, gradual and secondary to the change in feelings and behaviors between the sales/service people and their customers.

Starbucks

Southwest Airlines

Google

Apple

Goldman-Sachs

The Mayo Clinic

McKinsey

Navy Seals

the USMC

the French Foreign Legion

the Australian Air Force

the Green Berets

CULTURAL STAND-OUTS

EMOTIONAL COMMITMENT

outranks rational argument

How people feel about

the work itself matters

most in talent rich situa-

tions. As a result, those

who attract top talent

rely heavily on emotions

to sustain their talent

advantage over time

LOCAL CULTURAL SITUATIONS

can rarely be avoided

As a result, they are

at least as important

as corporate cultural

imperatives in influencing

what people do and

how they feel about

their work environment

over time.

Enterprise cultures are COMPLEX

EMOTIONALLYThey are the result of

multiple interactions over

time. As a result, they

contain untapped sourc-

es of emotional energy

that can accelerate and

sustain (or hinder and

erode) critical behaviors

A “CRITICAL FEW” mindset

enables cultural alignment

The inherent complexity

of cultural forces and

behavioral specifics

warrants a targeted

approach on both formal

and informal dimensions

to ensure the lasting

results that talent seeks.

FUNDAMENTAL REALITIES

about culture


Tapping Existing Emotional ReservoirsYou don’t have to change your culture to change the behaviors that matter most to your people. Every cultural situation that I am familiar with contains multiple sources of untapped emotion-al influence. That may not be the only attribute that strong cultures offer. However, it is far and away the one that offers the highest potential for influencing behaviors that matter most for at-tracting and retaining top talent. In the preced-ing vignette on Bell Canada, we see an example of one such special source of positive emotions, namely pride in the work itself. And while that is perhaps one of the most effective sources of emo-tional energy for sustaining “world class talent” over time, it is not the only one.

Other sources emanate from what people across the enterprise already care about—such as what they strive for, admire, enjoy, or simply feel good about doing. It also includes what peo-ple worry about, stress over, resent, fear, distrust, avoid, or feel angry about having to do. On the one hand those variations result in the complex-ity that makes cultures very difficult to change. More importantly, however, identifying the mul-tiple sources of emotions that are already opera-tive in your cultural situation provides a broader set of emotional alternatives to draw upon when seeking to energize particular behaviors. We find this to be true even if and when those behaviors manifest themselves somewhat differently with-in different populations, business situations, or segments of the enterprise. While dealing with that diversity involves shifting the influence among the current cultural forces, it is not nearly as difficult (or as threatening because of unin-tended consequences) as changing or replacing entire cultures and sub-cultures.

A good illustration of this cultural reality can be found in the well-publicized story of General Motors’ struggle with bankruptcy in 2009. At the time, there was little doubt in the public press that the main problem at GMC was its culture, which was widely described publicly as slow, cumbersome, bureaucratic, risk averse and out

of touch with potential customers. Many outside pundits and informed internal observers main-tained that major cultural change was impera-tive, with some arguing for complete cultural replacement. The interim CEO at the time had been with GMC for many years in different finan-cial and operating roles. He was well respected and certainly very knowledgeable about the company cultures. Early on he appointed a very able senior executive Culture Council to address GMC’s cultural challenges. However, he also ac-knowledged privately that as interim CEO, he did not have the time to “change the culture”. Far too many people were frustrated, confused, and fearful of losing their jobs. As a result the risk of losing the some of the best talent was significant.

So, long story short, he instigated three fun-damental behavior changes. First he lead his top team in making significant decisions with respect to changes in product lines, market-ing priorities, operating schedules and design plans. Many of these were very visible changes made in days and weeks rather than months and years. Even without any broad announcement, news of this accelerated decision making spread rapidly across the US organization. Not surpris-ingly, many other decision bodies followed suit. Second, he and his Culture Council executives started meeting informally in “safe space” discus-sions with small groups of respected managers (authentic informal leaders) several layers down in the organization. The purpose of these discus-sions was to gain a true picture of what front-line and mid-level people across North America were feeling and doing about their cultural concerns. This led to a series of larger gatherings that cre-ated many more “safe space” interactions. Out of these relatively informal interactions came a series of broader efforts to get more people in North America in direct contact with real cus-tomers—and thereby obtain a true sense of the gap between customer feelings about the prod-ucts and the actual engineering, marketing and design priorities.

I continue to believe that these three simple behavior changes were instrumental in acceler-ating the company’s recovery from bankruptcy

BELL CANADA

Each successful supervisor

concentrated on changing

a few sales and service

behaviors that would make

customers feel good during

each visit.

SNAP SHOT


in what was heralded as “the fastest ever bank-ruptcy recovery” in North America. It also slowed dramatically the loss of talented people leaving to avoid the pain of bankruptcy. And the sources of the emotional energy behind those three came from a few very strong emotions that permeated the company at that time, namely: a genuine “family” feeling within GMC’s local work groups (one constantly heard the phrase “we really care about each other”), a latent pride in the remark-able legacy of GMC—whose first CEO (Alfred Sloan) is legendary for creating the first truly decentralized organization in the auto industry (“we are better than that!” was frequently voiced), and a growing conviction that each person had a role to play in getting things done faster, better, and more collaboratively (“we don’t have to wait for someone to tell us what to do differently”).

Facing Local Cultural RealitiesLike politics (which, they say, is “mostly local”), local feelings matter culturally. As a result, the strongest cultures actually integrate different local feelings and behavioral manifestations without losing enterprise-wide coherence. While there is always an over-riding theme in the best cultures (e.g., the USMC’s and SWA’s “warrior spirit”, or Google’s “Don’t be Evil” the overall theme will manifest itself locally in dif-ferent ways without losing strategic coherence. It is hardly ever enough to simply promulgate an emotionally appealing theme along with a set of moral sounding shared value statements. Un-less and until a critical few key local behaviors become habits, deeply imbedded cultures rarely change much.

For example, several years ago when Henry Kissinger was leaving his remarkable govern-ment career for the private sector, I was manag-ing the NYC office of McKinsey & Company, Inc. At the time, I received a call from the CEO of one of the firm’s major clients, suggesting that I talk with Dr. Kissinger about his interest in en-tering the private consulting field. That discus-sion led to several other discussions between Dr.

Kissinger and a few other senior partners of the global firm. Initially these discussions centered on Kissinger becoming a global senior partner, and my enthusiasm was high. Clearly Kissinger’s wisdom and experience on matters of interna-tional consequence would add significantly to the firm’s strategic capabilities and reputation across the world. However, in a few international markets, the partners did not respond favorably to Kissinger’s strong personality. As this option was explored in depth in further discussions, however, it became clear to both sides that a local cultural fit did not exist in some important areas of the firm. Kissinger wisely decided to start his own firm.

What I had failed to appreciate was the im-portance of local cultural fit. The firm’s global network that initially seemed to provide an ideal opportunity for someone of Kissinger’s intellect, wisdom and experience was actually a “misfit cul-turally” in a few major locations. While this was disappointing from my vantage point, I am sure in retrospect that it was the right decision for both Kissinger and McKinsey. Local cultures matter a lot, and they don’t change easily. Based on what

GMC“We don’t have to wait for someone to tell us what to do.”

SNAP SHOT

IST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

ED

ALD

RID

GE


we now know about working with and within ex-isting cultural challenges, however, I believe we could have handled that opportunity differently.

The Critical Few at SWAThe essence of this insight on ensuring the kind of cultural help needed for sustaining a talent advantage can be simply stated: work with and within your current cultural situation by focus-ing on the critical few behaviors, emotions and informal interactions. As simple as this may seem, it is very difficult to do because it requires an integrated leadership approach across mul-tiple levels of the organization. The very best ex-ample I know of is Southwest Airlines; they are truly a “culture super star” that has lead their in-dustry for nearly fifty years.

To paraphrase their elegantly simple formula: Four key behaviors: 1) Make every customer

experience enjoyable; 2) make every internal in-

teraction fun; and 3) generate a habit of “volun-teerism” across the company whenever either customer or employee experiences need atten-tion; and 4) do it all “on the cheap”, thereby en-suring the low-cost airline in the U.S..

Three key emotions: 1) take pride in the work itself; 2) care personally about colleagues and customers; and 3) cultivate a true “warrior spirit” (this was actually borrowed from the USMC during a joint SWA/USMC workshop)

It’s hard to over-emphasize the value of cul-tural models like SWA and the Marines in sus-taining world-class talent - particularly when it comes to maintaining the critical few behaviors over literally decades (if not centuries for the USMC) of intense competitions and battles. It is no accident that SWA would gravitate to “a war-rior spirit” notion after their interactions with the USMC several years ago. The two fight very different wars, but the importance of their cul-tural forces in winning their competitive battles is none the less parallel. TQ

SOUTH WEST

AIRLINES4

Key Behaviors

1. Make every customer

experience enjoyable

2. Make every internal

interaction fun

3. Generate a habit of

“volunteerism” across the company

whenever either customer

or employee experiences need

attention

4. Do it all “on the cheap”

3 Key

Emotions

1. Take pride in the work itself

2. Care personally

about colleagues and

customers

3. Cultivate a true “warrior

spirit”

SNAP SHOT

CA

RLO

S E

. SA

NTA

MA

RIA

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M

We find you the best peopleSuccessful executive search

comes from being able to differentiate the great from the merely good. Big network – big deal, unless you can identify the

best talent within it.

At TSG Executive Search, we know great HR talent because

we’ve worked with them, helped them learn, watched

them grow.

Across financial services, technology, consumer

products, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and more, we

know which HR leaders are in the 90th percentile.

Let us help you find the best talentstrategygroup.com

because we know the right people



CEO SUCCESSION

B Y C H A D A . H A R T N E L L A N D A N G E L O J . K I N I C K I

Does the Fit between CEO Leadership and Organizational

Culture Matter?

CEO

LEF

T: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

PAU

L C

OW

AN


WE OBSERVED and participated in a key decision affecting every organization at some point in time. The decision involves CEO succes-sion. While it makes sense to find someone with relevant experience and an interpersonal style that meshes with the board, we find an additional consideration that frequently gets ignored. It involves the fit between a CEO’s leadership style and the organization’s culture. Consider a recent example.

ny emphasizes collaboration, trust, empowerment, and sup-port among employees. Loyalty and commitment among long-time employees was extremely high. Unfortunately, the company’s culture led to the protection and promotion of long-tenured employees rather than enhancing opportu-nities for newer and more qualified people. It also fostered a lack of accountability for performance. All told, the CEO’s relationship-oriented style fit nicely with clan culture, but it resulted in a strong internal focus resulting in happy em-ployees and poor financial results.

How does this happen? Can managers recognize and thwart this process? Yes, they can! And one of the first steps entails consideration of the fit between the CEO’s leader-ship style and the organizational culture.

Culture fit generally refers to the similarity between a leader’s values and behaviors and those that constitute an organization’s culture. It has become an important consid-eration for executive hiring decisions because a lack of fit can be a key cause of CEO termination. The idea of fit is ap-pealing. CEOs whose leadership is similar with the organi-zation’s culture are more likely to understand, comply with, and reinforce the way people do things. As a result, their ideas, attitudes, and behaviors are more likely to be accepted and modeled by employees.

As the opening example illustrates, however, culture fit may not deliver on its promise to enhance organizational effectiveness. Let us consider the following questions to un-derstand why high CEO fit may be less effective than lower fit: How do CEO leadership and organizational culture be-come similar? Why do similarities impair organizational performance? What can organizations do about it?

HOW DO CEO LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE BECOME SIMILAR?Organizational culture is the social glue that helps people understand the behavioral norms and expectations at work. It guides and shapes our behavior and can be an enabler or resistor to organizational change. This is why CEOs should be attentive to their level of culture fit as they attempt to ex-ecute strategic plans. Now to the question at hand. CEO lead-ership and organizational culture become similar over time for two reasons: (1) the leader’s imprint and (2) selection.

THE LEADERS IMPRINT

Leaders can significantly shape an organization’s culture, particularly when the organization is young. At the initial stages of an organization’s inception, employees take their

WW

The board of directors for a Fortune 500 company decid-ed to replace the CEO. He worked for the company for many years, being promoted from an entry level professional to CEO. He was firmly entrenched with the organization’s cul-ture and had a strong internal network. The CEO’s downfall was the inability to achieve the company’s growth strate-gies for several years running.

One cause of this result was his failure to challenge the organization’s strong “clan culture.” A clan culture is one that resembles a familial environment in which the compa-


cues from their leader’s beliefs and behaviors regarding how to treat customers and fellow employees. Leaders convey their relational and strategic philosophies through what they do and how they do it. For instance, followers observe what their leaders pay attention to and the criteria by which they hire, fire, reward, and promote organizational mem-bers. These behaviors send signals about the goals, organi-zational processes, and follower attributes, attitudes, and behaviors the leader values. If someone wants to be success-ful in the organization, they will model the leader’s perspec-tive. Over time, and coupled with organizational success, this modeling process entrenches a set of values, beliefs, and behaviors throughout the organization that come to anchor an organization’s culture.

CEO SELECTION

CEO leadership and culture tend to become similar over time due to the attraction, selection, and attrition of em-

ployees. CEOs are attracted to organizations that share a similar way of thinking. Similarities highlight commonali-ties that affirm a leader’s core values and beliefs. Similari-ties are also appealing to CEOs because they will encoun-ter less resistance within the top management team about the organization’s strategy and how to execute it. Organi-zations tend to select CEOs who share their employees’ shared values, beliefs, and assumptions because common-alities produce clear, consistent, and unambiguous com-munication, aligned perspectives, and reduced conflict. Differences between CEO leadership and culture, on the other hand, create angst, anxiety, and the potential for in-terpersonal conflict.

CEOs whose core values clash with those of the organiza-tion tend to leave either voluntarily or involuntarily. These leaders either are ineffective at implementing change or experience internal pressure to conform to, or align with, organizationally accepted patterns of thinking, feeling, and

behaving. Failure on either front results in high levels of frustration for CEOs or the organiza-tions they lead. Taken together, attraction, se-lection, and attrition produces and reinforces similarities between leadership and culture over time.

WHY DO SIMILARITIES IMPAIR ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE?There is a natural tendency for cultures to co-alesce into distinct and strong patterns because CEO leadership and culture naturally gravitate toward similarity. Strong cultures exist when employees throughout the organization uni-formly agree on the organization’s core values, beliefs, and assumptions. This agreement re-sults in consistent communication across orga-nizational levels, increased clarity about what employees should do, and improved coordina-tion across units, departments, or divisions. On the other hand, there are drawbacks to strong cultures. Uniformity within organizations can create a myopic focus on a narrow set of atti-tudes, behaviors, processes, and outcomes that ultimately impair organizational performance. The opening anecdote illustrated this process, and it is not an outlier. We have seen it many times. Consider the following well-publicized examples of Volkswagen and Zenefits.

THERE IS A NATURAL TENDENCY FOR CULTURES TO COALESCE INTO DISTINCT AND STRONG PATTERNS BECAUSE CEO LEADERSHIP AND CULTURE NATURALLY GRAVITATE TOWARD SIMILARITY.


VOLKSWAGEN (VW)

VW, Europe’s largest carmaker, admit-ted in 2015 to installing software in cer-tain vehicles with diesel engines to cheat emissions tests in the United States. These devices helped Volkswagen grow its U.S. market share by marketing their cars’ low emissions when they actually emitted pol-lutants up to 40 times in excess of the regu-latory limit. But how does CEO leadership and culture contribute to this situation?

During this time period both the CEO, Martin Winterkorn, and the organization-al culture were predominantly results-focused. Winterkorn, soon after becoming CEO in 2007, set the vision for VW to be-come the world’s largest car manufactur-er. The CEO’s demanding, authoritarian leadership style combined with a perfor-mance-driven culture resulted in a climate of fear that suppressed conflict, stifled upward communication throughout the organization, and encouraged accomplish-ing aggressive goals at any cost, including quality and ethics. Although Winterkorn’s leadership style fit the organization’s culture, the similari-ties produced a myopic focus on competition, market share, and performance that resulted in a catastrophic oversight that damaged the company’s reputation, profitability, and market share.

ZENEFITS

Peter Conrad founded Zenefits in 2013. The company’s mis-sion was to create software for businesses that would manage their human resources and health insurance functions in an integrated platform. The company grew from 15 employees in 2013 to more than 1,600 in three years via a culture that mirrored Conrad’s leadership style. Conrad created a fun-loving, party-like environment in which employees would celebrate the acquisition of new clients by drinking alco-holic shots. The Wall Street Journal described the culture as having a “frat-house feel.” Conrad also set ambitious sales growth goals, aiming to increase revenues from $10 million to $100 million within one year. The company experienced unprecedented growth but soon found itself embroiled in conflict due to inadequate internal processes and controls. Conrad resigned from the company in February 2016 amid allegations regarding employees’ compliance with state in-

surance regulatory requirements. Zenefits provides another example that similarities between leadership and organiza-tional culture can create vulnerable “blind spots.”

As with the CEO in the opening example, Winterkorn and Conrad modeled, supported, and reinforced their re-spective organization’s core values and beliefs. That is, CEO leadership mirrored the organization’s culture. The leader-ship—culture similarities, however, developed an overly narrow focus that eventually undermined their respective organization’s processes and performance. These examples offer a cautionary tale of the gravitational pull of high CEO leadership-culture fit.

WHAT CAN ORGANIZATIONS DO ABOUT IT? BE DIFFERENT.

Our research suggests that CEOs should adopt a leadership style that is different from the organization’s culture. We conducted a survey with 114 CEOs and 324 top manage-ment team members in the high technology industry. We asked questions about the extent to which CEO leadership was task- or relationship-focused and the degree to which organizational culture emphasized goal achievement and LE

FT: I

MA

GE

CO

UR

TE

SY

ST

EV

E J

EN

NIN

GS

/GE

TT

Y IM

AG

ES

FO

R T

EC

HC

RU

NC

H/C

C B

Y 2

.0. R

IGH

T: I

MA

GE

C

OU

RT

ES

Y V

OLK

SW

AG

EN

OF

AM

ER

ICA

. IN

C.

IT IS IMPORTANT FOR CEOS’ LEADERSHIP TO BE

DIFFERENT FROM THE ORGANIZATION’S CULTURE…

BUT NOT TOO DIFFERENT.

P E T E R C O N R A DZ E N E F I T S

M A R T I N W I N T E R K O R N

V W


profitability or employee development, engagement, and commitment. Findings showed lower financial perfor-mance when CEOs’ leadership behavior fit with the organi-zational culture. On the other hand, companies had higher financial performance when the CEO’s leadership style was different from the culture. These findings indicate that lead-ership—culture similarities produce redundancies whereas differences provide additional resources to the organiza-tion. It seems that differences between CEO leadership and culture introduce more diverse perspectives, experiences, and resources that have the potential to improve decision-making, creativity, and adaptability. As such, a leadership style that is different from the culture focuses employees on attending to important outcomes and processes that cul-tural signals overlook.

Returning to the aforementioned illustrations, all of the CEOs decided to lead in a manner that matched, or fit with, the organizational culture. This led to an avoidance of hold-ing people accountable for results that conflicted with the culture such as tenure over performance, market share over quality, and growth over ethics. All three of these CEOs ul-timately were fired.

In the wake of these CEO dismissals, all three companies hired CEOs with leadership styles that differed from their respective organizational cultures. In the opening example, the company hired a CEO who focused on results and on cre-ating a culture that rewarded performance and innovation rather than tenure and loyalty. Matthias Muller articulated a commitment to build upon VW’s performance-based cul-ture by developing a culture of openness, cooperation, and quality processes. David Sacks began to ground Zenefits ex-temporaneous culture by cultivating a grounded workplace that emphasizes compliance, integrity, customer service, and a rewarding workplace. These examples illustrate that CEOs must be intentional about their leadership style and incorporate different behaviors from those affirmed by the organization’s culture to enhance accountability and im-prove organizational performance. It is thus important for CEOs’ leadership to be different from the organization’s cul-ture… but not too different.

BUT NOT TOO DIFFERENT.

Differences between leadership and culture fall along a spectrum from clashing to complementary. Leaders whose style is opposite or confrontational to organizational cul-ture is likely to be met with resistance or resentment, and for good reason. Culture forms over time as employees learn how to effectively relate with each other and deal with task-

related problems. A leader who deliberately discards every assumption about what has worked in the past creates a great deal of uncertainty, ambiguity, and skepticism among the organization’s employees. Employees may also find it demeaning, resulting in resistance to the leader’s change efforts. Rather than invalidating the organization’s existing culture writ large, successful leaders build upon the organi-zation’s culture by incorporating a cadre of new skills, abili-ties, and resources that complement the culture and build upon its strengths to accentuate performance. The new CEOs we discussed are balancing the productive and func-tional elements of the existing culture with new core values that offset underlying weaknesses.

RECOMMENDATIONS TO IMPROVE LEADERSHIP— CULTURE FIT

How can CEOs best manage the fit between leadership and culture to optimize organizational performance? The following recommendations leverage the joint value of CEO leadership and culture.

1. Effective CEOs should not entirely conform to nor contrast with the organization’s culture; they should contribute to the culture. A leader’s goal is not to blindly adhere to or antagonistically challenge every assump-tion underlying the organization’s current culture. Instead, leaders must search diligently for what isn’t currently being handled by the culture and fill in the gap. This process involves adopting a flexible leader-ship style. If the culture is task-focused, exercise a lead-ership style that builds supportive relationships, par-ticipation, communication, and collaboration among employees. If the culture is relationship-focused, lead by clarifying followers’ role expectations, focusing on results, and holding followers accountable for perfor-mance. In this way, CEOs contribute to the culture and position the organization for success.

2. CEOs must pay acute attention to the alignment be-tween the organization’s strategy and culture. If cul-ture is allowed to drift, it WILL eat strategy for break-fast according to renowned writer and consultant Peter Drucker. In the opening example, the organization’s culture drifted from an external focus on competition and performance to an internal focus on tenure and loy-alty. VW’s culture drifted by emphasizing performance at the expense of the strategic imperative to build the brand by increasing its reputation and trust with con-


sumers. Zenefits culture drifted by underscoring fun and rapid growth at the expense of ethical policies and procedures. In each case, cultural misalignments un-dermined each company’s long-term strategies.

CEOs can create strategy-culture alignment by tak-ing four steps. (1) Clarify the organization’s strategy. (2) Identify specific values and beliefs that correspond with specific aspects of the organization’s strategy. (3) Ensure that cultural values are monitored, rewarded, and supported via human resource policies, practices, and procedures. (4) Institute a culture of accountabil-ity in which employees can raise concerns about prob-lems and discrepancies without fear of retaliation. Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford Motor Company achieved this objective by holding frequent meetings with his top management team to identify problems and lever-age the organization’s resources to solve them. Through encouraging and rewarding transparency among ex-ecutives, cross-functional communication increased, complex problems were solved, and organizational pro-cesses improved. All of these improvements enabled Ford to overcome a $17 billion operating loss and even-tually return to profitability.

3. CEOs can engage in incremental culture change by capitalizing on positive cultural characteristics while questioning or eliminating counterproductive charac-teristics. There are numerous culture change levers at the CEO’s disposal. These levers include reformulating the organization’s core values, mission, and strategy. They also include aligning the organization’s structure, human resource practices, and organizational climate with the modified values, mission, and strategy. Keep in mind that organizational members are attentive to attitudes and behaviors that are desired, rewarded, and supported. As a result, organizational members need to receive clear, consistent communication throughout the managerial ranks about organizational priorities in addition to rewards associated with the valued objec-tives. Be careful to devote frequent time and attention to measure and reward desired behaviors to reinforce the new expectations and ingrain them into the organi-zation’s culture. Doing so will develop skills, processes, and competencies within the organization that are cur-rently lacking.

In conclusion, culture fit has earned widespread ac-colades and popular acclaim, but it can produce a narrow

focus that undermines the organization’s long-term reputa-tion and performance. CEOs would be wise to consider their ongoing fit with the organization’s culture. Because culture can change over time, so should the CEO’s leadership. It’s important to resist the blinders that inevitably ensue when CEO leadership and culture gravitate toward similarities. With intentional and mindful leadership, leadership—cul-ture differences can be managed to cultivate a competitive advantage. TQ

REFERENCESAndersen, E. (2012). The most important reason people fail in a new job. Forbes, April 25, http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaander-sen/2012/04/25/the-most-impor-tant-reason-people-fail-in-a-new-job/#cadccd73a2ec.Barney, J. (1986). Organizational culture: Can it be a source of sustained competitive advantage? Academy of Management Review, 11, 656-665. Bort, J. (2016). Lies, booze, and billions: How one of the fasted-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of control. Business Insider, March 11, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-inside-story-of-zenefits-2016-3.Chatman, J. A., Caldwell, D. F., O’Reilly, C. A., & Doerr, B. (2014). Parsing organizational culture: How the norm for adaptabil-ity influences the relationship between culture consensus and financial performance in high-technology firms. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35: 785-808.Cremer, A., & Bergin, T. (2015). Fear and respect: VW’s culture under Winterkorn. Reuters, October 10, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-emissions-culture-idUSKCN0S40MT20151010.Hartnell, C. A., Kinicki, A. J., Lambert, L. S., Fugate, M., & Doyle-Corner, P. (2016). Do similarities or differences between CEO leadership and organizational culture have a more positive effect on firm per-formance? A test of competing predictions.

Journal of Applied Psychology, 101, 846-861.Hotten, R. (2015). Volkswagen: The scandal explained. BBC News, December 10, http://www.bbc.com/news/busi-ness-34324772.Kotter, J.P., & Heskett, J.L. (1992). Corporate Culture and Perfor-mance. New York: Free Press.Sacks, D. (2016) The new Zenefits—Becoming the compliance company. Zenefits Blog, May 9, https://www.zenefits.com/blog/new-zenefits-becoming-compliance-company/.Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and lead-ership (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Schneider, B. (1987). The people make the place. Personnel Psychology, 40, 437-453. Sorenson, J.B. (2002). The strength of corporate culture and the reliability of firm performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47, 70-91.VolkswagenAG (2015). Matthias Muller unveils next steps for the Volkswagen group. Volkswagen News, October 28. http://www.volkswagenag.com/content/vwcorp/info_center/en/news/2015/10/naechste_Schritte.html. Winkler, R. (2016). Zenefits warned employees on risqué behavior. The Wall Street Journal, February 23, p. B4.

60 second feedback & feedforward. Anywhere. Anytime. Learn more about Karma at www.karmafeedback.com



IT IS NOT A SURPRISE that “culture” was the Merriam-Webster word of the year in 2014. Culture can refer to the performing arts (humanistic culture), a group of ideas (consumer culture), an issue (culture of transparency), or something specific (marching band culture). But the concept of culture has an increasing resur-gence and relevance for organizations. When business leaders

and HR professionals master the why, what, and how of organization-al culture, they deliver more value.

the Why, what, and how of organization culture

B Y W A Y N E B R O C K B A N K A N D D A V E U L R I C H

Why Culture Matters

Culture is central for business success and is be-coming an HR priority.

It’s top of mind for CEOs who want to adapt their organization, future high potential employ-ees who are looking for a cultural fit, and even for Chartered Institute of Auditors who have prepared recent documentation to help auditors monitor culture.

As organizational users, we continually en-counter culture. When we shop, eat at a restau-rant, stay in a hotel, fly on an airplane, or even vis-

it friends, we experience an organization’s culture that affects how people think, behave, and feel about their organization and how employees feel about working at the organization. We also expe-rience if employees are focused on themselves, their bosses or on their customers.

One of the authors had the unique opportu-nity to interview the senior HR executives from fifteen globally recognized firms in the financial, defense, and high-tech sectors. Most of their com-panies were the highest performers in their sec-tors. Each interview lasted two to three hours. The

BU

ILD

GIN

S: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

CJ_

RO

MA

S, F

IST

S: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/

CH

RIS

GO

RG

IO


focal question of the interview was: “What 2-3 HR practices or agendas create the greatest performance differentiation between your company and your competitors?” The over-whelmingly most frequently mentioned agenda by the highest performing companies was the seamless integra-tion of the following:

• Connecting HR to a clearly defined short list of busi-ness imperatives• Focusing on culture as the basic integrating frame-work for all HR practices and as the primary mecha-nism through which HR practices are linked to busi-ness requirements.• Leveraging all talent tools to sustain the culture agen-da while also ensuring their role in hiring, developing and retaining the best individual talent.

These findings are supported by recent empirical re-search. Deloitte found that culture and engagement were rated as the most important human capital issue edging out leadership which had been the most highly rated in previ-ous years. An important recent article in Group and Orga-nization Management showed that CEOs’ personalities have significant influence on business performance primarily through their influence on culture which in turn has influ-ence of business performance. Finally, in the International Journal of Organizational Leadership, authors found that lead-ership has a strong influence on employee commitment but only through the mechanism of organizational culture.

This recent resurgence of culture is undoubtedly the

result of three conditions. First, in the midst of economic turbulence, high performing companies effectively respond through the fundamental cultural values on which they are built. Second, with mergers and acquisitions again in-creasing, the shelf-life of technical knowhow plummeting and individual talent being increasingly uniform (at least, among major competitors), culture becomes the key mecha-nism through which to successfully integrate merged com-panies, to develop and leverage technical knowhow and to integrate individual talent so that the organization whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Finally, the resurgence of culture is also a result of HR departments being more sophisticated and rigorous in de-signing, creating and leveraging business cultures. HR ex-ecutives in the high performing firms are highly skilled in understanding the nuances of market-based business priori-ties and their cultural implications. They are considerably more exacting in defining specific cultural behaviors that drive business performance. The movement away from ge-neric behavior or competency based models is noticeable. They are much more disciplined in aligning the full range of talent management tools with critical cultural attributes.

What Culture Means

One of the challenges of managing culture is that it has be-come a Rorschach test for those interested in organizations; there are related concepts, terms, and prescriptions that re-quire clarity. Are organization cultures to be thought of as resources, core competencies, health, climate, processes, val-ues, shared mind-sets, organization types, or systems. With these confusing concepts, no wonder business leaders and HR professionals have difficulty in creating competitive or-ganizations. We talked to a CHRO who said that her CEO was very committed to fundamental business transformation, but many of the terms related to “culture” were relevant but fuzzy to him. The concept of culture clearly matters, but it is difficult to articulate or define with any unified precision.

We propose a three stage evolution for clarifying what culture means. Phase 1 is culture as seem through symbols, rituals, stories, and other organization events. We experi-ence or see these cultural artefacts when we observe or join an organization. Phase 2 is culture as seen through how it is a reflection of how people think, behave, and feel in the or-ganization. Culture shows up in the values, norms, unwrit-ten rules, emotional responses to, or flows of how things are done in a company. Most of the above current definitions fol-low this dominant culture logic. Phase 3 shifts understand-

CEO’S

PERSONALITIES HAVE SIGNIFICANT

INFLUENCE ON

BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

PRIMARILY THROUGH

THEIR INFLUENCE ON CULTURE.


ing of culture by clarifying culture from the outside in. In this phase, culture is the identity of a company in the mind of the best customers, made real to all employees through-out a company. Each of these phases of cultural definition af-fect the focus and behaviours of employees. In Phase 1 (sym-bols), employee affect comes from the organizational events. In Phase 2 (values, beliefs), employee engagement comes from enacting the organization’s values. In Phase 3 (outside in), employees’ behaviours and thoughts are focused on the right things, those that matter to customers.

By moving to the outside in, customer centric view of culture, we create clarity about a winning culture. The words that are used to describe culture represent categories of behaviours as they are experienced and perceived by cus-tomers and investors. Thus, Southwest Airlines wants to be known for low price with a fun experience; Marriott for ex-ceptional service; Apple for design and simplicity; Google for innovation. These firm brands or identities should then become infused through the company as employees think and behave in concert with these culture aspirations. Cul-ture is less obtuse and more focused and it is not a social but business agenda.

1. DEFINE

THE DESIRED CULTURE.

2. MAKE THE CULTURE REAL TO

CUSTOMERS.

3. MAKE THE CULTURE REAL TO

EMPLOYEES.

4. INSTITUTIONALIZE

CULTURE THROUGH HR PRACTICES.

5. HR PROFESSIONALS

CAN HELP BUSINESS LEADERS

MODEL CULTURE

How to change culture

Organization culture is not static; it changes and should change as customer expectations change. Disney’s recent adoption of technology enables guests to have a better ex-perience in their Disney stay. Yum Foods (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut) has shifted to more healthy food as consumer tastes have changed. Business leaders and HR professionals should become the architects of culture change by engaging in five steps.

1. Define the desired culture. As we stated, culture is not just the institutionalization of personal values, but the values that create value as experienced by external stakeholders. When a firm’s market brand be-comes the guiding light for the culture, culture is both a social and business agenda. HR professionals can work with marketing colleagues to turn firm brand into organizational culture.

2. Make the culture real to customers. A firm’s culture should be transparent to customers. HR pro-fessionals can ask customers how the thoughts and behaviors of their firm’s employees can add greater value to customers. This means asking customers what service, innovation, efficiency or collaboration means to the customer, then turning these customer expectations into employee actions.

3. Make the culture real to employees. Ultimately, an organization’s culture shows up in how employees think (head), do (hands and feet), and feel (heart and soul). HR professionals can communicate clear and simple cultural messages. (See Johnson and Johnson’s Credo.) The high level statement of cultural aspiration should then be translated into specific concepts that shape ideas; specific behaviors that enable employees to act on these ideas; and specific values that help em-ployees find meaning from the cultural messages.

5 steps towards culture change

WHEN A FIRM’S MARKET BRAND BECOMES THE

GUIDING LIGHT FOR THE CULTURE, CULTURE IS BOTH

A SOCIAL AND BUSINESS AGENDA.


4. Institutionalize culture through HR prac-tices. HR practices are the most powerful tools to institutionalize culture. People can be hired, trained, promoted, and outplaced consistent with culture. Per-formance management and rewards can align with and reinforce culture. Informations systems reinforce culture through all communication mechanisms including mechanisms that bring important external information into the firm and that facilitate impor-tant information throughout the firm. Organization design choices reinforce culture through reporting relationships, work design, and corporate policy. As these HR practice areas encourage culture in a disci-plined and integrated manner, the culture becomes part of the fabric of the organization.

5. Finally, HR professionals can help business leaders model culture by where they spend time, what questions they ask, which people they meet with, what decisions they make, how they interaction with others, and how they allocate budget and time. We have coined the term leadership brand to capture how leaders model customer expectations.

Business leaders own and HR professionals archi-tect the right culture by making sure that HR practices align and reinforce the desired culture.

Conclusion

For the last twenty years, HR has been consumed with win-ning the “war for talent.” We now find that as HR organiza-

http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/2014-word-of-the-yearChartered Institute of Internal Auditors. 2014. Culture and the Role of Internal Audit: Looking be-low the surface. Sourced at: http://www.iia.org.uk/policy/culture-and-the-role-of-internal-audit/ Deloitte (2015). 2015 Global Human Capital Trends. Deloitte University Press.O’Reilly III, C., Caldwell, D., Chatman, J. & Doerr, B. (2014) “The promise and problems of organizational culture: CEO per-sonality, culture and firm perfor-mance.” Group and Organization Management. 39(6): 595-625Abdullah, N., Shamsuddin, A., & Wahab, E., (2015). “Does orga-nizational culture mediate the relationship between transforma-tional leaders and organizational commitment?” International Journal of Organizational Leader-ship. 4:18-32Barney, J.B., (1991), Firm Resourc-es and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Manage-ment; 17, (1), pp.99–120.Barney, J.B., (2001), Is the Resource-Based Theory a Useful Perspective for Strategic Manage-ment Research? Yes. Academy of Management Review; 26, (1), pp. 41–56.Approaching organizations as core competencies has been captured in work by CK Prahalad and Gary HamelPrahalad, C.K. and Gary Hamel. 1990. The core competence of the corporation. Harvard Business Review, May-June: 79-91.Scott Keller and Colin Price, Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage first edi-tion, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Aaron de Smet, Bill Schaninger, and Matthew Smith. The hidden value of organizational health – and how to capture it. McKinsey Quarterly, April 2014

Rousseau, DM. 1988. The con-struction of climate in organiza-tional research. In International Review of Industrial and Organi-zational Psychology, edited by CL Cooper and I Robertson. London: Wiley.The process approach to organization may be seen in the balanced scorecard work:Dave Norton and Robert Kaplan. 1992. The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Perfor-mance, Harvard Business Review, January–February 1992.David Norton and Robert Kaplan. 2000. The Strategy-Focused Orga-nization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment, Harvard Business School Press, 2000David Norton and Robert Kaplan. 20014 Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes, Harvard Business School Press.Schein, Edgar (1992). Organiza-tional Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Deal, T.E. and A.A. Kennedy. 1982. Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Read-ing, MA: Addison-Wesley. DiMaggio, P. (1997). Culture and cognition. Annual Review Of So-ciology, 23: 263-287. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.23.1.263Daniel Denison. 1990. Corporate culture and organizational effective-ness, Wiley.Russell Ackoff 1999, Re-Creating the Corporation: a design of organi-zations for the 21st century. Oxford Univ. Press: New York.Dave Ulrich and Norm Small-wood. 2007. Leadership Brand. Boston: Harvard Business Press.

tions have moved up to 70 to 80% of the S-curve on fighting the war for talent they know what to do and how to improve talent. When HR professionals master the why, what, and how of organization culture, they create competitive advan-tage and ensure victory through organization. TQ

REFERENCES

ORGANIZATION DESIGN CHOICES

REINFORCE CULTURE THROUGH

REPORTING RELATIONSHIPS,

WORK DESIGN, AND CORPORATE POLICY.

The best authors and most practical advice on managing

talent. Get the best first at Talent Quarterly.

Subscribe at www.talent-quarterly.com


CULTURE, NATIONALITY, AND LEADERSHIP

B Y M I C H A E L S A N G E R



WHAT MAKES A LEADER, A LEADER?ACROSS THE WORLD, employees first and foremost agree that part of being an effective leader is bringing sup-portive experience and knowledge. To be followed over the long-term, people in charge have to “know their stuff”. Sec-ond, an effective leader must have a track record of succes-sive good decisions and the best way to do so is to learn from mistakes made over time. Third, a leader who drives high performing teams also needs integrity. After a short while, subordinates’ tolerance for a boss they cannot trust begins to whither. Finally, to be a true leader, one must have a vision and be able to articulate that vision with purpose and con-viction. In order to accomplish goals and maintain a leader-like reputation, those who strive for power will need to rally a group around a mission that inspires (Bono & Judge, 2004; Hough, Ones, & Viswesvaran, 1998; Hogan & Benson, 2009; Judge, Bono, Ilies, & Gerhardt, 2002; Luthans 1988).

Why then do we see so much variance in leadership pro-files when we assess managers and executives hailing from different nationalities? Perhaps it’s because there’s more

than one leadership type that can fulfill these common re-quirements (Duke, 2010; Erez, 2011; Schwartz & Bardi, 1997).

Take competence, for example. Perceptions of aptitude can be influenced by local leadership expectations; the per-sonality characteristics that determine the most acceptable way to display one’s abilities can vary internationally. The factors that lead a subordinate to dub a manager as compe-tent, or conclude otherwise, can be wildly different than those considered by subordinates from another country (Shalhoop & Sanger, 2012).

Learning from mistakes to hone one’s judgment requires humility, restraint and openness to new information (Col-lins, 2011). But modesty and flexibility can run counter to a leader’s instincts when a self-assured, steadfast boss is seen as decisive and rewarded by supporters in the short-term. Straightforwardness, follow-through and keeping prom-ises are just three different ways integrity can be demon-strated. Depending on the country involved, one of these reputational attributes might necessitate greater emphasis in order to satisfy local expectations (Chamorro-Premuzic & Sanger 2016). Finally, the vision a leader articulates and how followership is cultivated is largely based on commu-nication style (Bono & Judge, 2004). Few qualities are as cul-turally sensitive as how one is expected to convey a transfor-mational message. H

AN

D/V

IEW

-MA

ST

ER

: IS

TO

CK

PH

OT

O.C

OM

/ D

IAL-

A-V

IEW

; SLI

DE

IMA

GE

S C

LOC

KW

ISE

FR

OM

AR

RO

W: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M(A

LL);

/A

PH

OT

OS

TO

RY

; / IM

AG

ES

_B

Y_

KE

NN

Y; /

CH

AN

AW

IT; /

VE

LHO

JUN

IOR

; /F

ILIP

EF

RA

ZA

O; /

PO

WE

RO

FF

OR

EV

ER

; /V

U3

KK

M; /

ZE

TT

ER

; /J

DW

OW

; /N

I QIN

; /C

HIN

AFA

CE

; /M

AX

IM4

E4

EK

; /A

FO

NS

KA

YA

; /N

IKA

DA


MANAGERS: INDICATORS OF WHAT A GROUP VALUESTO TRULY UNDERSTAND how societal ascription influ-ences characteristics of a foreign workplace, one needs look no further than the organizational leadership ranks from the country in question. According to Implicit Leadership Theory (ILT), individuals are more likely to be perceived as leaders when their personal attributes match existing lead-ership prototypes (Fischbein & Lord, 2004). ILT describes a heuristic used to categorize others’ behavior. Leadership emergence measures are useful in cross-cultural research because people in management positions have demon-strated alignment with local beliefs about successful gov-ernance (Bryman, 2001; Epitropaki & Martin, 2005; Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984). However, where a culture starts and ends isn’t clear-cut. Regional ethos is rarely as well defined as the world map’s political borders.

But, is culture the only factor that drives the variance in leadership expectations from place to place? Our latest re-search indicates there may be more to it. Culture is certain-ly part of the equation. Culture is popularly understood as a common way of viewing the world; a certain programming of the mind that leads to a common way of thinking and behaving. It entails mutual agreement about which indi-vidual characteristics are rewarded and which are punished

(and how). Membership to a culture is often characterized by geographic location of one’s upbringing, shared spoken and written language, and self-identification (Hofstede, 2001).

Consider culturally similar societies and the differences we experience when interacting with managers from those locations. For example, those who have worked with and across Confucian Asia should be familiar with its diversity. Granted, the typically held philosophical beliefs, views on family, and ceremonial traditions in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are more alike than they are dissimilar. Yet, anyone practiced with conducting business or involved in talent management initiatives in these locations will tell you the experiences in each land are quite distinguishable.

More specifically, if those in the human resources and talent management industries generalize assessment re-sults across neighboring countries based on perceived or measured cultural similarities, important distinctions are lost. After several years of applying leadership metrics (e.g., personality inventories, assessment centers, and 360 degree surveys) to talent management initiatives across Greater China, as well as in other clusters of “culturally similar” locales, we and our international consulting partners have

found that popular generalizations lend little-to-no added value when evaluating leaders. In other words, broad de-scriptions of country groupings based on shared cultural beliefs were rarely supported by leadership assessment data or observational evaluation methods. Still, political borders (in as far as they represent shared economic structure, busi-ness practices, and modern sociopolitical history) provide the best parameters for analyzing variance in leadership as-cendency around the world.

Broad descriptions of country groupings

based on shared culture beliefs were rarely

supported by leadership assessment data

PR

EV

IOU

S S

PR

EA

D: V

IEW

-MA

ST

ER

: IS

TO

CK

PH

OT

O.C

OM

/CA

TH

ER

INE

LA

NE

; SLI

DE

IMA

GE

S,

CLO

CK

WIS

E F

RO

M T

OP

LE

FT: I

ST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M (A

LL);

/NIK

AD

A; /

AP

HO

TO

ST

OR

Y;

IMA

GE

S_

BY

_K

EN

NY

; /C

HA

NA

WIT

; /V

ELH

OJU

NIO

R; /

FIL

IPE

FR

AZ

AO

; /P

OW

ER

OF

FO

RE

VE

R


NATIONAL BORDERS: A PRACTICAL APPROACHIT IS HYPOTHESIZED that this variance stems from a di-vergence in each locations’ modern socioeconomic history. Continuing with the example of Sino societies, in Mainland China the Chinese Communist Party’s early state-owned system forced the entire working population to consider re-lations with coworkers equal to those with family members. Additionally, a generation of educated managers was lost during the Cultural Revolution, leaving a dearth of relatable mentors for today’s leadership ranks. Furthermore, the cur-rent employment pool there has been affected in part by the one child policy; aiming to give their singular offspring the best chances for success, parents in Mainland China tend to prioritize their only child’s educational security at the ex-pense of early professional interaction (Starr, 2010).

Accordingly, managers and executives in Mainland Chi-na operate according to rules and implicit expectations very different from Hong Kong’s. Hong Kong’s economy and or-ganizational structures evolved independently of Commu-nist China’s influence and are largely based on the British system of governance (Sunderland, 2014). The operational principles in each of these locations also differ drastically from those of Taiwan’s, a country (or territory, depending on one’s political orientation) that experienced martial law for nearly forty years in the second half of the twentieth cen-tury (New York Times, 1987). Similar diversity can be found across the Spanish speaking countries of South American, “Anglican” countries with regional proximity (e.g. US ver-sus Canada or Australia versus New Zealand) and other popularized groupings.

Therefore, when evaluating employees or conducting business across the globe, country differences can be as im-portant to understand as cultural ones. Predictive data that highlight the nuances in leadership drive, communication style and derailment tendencies are imperative to success-ful global high potential programs, selection and devel-opment of regional managers, international merger and acquisition (M&A) management due diligence, and expatri-ate or talent relocation assignments, cross-border contract negotiations, and development of regional managers with international purview. Examining differences cross-nation-

ally rather than cross-culturally aligns better with organi-zational frameworks as well; multinational organizations are usually arranged around a country-based business unit structure, due to national labor, finance, import/export and other related laws, practices and policies.

To understand these nuances in finer detail, variance in leadership expectations across Asia should be examined through locally sourced personality data. If the assessments used are based on sound theory and modeling, and if they predict workplace outcomes and feature a translation pro-cess that adheres to best practices, the results can be easily applied to real world talent evaluation and competency de-velopment (Hogan & Hogan, 2007). When evaluating cross-cultural differences, whom to include in comparative data-sets and how to ensure samples are representative, and thus generalizable, is dependent on the intended application of the results.

BENCHMARKING FOR CROSS-CULTURAL COMPARISONSENSURING A REPRESENTATIVE sample of a popula-tion’s cultural diversity is important when conducting aca-demic intercultural research (Meyer & Foster, 2008). But in the applied talent management fields, studying the industry and sector diversity of the organizational leadership ranks when making comparisons is a more business-relevant and practical approach. When executing the types of talent management initiatives just listed, cross-industry bench-marks illustrative of what tends to rise through the ranks in business units and branches of private and government controlled companies that either operate within-country or internationally are vital.

When comparing the leadership prototypes of Chinese managers working in China for state-owned enterprises to their counterparts working for multinational corpora-tions, Shalhoop and Sanger (2012) found strikingly similar patterns from a personality perspective, but differences in preferences for certain rewards. Studies like this show that the desirable day-to-day leadership profile across a country can be generalized; even in an expansive and culturally di-verse one like Mainland China. We hypothesize the same should hold true for other large diverse countries like India, US, Brazil and Russia. However, as noted earlier, the general-


izations cannot be reasonably extended to neighboring ter-ritories, even if there are cultural similarities between them.

As long as the assembled managerial benchmarks em-ployed best practices for sample criteria (i.e. being born in that country, raised there until late teens when cultural identity takes root, are working in the country at the time of the assessment, self-identification variables, and having at least one direct report), and take into account an adequate cross section of the county’s industries and sectors, and long as the data are scored against a global norm, they can be quite informative. Admittedly, in emerging markets, much the data come from the bigger business cities; and one cer-tainly can’t claim to understand Mainland China’s implicit leadership expectations by only sourcing from Shanghai and Beijing. However, one must consider that even if as-sessed in the metropolises, individual organizational lead-ers’ birthplaces and early educational experiences tend to be all over the (country) map.

CONCLUDING REMARKSIt is imperative to study what country-specific leadership prototypes are rewarded by way of promotion and being given team management responsibilities. These data inform us on a country’s leadership emergence factors and clue us in to what the working population admires, values and seeks to emulate. As such, these data should be considered before finalizing an international talent management strategy, as they can alert those constructing corresponding evaluation models to where adverse impact could be expected. Qualita-tive, theoretical, and empirical data will help to understand where and how such models should be altered, so as to en-sure fair and accurate assessment across the world.

EPILOGUE: A NOTE ABOUT TECHNICAL JOBSWhat has just been discussed is a practical approach to measuring global variance in leadership expectations. How-ever, the individual characteristics and behaviors that lend themselves toward to the successful execution of technical jobs transcend cultural and national borders. For example, the personality attributes that ensure physical safety (e.g. fo-cus, compliance, emotional control) are universal. Or, take the job of a pilot. Flying an airplane requires the same set of behavioral propensities whether one works for United Air-lines, Qantas or Korean Air. With the technical nature of the job and the specific environment in which a pilot is expected to operate, job requirements trump cultural differences; and certain individual profiles just won’t work out well in terms of performance (Hogan & Hogan, 2007). TQ

REFERENCES

Bono, J. E., & Judge, T. A. (2004). Personality and trans¬formational and transactional leadership: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89, 901–910.Bryman, A. (2001). The general-izability of implicit leadership theory. Journal of Social Psychology, 127(2), 129-141.Chamorro-Premuzic, T. & Sanger, M. (2016). What leadership looks like in different cultures. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved August 8, 2016, from http://www.hbr.com.Collins, J. (2001). Good to great: Why some companies make the leap…and others don’t. New York, NY: Harper.Duke, J. D. (2010). The impact of colonialism on the develop-ment of management in Nigeria. International Journal of Business and Management, 5(8) 65–75.Erez, M. (2011). Cross-cultural and global issues in organization-al psychology. In Zedeck, Sheldon (Ed), APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology, vol-ume 3: Maintaining, expanding, and contracting the organization. (pp. 807–854). Washington, DC, US: American Psychological Association.Epitropaki, O., & Martin, R. (2005). From ideal to real: A longitudi-nal study of the role of implicit leadership theories on leader-member exchanges and employee outcomes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 659–676.Fischbein, R. & Lord, R. G. (2004). Implicit leadership theories. In J. M. Burns, K. Cho, G. R. Goethals, & G. J. Sorenson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s con-sequences: Comparing values, behav-iors, institutions, and organizations across nations (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.Hogan, R. T., & Benson, M. J. (2009). Personality, leadership, and globalization: Linking per-sonality to global organizational effectiveness. In W. H. Mobley, Y. Wang & M. Li (Eds.), Advances in global leadership (Vol. 5, pp. 11–34). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Hogan, R., & Hogan, J. (2007). Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) manual (3rd ed.). Tulsa, OK: Hogan.

Hough, L. M., Ones, D. S., & Viswesvaran, C. (1998, April). Personality correlates of manage-rial performance constructs. In R. Page (Chair), Personality deter-minants of managerial potential, performance, progression and as-cendancy. Symposium conducted at the 13th annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Dallas, TX.Judge, T. A., Bono, J. E., Ilies, R., & Gerhardt, M. W. (2002). Personal-ity and leadership: A qualitative and quantitative review. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87, 765–780.Lord, R. G., Foti, R. J., & De Vader, C. L. (1984). A test of leadership categorization theory: Internal structure, information process-ing, and leadership perceptions. Organizational Behavior and Hu-man Performance, 34, 343–378.Luthans, F. (1988). Successful vs. effective real managers. The Academy of Management Executive, 2, 127–132.Meyer, K.D., & Foster, J.L. (2008). Considerations for creating multi-language personality norms: A three-component mod-el of error. International Journal of Testing, 8, 384–399.Taiwan ends 4 decades of martial law. [Electronic Version]. (1987, July 15). The New York Times. Retrieved August 8, 2016, from http://www.nytimes.com.Schwartz, S. H. & Bardi, A. (1997). Influences of adaptation to com-munist rule on value priorities in Eastern Europe. Political Psychol-ogy, 18(2), 385–410. Shalhoop, J. H., & Sanger, M. R. (2012). Understanding leadership in China: Leadership profiles of state-owned enterprises, multinational corporations, and major economic trading partners. In W. H. Mobley, Y. Wang & M. Li (Eds.), Advances in global leadership, (Vol. 7, pp. 321–348). Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.Starr, J. B. (2010). Understanding China: A guide to China’s economy, history and political culture (3rd ed). New York, NY: Hill & Wang.


B Y D O U G L A S A . R E A D Y


WHAT ARE THE INGREDIENTS that make a company a truly great company? Is it any one thing, such as a continuous innovation-making capability? Or is it an unbroken record of stellar financial performance? Perhaps a great company is one that has a clear and non-negotiable set of values?

After conducting multiple research projects on organi-zational effectiveness and from working with companies on this topic for more than thirty years, my observation is that the secret sauce of great companies is that they work tirelessly to build three meta-capabili-ties simultaneously. Their aspiration is to be a company that is: purpose-driven; performance-oriented; and principles-led. No doubt—these three phrases are very easy to say but incredibly difficult to ex-ecute. In this article I will identify many of the key ingredients that comprise each capability, and point to some of the things that prevent many companies from achieving this aspirational objec-tive. To illustrate that this can be done, I will also offer a case example of a com-pany that is well on its way in making this journey successfully. Like so many of the companies I have come across, this company had many positive attributes, but needed to put the final pieces of the puzzle together. By examining the elements that better define what comprises purpose, performance and principles, and by offering a look into a company’s journey to build these capabilities, we’ll make real progress in cracking the cultural code of what makes a company a great company.

MORE THAN JUST BUZZWORDS

Several years ago I conducted a major research project that led to a popular Harvard Business Review article called The Power of Collective Ambition. This work was the genesis of

the purpose, performance, and principles mantra that I have been intrigued by for the past four or five years. I have subse-quently been engaged with many companies, helping them to integrate these three capabilities into a compelling and au-thentic Collective Ambition that has served as a platform for transformation and a vehicle for driving growth and innova-tion. As a central part of the dialogues that I’ve been involved in with these organizations, I’ve asked the leaders of the companies involved to elaborate on what each term means to them, and what challenges they face in building these cul-tural capabilities. The following is but a glimpse of what pur-pose, performance and principles means to their leaders.

• Purpose-Driven—our mission; why we exist as an organization, a sense of stewardship; a provider of meaning; sustainability; our contribution to society;

what makes this place a special place…

• Performance-Oriented—creator of differentiated value; the discipline to make tough choices; a focus on out-comes for customers; owning it; meritoc-racy; focusing on profitable growth…

• Principles-Led—what we stand for as a company, mutual trust and respect; integrity; openness; humility; curiosity; diversity; team; accountability; doing the right thing; focusing on those we serve…

WE AGREE, SO WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

When we look at the defining elements of each cultural capability, the immediate response is: Yes, this seems about right, let’s build our company on this foundation. But

real life has a nasty way of creeping into theoretical frame-works. If we agree that building a company that is purpose-driven; performance-oriented; and principles-led is a great idea, then what could get in our way of making that hap-pen? If you’ve been in a leadership role of any significance or complexity you already know the answer: the embedded tensions and paradoxes that we face as leaders make coming up with easy answers seem elusive at best. I’ve seen a CEO of a world class services company fired for missing her per-formance objectives in just one year, at the same time this organization had a strong sense of purpose and a highly re-garded set of guiding principles and values. Purpose-driven and principles-led but not performance-oriented. I’ve seen

META-CAPABILITIES OF GREAT COMPANIES

PURPOSE- DRIVEN

PERFORMANCE-ORIENTED

PRINCIPLES- LED


senior leaders question their company’s commitment to its core purpose of client service when the top executive team needed to make some tough decisions about cutting back on service levels temporarily due to margin pressures. I’ve seen highly visible leaders who don’t live their company’s values as well as they should be given disproportionately higher bonuses because they delivered strong performance in a quarter that mattered to the CEO’s tenure that year. I’ve seen it—haven’t you?

The great leaders of today’s companies realize that there will be few perfect answers to the questions that will surface from employees concerning the em-bedded tensions their organiza-tions face. The job at hand then is to artfully reconcile rather than definitively solve these questions, and engage employees in this process of reconciliation. They re-main committed to and enthusi-astic about pursuing the objective of being purpose-driven; perfor-mance-oriented; and principles-led, despite knowing there are no easy answers. Let’s take a look at one company’s journey to build these cultural capabilities in an era of widespread change and uncertainty.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER— RBC’S PURSUIT OF ITS COLLECTIVE AMBITION

Royal Bank of Canada (known more commonly as RBC) is a diversified financial services company, based in Toronto. It is one of the world’s top 20 banks in the world, based upon market capitalization. RBC employs more than 85,000 peo-ple and serves 16 million clients in more than 35 countries around the world. While experiencing periodic and mostly minor setbacks, RBC has achieved an enviable record of strong financial performance against any peer group in the industry. It is also recognized repeatedly in annual surveys of Canada’s CEOs as among the most admired companies in the country, and the Economist last year ranked RBC as the world’s most trusted investment bank. And, by the way, RBC has been doing what it does exceptionally well for its clients for the past 150 years. By any measure this company has put it all together—right? Not so fast.

Dave McKay was appointed CEO of RBC in August 2014, following hugely successful leadership tenures that spanned more than two decades by the company’s prior two CEOs Gord Nixon and John Cleghorn. Few observers would have criticized McKay for staying the course and following the paths cut by these iconic CEOs. Instead, the first thing that McKay did was to set out to shake the bushes—and to shake them hard. How did he do this? While still honoring RBC’s incredible heritage of success and reputation, he es-

sentially called into question the sustainability of these strengths without a total reexamination of RBC’s place in the world and its competitiveness in an ever-changing environment. In other words, what McKay wanted everyone in the organization to ask was:

“What is it that makes this place a special place? Why do we really ex-ist as an organization? What is our core purpose?”.

For decades RBC had been a high performance company with a strong set of values—perfor-

mance-oriented and principles-led, but McKay felt that still, something was missing—an abiding sense of purpose that would bring the organization together in order to make the transformation journey he felt the company needed to stay out in front. There was no doubt that RBC was already suc-cessful financially, but McKay argued that continuing to do what the company had been doing, albeit successfully, for the past 150 years was insufficient to keep RBC in the position of being a leading, game-changing company in the future. McKay argued that this was especially true since technological innovations in the industry were threaten-ing a wholesale disruption concerning what a bank might look like and feel like as early as even ten years from now. Moreover, RBC already had a clear set of values that served as a touchstone for how employees would behave—both with their clients externally and with each other internally. But again, McKay argued that 85% of the employees who worked for RBC at the time he addressed the organization did not work for the company when those values were writ-ten down. He wanted to open up a dialogue about how ap-plicable these values might be today, or if they at least need-ed refreshing.


CRACKING THE CULTURE CODE— AN AGENDA FOR ACTION

One of the reasons why it is so important to talk about pur-pose, performance, and principles together is because it is virtually impossible to think of these topics as completely independent variables. As such, McKay couldn’t just an-nounce that the company would create a purpose state-ment without an examination of what a compelling sense of purpose would mean for the company’s employees, cli-ents and communities around the world. This is where the hard work really begins. To embark on this journey meant first that McKay needed to make certain that he was com-mitted to and engaged in this process, and fully intended to unleash the contributions of his 85,000 employees. Deep self-reflection then was the first order of business.

Once McKay and his top team were committed to the journey they had to find a way to make the pursuit of this ambition be a Collective Ambition. This was a months-long effort involving multiple layers of leadership and teams from around the world. People were asked a simple question: “What words or phrases best describe why RBC exists and what we stand for as an organization?”. RBC’s HR leaders (Zabeen

Hirji, the company’s CHRO and Per Scott, one of RBC’s HR VPs) led this part of the journey. They created a “heat map” illustrating the most oft-cited terms, and then followed this up with a two-day, online Values Jam where employees could engage in an ongoing dialogue with McKay and the compa-ny’s leadership team. They had hoped for several hundred responses from employees. They received more than 17,000! Engagement and ownership had taken hold!

Finally, McKay and his team knew that excitement wasn’t enough to bring about a change that would stick. He took the outputs from the surveys, discussions and Values Jam and created a living document—a Collective Ambition Compass, that outlined RBC’s purpose, its key performance indicators, and its refined set of principles and core values. The top team all signed onto the Compass, indicating that they would use it as a touchstone for decision making in the future. And, while a transformation journey is never really a completed one, RBC is well on its way toward making this a successful one, because they thought hard and worked hard on under-standing and then cracking the culture code of what makes a company a truly great company—one that is purpose-driven; performance-oriented; and principles-led. TQIM

AG

E C

OU

RT

ES

Y R

OY

AL

BA

NK

OF

CA

NA

DA

ONCE MCKAY AND HIS TOP TEAM WERE COMMITTED TO THE JOURNEY

THEY HAD TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE THE PURSUIT OF

THIS AMBITION BE A COLLECTIVE

AMBITION


B Y E D G A R H . S C H E I N A N D P E T E R S C H E I N

l >

What Can We Do to

Modernize Talent

Management?


THE CURRENT REALITY: » Complexity and specialization inundate individuals with career paths to navigate in building their futures. » Organizations are better equipped today to deeply under-stand and build upon their work styles and human relations cultures.

»We are on the verge of a relationship revolution that will improve how the individual and the organization relate to each other at the points

of hiring, onboarding and employee development.

HOW CAN THESE THREE POINTS BE BROUGHT TOGETHER TO CREATE A MORE VIABLE TALENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

ORGANIZATIONS WANT a good fit between their culture and the individual’s aspirations. So they talk about engagement and motivating the in-dividual to be productive and creative to help the organization become more adaptive and innovative. And within the organization there

are many types of work and many types of careers. Organi-zations need to be clear what the options are for someone joining the team. Organizations talk about their culture and want to create a good culture—Can they articulate what their present culture is and what it could become?Different individuals have different career needs and aspi-rations. They come with different competencies, values and career motives. The choices, options, paths facing today’s twenty-somethings dwarf the options presented to their parents. This makes it even more important for today’s newest employees to build a competency for conceptual-izing and refining their career needs and aspirations. Indi-viduals need to know what their organizational options are and what questions to ask in order to match their potential to the options organizations present to them.

When managers and job recruits come together for the first time, they have a unique opportunity to forge a close relationship that will enable each to find out what they need to know in order to make that critical fit assessment. It is often the case that a hiring manager will try to sell the organization as a place for a good career before he or she really knows what that might be for that recruit; similarly, the individual may try to shape a representation of himself or herself in order to get an offer. Recruits will typically in-quire about career possibilities in the future, and this can build a great deal of engagement from the outset. Uncer-tainties this month, this quarter, this fiscal year, however, make it nearly impossible for a hiring manager to project or promise any career pathways. It’s a speculative endeavor, with recruit and hiring manager essentially flying blind, each making their best guess as to future fit.

Complicating all of this is the fact that the societal and demographic shifts are changing the way we value differ-ent kinds of careers. Career starters now have different as-pirations and requirements from when many of our human resource systems were built. In fact, the ideal of “a career” is

What Can We Do to

Modernize Talent

Management?

IST

OC

KP

HO

TO

.CO

M/M

AR

TIN

WIM

ME

R


very different simply because it is now acceptable and com-monplace for today’s career starters to assume multiple ca-reers at many organizations. The nature of work itself has changed to being primarily conceptual, virtual, and flex-ible. Career starters today have infinite choice and flexibil-ity on the one hand, and the requirement to be extremely specialized on the other hand.

» SO WHAT HELP IS AVAILABLE?In his academic career Ed Schein never intended to study this particular problem but it turns out that much of his research on careers, on culture and on the consultation process helps integrate the above issues. Through long-term analy-sis of varying career paths, he developed tools that may be helpful both to individuals and to organizations in figur-ing out early in the individuals’ careers what competencies, motives and values constitute their career anchors. His work on culture can be very helpful to organizations in analyz-ing the work they do and the culture they create around that work. And his writings on the consultation process—how to provide real help faster—have yielded some impor-tant insights on how to create an open trusting relation-ship that reveals both to the individual and to the manager the kinds of information they each need and want, in order to create the kind of fit they hope for.

» HELPING INDIVIDUALS TO SORT OUT CAREER ISSUESTo help the individual we favor the career anchor concept that grew out of longitudinal research on various profes-sionals who were 5 to 15 years into their careers and re-vealed that there were eight different kinds of career styles or options.

A career anchor is a person’s sense-of-self around his or her motives, values, and competencies. It is learned through one’s early work experience and becomes more stable as one progresses further into one’s career. The re-search discovered that in every occupation there are eight different kinds of anchors:

1) Technical/functional competence—wanting to be the best at something throughout one’s career,2) Managerial competence—wanting to climb the managerial ladder to higher positions of responsibility,3) Entrepreneurial creativity—wanting to start an enterprise of one’s own,4) Service to a higher cause—wanting to work on things that have a higher value in the world,

CAREER ANCHORS

»

TECHNICAL/FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCE

MANAGERIAL COMPETENCE

ENTREPRENEURIAL CREATIVITY

SERVICE TO A HIGHER CAUSE

PURE CHALLENGE

AUTONOMY

SECURITY

LIFESTYLE

»

»

»

»

»

»

»

»

5) Pure challenge—wanting to tackle difficult problems or important challenges that had not been met by others,6) Autonomy—wanting a career that is free of organizational rules and constraints,7) Security—wanting a career that is secure and stable, and8) Lifestyle—wanting a career that can be integrated with a total lifestyle and family obligations.

Of course career occupants typically want a little bit of each of the categories of anchors, but what we learned in the research is that the anchor is that which we care about so much that we will not give it up if forced to make a choice.

Our culture and our human resource practices tend to type career starters into the first three categories. Typical career systems are primarily geared to people who want to rise in the organization. We do not have good career lad-ders for people who want service roles or pure challenge or autonomy, and we oftentimes disapprove of people who just want security and stability. Because dual-career fami-lies and partnerships are the norm today, we have made some concessions and created lifestyle accommodations


through part time work, work at home plans, and flexible working hours.

Career Anchors Online careeranchorsonline.com pro-vides additional details of how this form of assessment can help individuals and human resources professionals under-stand the key individual differences to consider in hiring and career development decisions.

» HELPING ORGANIZATIONS TO BETTER DEFINE THE NATURE OF WORKWhen organizations talk about creating a culture of en-gagement it is vital to consider individual differences in employees’ aspirations and in their expectations of job roles and norms. Job descriptions typically emphasize the duties and requirements of the job. In addition it is be-coming increasingly important to recognize that modern “knowledge work” positions are deeply interpersonal and are embedded in a network of jobs. What needs to be identi-fied and communicated, above and beyond the duties and objectives, is the personal networks and roles that are inter-dependent and make a job engagingly human rather than a robotic sequence of tasks and completions.

The career research discovered that hiring managers who effectively communicated to their recruits what a given job actually involved interpersonally also gained a better understanding of what others in various connected roles were expecting that new recruits should be doing. Manager and recruit can accelerate success by understand-ing the subtext, the subtle expectations that are brought to a new role and that greet a new participant. To help gain these insights the analytical tool included in the Career Anchors booklet (2013) is an exercise called job/role planning which can be done by the job applicant with the hiring manager or could be done by a manager in planning the de-velopment of a subordinate. It is the role map and the anal-ysis of what various others who are connected to the job would expect that really defines the essence of a job where fit is the most significant early indicator of future success.

» HELPING ORGANIZATIONS TO DEFINE WHAT CLIMATE AND WORKPLACE CULTURE REALLY INVOLVESThe concepts of culture and climate have been very useful as a way of describing and stereotyping organizations. In the 30 years since Ed Schein first authored Organizational Culture and Leadership it has become standard practice to think about climate and culture at all junctures of organi-

zational growth, maturity and decline. For every organiza-tion, pivotal dimensions yield healthy climate and engaged employees. These dimensions will vary by organization, depending on the culture passed down from the founders’ and the history that is unique to every organization.

In stereotyping organizational cultures and climates we run the risk of missing the importance of individual differ-ences within a group. Even within a given occupation or job there are great differences in why people choose certain kinds of work, observable in terms of their career anchors as described above. Employees with certain anchors may describe what they find “engaging” in very different ways than others with different anchors. There will be natural alignments between certain anchors, climates and culture types. Given how critical fit assessment has become in hir-ing and in retention, managers will benefit from insights into their own cultures, insights into the career anchors of their key staff members, and the dimensions of climate that provide for engaged employees on any given day.

There are many tools available for quantitatively assessing climate and culture and there are many different interpreta-tions of the most critical dimensions in shaping climate and culture. We have not developed common definitions for ei-ther climate or culture. This provides for plenty of “white space” for culture models and new schemes for measuring climate and influencing engagement. Dimensions of cli-mate and culture are both important concepts, but what we find most relevant for each organization is to figure out for itself, through dialogue, what are the essential shared val-ues, beliefs and norms that yield their unique identity.

For many organizations the best first step in a cultural assessment, therefore, may be a qualitative dialogic assess-ment through group sessions with stakeholders within the organization to verbalize and document key shared beliefs, values and norms. Once a shared understanding is estab-lished in this qualitative way, there are many options for quantitative assessments (culture questionnaires, climate surveys) that provide detailed information about the key dimensions of climate and culture. Quantitative assess-ments can provide great details, akin to the bark on the trees, provided there is some shared understanding of the forest and its history.

Deep self-assessment will not only reveal the shared values of the total organization but will also reveal impor-tant subcultures, which may create very different climates and therefore very different problems of fit. As with indi-viduals, the variety both across organizations and within organizations is striking. It is therefore important for each


organization to get to know itself qualitatively before it measures itself quantitatively (which all too often runs the risk of over-simplifying layers of nested subcultures.)

We have also learned that leaders should start by articu-lating their problem before trying to understand the cul-tural issues that surround it—culture covers everything, and with only a vague sense of something being wrong, labeling it a culture problem may just exacerbate the lack of specificity. Is your problem that you have too much

turnover, or that you cannot hire the right people, or that you have morale problems in certain units of your organi-zation, or that there is some other business-related problem? Once you are clear on what problem you are trying to solve, you will know better what kind of a discussion you need to have about your own culture, its pivotal dimensions, and the downstream reflections of climate, employee engage-ment and fit.

There are many approaches and tools for building this deeper understanding of an organization’s culture. The ap-proach that has often worked best is described in the book The corporate culture survival guide, 2nd edition (2009).

» HELPING MANAGERS TO HAVE BETTER RELATIONSHIPS WITH SUBORDINATES AND NEW HIRESHistorically, management has tended toward defining re-lationships across hierarchical boundaries as transactional and impersonal. Just as we stereotype careers and organi-zational cultures so we also stereotype the concept of re-lationship. Changes of the kind we have described above raise the question of whether relationships have to become more complex, more personal, more open and more trust-

Schein, E. H. (2013) Humble inquiry. Berrett/Kohler.Schein, E. H. (2016) Humble consulting. Berrett/Kohler.Schein, E.H.& Van Maanen, J. (2013) Career anchors, 4th ed. Wiley.

ing. Our recent consulting experiences have shown that relationships have to be more personal from the very be-ginning of a conversation and have to display humility between team members who are interdependent and even between bosses and subordinates because they also are be-coming more interdependent.

Humility and a more inquiring attitude supported by deeper listening skills will be needed in order to find out what is on each other’s mind and to create communica-tion processes that build trust. How to think about this and how to build relationship skills is well described in Humble Inquiry (2013) and Humble Consulting (2016). The implica-tion is that what we really need is humble leadership and humble management.

» TOWARD BETTER TALENT MANAGEMENTFirst of all, we should stop oversimplifying and stereotyp-ing what individuals and organizations of today need and want. We have to take individual differences in career as-pirations seriously and similarly take seriously the huge variety of organizations and work styles that have emerged this century.

Second, we have to abandon stereotypic notions of transactional relationships and begin to develop more per-sonal relational dialogue skills that enable both career as-pirants and organizational managers to talk more openly with each other and build the trust necessary for clear and honest communication.

Third, we should consider redesigning our hiring pro-cesses, socialization and career development processes to take into account evolving varieties of individual careers and work situations. Such redesigns should leverage the inter-relatedness and interaction between individual dif-ferences, different organizational forms and evolving cul-tural norms.

Fourth and finally we need to become more adaptive and be prepared to redesign all of these processes continuously as the world around us changes at an accelerating rate. TQ

REFERENCESSchein, E. H. (2009) Helping. Berrett/Kohler.Schein, E. H. (2009) The corporate culture survival guide, 2nd Ed. Jossey-Bass, Wiley.Schein, E. H. (2010) Organizational culture and l eadership, 4th Ed. Jossey-Bass, Wiley.

»

Stop oversimplifying and stereotyping

what individuals and organizations of

today need and want.

»


Eugene Kim’s and Theresa Glomb’s research shows us one key obstacle to achieving a high performance culture—hating high performers! It’s a sad commen-

tary that emerges from their study in which they find that those who outperform at work are victimized by their less successful co-workers. That victimization included lying

to get someone in trouble or speaking badly about the high performer to coworkers. Their research adds empirical evidence to the colloquial phrase “the tallest poppy gets cut down” and offers helpful insights as to why it occurs.

As human beings we’re naturally drawn to compare ourselves with each other and we generally compare up

Because facts matter, we always Start with the Science. We bring you two articles which present somewhat counter-intuitive views on how we get along at work and how much country culture matters.

A culture of “I hate you because you work hard”

START WITH THE SCIENCE


rather than down. Because we’re typically also a bit delu-sional about our own capabilities, the people we select for our upward comparison tend to represent a higher standard (in this case a higher performer) than is realistic. When we see this higher performing individual perform better than us and get the commensurate rewards and accolades, it can cause envy, depression, shame and hostility.

But, fortunately for that underperformer, they can re-duce their negative feelings by attacking the high perform-er’s satisfaction, relationships and performance. That’s the conclusion of this study of nearly 5,000 employees, which also saw victimized high performers suffer higher negative affectivity (roughly defined as a bad mood) and job stress. The sliver of good news in this research is that stronger work group identification—one’s feelings of affiliation for the team they work with—reduced the extent of victimization.

The key insight from this research is that a high perfor-mance culture has to truly value high performers and en-sure that they’re not sabotaged by jealous peers as they drive the company’s results.

Kim, Eugene, and Theresa M. Glomb. “Victimization of high performers: The roles of envy and work group identi-fication.” Journal of Applied Psychology 99, no. 4 (2014): 619.

Great leadership cuts through (some) country cultureThe concept of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) is that ones’ relationship with their leader influences most of their work behavior. It’s a decidedly Western concept since research shows that this relationship doesn’t matter as much in China (work satisfaction is less affected by the relationship)

or India (turnover intentions are not influence by this) or in other more group-oriented cultures. So in what areas does the leadership relationship matter independent of country culture?

This meta-analysis (research that summarizes many re-lated studies) shows that the leader’s relationship with their direct report matters across cultures in three critical areas.

1. Task performance: A somewhat intuitive finding is that leadership affects task performance independent of culture. Higher quality interaction between a leader and their direct report will typically lead to better performance from that direct.

2. Organization commitment: You might think that in a collectivist culture, your connection to the organization would be based more on pride in the company or co-worker relationship than on one’s relationship with their manager. Not true, says this research, which finds the leader-subordinate relation-ship is still very meaningful in creating connection with and loyalty to the organization.

3. Transformational Leadership: If you want dramatic change, there’s no substitute for strong leadership according to this study. Independent of culture, the quality of the leader’s relationship is a key factor in driving transformational change. TQ

REFERENCERockstuhl, Thomas, James H. Dulebohn, Soon Ang, and Lynn M. Shore. “Leader–member exchange (LMX) and culture: A meta-analysis of cor-relates of LMX across 23 countries.” Journal of Applied Psychology 97, no. 6 (2012): 1097.

START WITH THE SCIENCE


Why do you say we have an aggressive culture?

We believe that if you’re going to fail, fail fast. Like Jensen did with that suit.

Sorry! Where I come from “being in the doghouse” is a good thing.

TALENTQ HUMOR

CA

RT

OO

NR

ES

OU

RC

E/S

HU

TT

ER

ST

OC

K.C

OM

(ALL

)


Henry appreciated the company’s playful culture

Smith here exemplifies our firefighting culture

I’m just saying it felt more like a family before the merger . . .

TALENTQ HUMOR

CLO

CK

WIS

E F

RO

M B

OT

TO

M: C

AR

TO

ON

RE

SO

UR

CE

/SH

UT

TE

RS

TO

CK

.CO

M (2

), A

ND

RE

W G

EN

N/1

23

RF

ST

OC

K P

HO

TO

BECAUSE TALENT IS IN DEMAND, WE’VE MADE EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT ON DEMAND.

ONDEMAND.OPTM360.COMUse insights from Harvard Business Review Publishing’s Best-Selling Book on Talent to Accelerate the Development of your Teams.

Based on the principles of “One Page Talent Management”, the OPTM360 is fast-replacing traditional 360s at some of the world’s highest performing companies.

Proven to appeal to every generation in your workplace the OPTM360:• Avoids the negative emotional response that typical 360s generate • Delivers specific, positive and practical advice for quickly changing behaviors• Takes less than 10 minutes for raters to complete and for participants to understand

No Minimums, No Contracts, No Coaching, No Admin Required.

ONDEMAND.OPTM360.COM

ONE PAGE TALENT MANAGEMENT

What if all of the online data that you generate via social media, gaming, music streaming, photo uploads, etc. could

be put to work for something actually useful? Could it help us learn more about ourselves? Make us more aware of how others view us? Welcome to Hogan X – the new analytics division of Hogan Assessments focused on emerging technologies for the assessment industry. We’re working to translate your digital identity into an accurate and predictive personality profile. And we'll do it in a transparent and non-intrusive way that ensures you stay in control of your data.

THE FUTURE OF PERSONALITY

LEARN MORE AT HOGAN-X.COM

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE, IT’S

JUST NOT EVENLY DISTRIBUTED.

– William Gibson

Documents

TALENT · Contrast for a moment John McPhee’s vivid descrip-tion of the late Frank Boyden, from 1902 to 1968 head-master of Deerfield: