HR Summit 2013 Conference ebook sampler

Introduction

This HR Summit 2013 Conference e-book sampler includes selected

materials from six recently published titles in the Jossey-Bass

Human Resource Development, Team Building, Leadership and

Business lists. The material that is included for each selection is the

book’s full Table of Contents as well as a full sample chapter. To

read more, please click on the links below.

Cultural Agility: Building a Pipeline of Successful Global

Professionals

Leadership-Driven HR: Transforming HR to Deliver Value for

the Business

Leading with Conviction: Mastering the Nine Critical Pillars of

Integrated Leadership

Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Asia: Applying the

Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership

Talent, Transformation, and the Triple Bottom Line: How

Companies can Leverage Human Resources to Achieve

Sustainable Growth

Team Building: Proven Strategies for Improving Team

Performances, 5th edition

HR Summit eSampler.indd 15HR Summit eSampler.indd 15 3/15/2013 8:58:01 PM3/15/2013 8:58:01 PM

http://www.wiley.com/buy/9781118275078






Contents

Preface xiii

Acknowledgments xvii

PART 1: Introduction: The Basics of Cultural Agility 1

CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS CULTURAL AGILITY—AND WHY IS IT SO CRUCIAL TODAY? 3

Cultural Agility: A Mega-Competency with Three Levels 4

The Need for Speed in Building a Pipeline of Culturally Agile Professionals 7

Barriers to Creating a Pipeline of Culturally Agile Professionals 10

Take Action 18

PART 2: Who Is Culturally Agile? 21

CHAPTER 2: THREE CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCIES AFFECTING

CULTURALLY AGILE RESPONSES 23

The Cultural Agility Competency Framework: Twelve Key Competencies 24

How the Competencies Affecting Behavioral Responses Are Different 26

Competencies Affecting Behavioral Responses in Cross-Cultural Contexts 26

Take Action 46

CHAPTER 3: NINE CROSS-CULTURAL COMPETENCIES AFFECTING

SUCCESS OF CULTURALLY AGILE PROFESSIONALS 47

Three Competencies Affecting Psychological Ease in Cross-Cultural Situations 48

Three Competencies Affecting Cross-Cultural Interactions 53

Three Competencies Affecting Global Business Decisions 59

Take Action 64


PART 3: Attract and Select the Most Culturally Agile Talent 67

CHAPTER 4: ATTRACTING AND RECRUITING FOR CULTURAL AGILITY 69

Finding Culturally Agile Professionals 74

Attracting Culturally Agile Professionals 82

Creating the Employee Value Proposition for Culturally Agile Professionals 89

Take Action 92

CHAPTER 5: ASSESSING AND SELECTING FOR CULTURAL AGILITY 95

Résumé Screening 98

Foreign Language Assessment 100

Knowledge Assessment 102

Personality Assessment 103

Interview 108

Self-Assessment 113

Take Action 115

PART 4: Train and Develop Culturally Agile Talent 117

CHAPTER 6: BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR CULTURAL AGILITY WITH

CROSS-CULTURAL TRAINING 119

What to Include in a Cross-Cultural Training Program 121

Delivery Methods for Cross-Cultural Training 128

Language Training 132

Timing and Sequencing of Cross-Cultural Training 133

Readiness for Cross-Cultural Training 134

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Cross-Cultural Training 135

Take Action 140

CHAPTER 7: CRAFTING DEVELOPMENTAL CROSS-CULTURAL EXPERIENCES

TO INCREASE CULTURAL AGILITY 141

How Cross-Cultural Experiences Become Developmental 143

Suggestions for Developmental Cross-Cultural Experiences 150

Take Action 156

CHAPTER 8: DEVELOPING CULTURAL AGILITY THROUGH INTERNATIONAL

ASSIGNMENTS 157

International Assignment Goals and Cultural Agility 161


Using Strategic Global Mobility Practices to Build Cultural Agility 164

Take Action 182

PART 5: Conclusion: Leadership and Organizational Factors 183

CHAPTER 9: MANAGING AND LEADING TO BUILD CULTURAL

AGILITY IN THE WORKFORCE 185

Your Organization’s Readiness for Cultural Agility Practices 187

Leadership Practices to Foster a Culturally Agile Organizational Culture 191

HR’s Role in Building the Culturally Agile Workforce 195

Your Cultural Agility 205

Take Action 205

Stay Connected to Learn More 206

Appendix: Lists to Assess Your Organization’s Global Employer Image 207

Notes 219

About the Author 231

Index 233

Buy This Book



23

CHAPTER

2 THREE CROSS-CULTURAL

COMPETENCIES AFFECTING CULTURALLY AGILE RESPONSES

In 2001, the British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever bought the American Vermont-based ice cream manufacturer Ben & Jerry’s. A key asset of Ben & Jerry’s was its market niche among those customers who appreciated the premium ice cream with unusual fl avor names like Karamel Sutra, Chocolate Therapy, and Imagine Whirled Peace. In the acquisition, Unilever needed to preserve this market niche, which was based in no small part on the corporate image of Ben & Jerry’s social responsibility and left-leaning social activism. With an image honed by the founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfi eld over almost twenty years, Ben & Jerry’s worked with sustainable, Fair Trade certifi ed and organic suppliers; used environmentally friendly packaging; paid premium prices to dairy farmers from Vermont who did not give their cows growth hormones; and cre-ated business opportunities for depressed areas and disadvantaged people. Giving 7.5 percent of their pretax revenues to charity, publicly traded Ben & Jerry’s could not be accused of corporate greed. At the time of the acquisition, however, the Ben & Jerry’s alternative management style lacked the fi scal and managerial discipline market ana-lysts and investors demanded. The company’s stock had fallen from almost $34 in 1993 to $17 in 1999.

Enter Unilever and Yves Couette, Unilever’s choice to be the CEO of its new odd-ball acquisition. 1 As a longtime corporate Unilever executive, the French-born Couette

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24 Cultural Agility

had spent several years running businesses in Mexico and India. Couette needed to thread the proverbial needle as the CEO, to understand this alternative American orga-nization enough to preserve the intangible assets of Unilever’s new acquisition while at the same time introducing some parent-company fi scal and managerial controls.

Within his fi rst few months as CEO (an acronym that at Ben and Jerry’s means chief euphoria offi cer), Couette demonstrated his true cultural agility by adapting some—but not all—of his leadership style and business practices. 2 He began with sym-bolic gestures. He came to work dressed casually, and volunteered to mix mulch at a company-sponsored gardening project in the local community. These initial gestures helped build rapport and ease employees’ concern that Couette was sent by Unilever to dissolve Ben & Jerry’s small-town American (and anticorporate) culture. On a more tangible level, Couette also continued the corporate social responsibility approach of the founders, saying that he envisioned Ben & Jerry’s to be “a grain of sand in the eye of Unilever” because these practices were more generous than those typically found in publicly traded companies.

Even after the Unilever takeover, the core of Ben & Jerry’s values remain. The company continues to contribute about $1.1 million annually through employee-led corporate philanthropy and makes substantial product donations to community groups. 3 Today, Ben & Jerry’s press releases reinforce this commitment to “doing good,” stating that “the purpose of Ben & Jerry’s philanthropy is to support the founding values of the company: economic and social justice, environmental restoration and peace through understanding, and to support our Vermont communities.” Under Couette’s leadership through the postacquisition transition, the Ben & Jerry’s external mission continued.

However, Couette knew that some things needed to change at Ben & Jerry’s to deliver a fi nancial return to Unilever. In a very un–Ben & Jerry’s act, he downsized the company—eliminating jobs and closing plants. He provided structure and introduced some basic organizational practices, and opened Ben & Jerry’s positions to Unilever’s global talent pool. Knowing that these moves would be unpopular with the employees, he justifi ed them by saying that “the best way to spread Ben & Jerry’s enlightened ethic throughout the business world was to make the company successful.” 4

There was also an integration of the Ben & Jerry’s practices with those of Unile-ver. For example, Ben & Jerry’s began using the Unilever performance management system—but added its own performance dimension of maintaining the company’s social mission. Many would agree that in this critical postacquisition integration phase, Couette successfully led Ben & Jerry’s both to maintain its corporate identity and brand image and, at the same time, to become profi table.

THE CULTURAL AGILITY COMPETENCY FRAMEWORK: TWELVE KEY COMPETENCIES It was not by accident that Yves Couette, a highly culturally agile professional, was able to navigate the myriad of cultural challenges embedded in the Ben & Jerry’s acquisi-tion. Over years of working in different environments around the world, Couette has

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Three Cross-Cultural Competencies Affecting Culturally Agile Responses 25

honed cross-cultural competencies enviable in many global organizations today. Unfor-tunately, there aren’t enough culturally agile professionals who share his competencies. In a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, more than four hundred global business executives were asked to name the primary shortcomings of management-level and other specialized workers in various markets around the world. 5 Three of the top four areas of concern were competencies related to cross-cultural agility: limited creativity in overcoming challenges, limited experience within a multinational organization, and culture-related issues. The report concluded that “many candidates do not yet possess the understanding and sensitivity to navigate the intricate internal politics of a global organization or deal with the very different cultural backgrounds of a diverse workforce.” Karl-Heinz Oehler, vice president of global talent management at the Hertz Corporation, offered this insight on the fi ndings in this report: “The rarest personality traits are resilience, adaptability, intellectual agility, versatility—in other words, the ability to deal with a changing situation and not get paralyzed by it.”

Research and practice have identifi ed certain cross-cultural competencies that enable professionals to assess cross-cultural situations accurately and operate effectively within them. The twelve most critical of these cross-cultural competencies

The Cultural Agility Competency Framework

Competencies Affecting Behavioral Responses

1. Cultural Minimization

2. Cultural Adaptation

3. Cultural Integration

Competencies Affecting Individuals’ Psychological Ease Cross-Culturally

4. Tolerance of Ambiguity

5. Appropriate Self-Effi cacy

6. Cultural Curiosity and Desire to Learn

Competencies Affecting Individuals’ Cross-Cultural Interactions

7. Valuing Diversity

8. Ability to Form Relationships

9. Perspective-Taking

Competencies Affecting Decisions in a Cross-Cultural Context

10. Knowledge and Integration of Cross-National/Cultural Issues

11. Receptivity to Adopting Diverse Ideas

12. Divergent Thinking and Creativity

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26 Cultural Agility

constitute the Cultural Agility Competency Framework . Although the framework is not an exhaustive list of cross-cultural competencies, these are the competencies I consider to be the most important because they are the ones with the greatest validity evidence—with demonstrated relationships to success in diverse international, cross-cultural, and multicultural roles. Please take a moment to review the Cultural Agility Competency Framework (see box on page 25) and judge for yourself which competencies make the greatest amount of sense for your organization’s strategic needs.

HOW THE COMPETENCIES AFFECTING BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES ARE DIFFERENT The three cross-cultural competencies affecting behavioral responses—cultural mini-mization, cultural adaptation, and cultural integration—are different from the other nine competencies in the Cultural Agility Competency Framework. Those other cross-cultural competencies (to be discussed in detail in Chapter Three) operate from a human talent approach which posits that their presence in global professionals is good and that a greater level of the competencies is related to a higher degree of cultural agility—in short, more is better. We have research and cases to show a direct relationship between their presence and subsequent professional successes in cross-cultural settings.

But in the case of cultural minimization, cultural adaptation, and cultural integration, the pattern for success changes: the presence of these three cross-cultural competencies is good when they are leveraged at the appropriate times . Unlike the other cross-cultural competencies, these three are not simply “nice-to-haves.” Global professionals must be able to use these competencies correctly to increase their overall cultural agility. For example, cultural minimization is potentially derailing for global professionals in cir-cumstances where some level of cultural sensitivity is needed; in those circumstances, inattention to the effect of culture will be detrimental to the outcome. Similarly, leverag-ing cultural adaptation at the wrong time can result in professionals’ overinterpreting behaviors on the basis of cultural expectations or nationality. And using cultural integra-tion at the wrong time can run the risk of taking too much time to build consensus, espe-cially in situations where it would be appropriate to use either the organization’s approach or the local approach.

COMPETENCIES AFFECTING BEHAVIORAL RESPONSES IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXTS Successful global professionals like Yves Couette know that cultural agility comprises more than just cultural adaptation ; however, there are times when adapting to the norms and behaviors of the local context is essential. They know they cannot ignore cultural differences; however, there are times when cultural minimization is needed—when a higher-order professional demand will supersede cultural expectations and make it nec-essary to override a cultural norm. They know that merging multiple cultures to create a new set of behavioral norms can be time consuming and challenging—but there are

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times when cultural integration is most important and well worth the effort. Successful culturally agile professionals decide which approach or orientation to cultural differ-ences is needed, and behave accordingly. Having these three competencies available as plausible responses is akin to having multiple tools in the proverbial toolbox. The most cultural agile professionals have a command of each of these orientations and can lever-age them as needed, depending on the situation in which these professionals are operating.

James Piecowye, a Canadian culturally agile professional, has been an associate professor in the College of Communication and Media Sciences at Zayed University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, since 2000. James knows exactly what it means to toggle among these three cultural orientations, something he had been doing long before he even left Canada. James, who is originally from Ajax, Ontario, an English-speaking part of Canada, pursued his doctoral degree at the University of Montreal, a French-language institution in Quebec.

James credits this experience living in French-speaking Quebec with laying the foundation for his cultural agility; he quickly learned that his French language acquisi-tion, while challenging, was merely providing the means to deliver far deeper cultural challenges. Staying in Montreal for fi fteen years, James learned to toggle effectively among the three cultural orientations. For example, he earned the trust of his French-speaking colleagues in the quintessentially French manner—slowly, over time. The more time he invested in building professional relationships and adapting to the French culture, the more his French-speaking colleagues accepted him, eventually even speak-ing with him in English. At the same time, he wrote in English and adopted the broader English-speaking Canadian norms for conducting his research, even though they were not typical among his French-speaking colleagues.

Now living and working in Dubai, James notes similarities between the United Arab Emirati and French Canadian cultures: “There is more of a community and com-munal aspect to the French Canadian culture that I don’t think exists anywhere else in Canada. In a sense, the French Canadian culture is more like the tribal culture of the United Arab Emirates.” As he is quick to add, however, “moving to the UAE was a huge cultural change—not just the Arab culture but also the expatriate culture with its mix of Indians, Pakistanis, Europeans, Australians, North Americans, and Asians. It was an extreme experience.” James reconciled the cultural challenges and embraced the oppor-tunities in the UAE, again negotiating with his multiple cultural orientations.

James is a male professor in an accredited university in Dubai that teaches only Arab women. He brings cultural minimization into the classroom by maintaining his standards and expectations for his students’ learning. Suspending his judgments, James uses cultural adaptation and adjusts his behaviors to accommodate the more collectivist Emirati ways, which are rooted in their Arab culture and predominantly Islamic religion. He uses cultural integration also, starting with the ideas that he and his students share a common desire to learn and that the best way to learn is to collec-tively create an interactive environment where students can comfortably share their experiences. James calls it “meeting in the middle.”

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28 Cultural Agility

Over the past six years, James has also been a radio host on DubaiEye (103.8 FM), which describes itself as “Dubai’s premier talk radio station” and offers broad-casting twenty-four hours a day in eight languages. Its listeners include expatriates from some forty countries. Again showing his cultural agility, James works with British, Australian, South African, and Filipino presenters at the station. “What makes the relationship work,” he says, “is that we are all working toward the same goal to create informative, compelling, and enjoyable radio. The fact that each of our countries may have a different radio culture is of little consequence. What is important is that we all agree to work collaboratively in an environment different from our own—one that does not have legislated freedom of the press or even a long radio culture.”

As a culturally agile professional, James selects a particular cultural orientation intentionally. For example, he does not have a maid or a gardener, opting to eschew the symbols of class status that his profession and income give him in the traditionally hierarchical culture of the UAE. James initially predicted that as a result of his counter-cultural behavior, he would receive less respect from the laborers in the neighborhood. (He thought, at the time, that it was a very small price to pay to maintain the pleasure he experiences when tending to his garden and washing his car.) In fact, the opposite occurred: the neighborhood gardeners and maids respect James tremendously because, as a person of status doing their jobs, he elevates their own positions through his actions, and they appreciate the respect James gives them. In refl ecting on his own career and the careers of his colleagues with cultural agility, James shares that cultural agility “does not mean people either agree fully or give up their own cultural norms, but it does suggest that they are able to look beyond the differences and work toward common goals—goals which will invariably be infl uenced by and rooted in the local host culture.” As his comment refl ects, James operates with an authentic respect for other cultures while maintaining a healthy sense of self.

As a professor and popular radio host, James has achieved the success that accrues to culturally agile professionals who operate with multiple available behav-ioral responses, leveraged appropriately depending on the requirements of the profes-sional situations. They will use cultural minimization when the situation demands that their behaviors supersede the local context. They will adapt their behaviors when the situation demands attention to the local context. They will also create a new behavioral set, taking elements from multiple cultural contexts.

In a study of more than two hundred global professionals and international assignees from more than forty countries, Ibraiz Tarique and I found that those who possessed a greater number of available cultural responses earned higher ratings from their supervisors on “how effectively they work with colleagues from different cultures.” Figure 2.1 illustrates this result.

The given global context of the job, task, or professional role is what matters most when deciding which behaviors are the most appropriate for success, whether one should behave with cultural adaptation, cultural minimization , or cultural integration . As shown earlier, these three make up the behavioral responses in the Cultural Agility Competency Framework. Figure 2.2 provides a defi nition of each of these competencies.

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In the remainder of this chapter, I will examine each of these three competencies with examples from various sectors of the business world. Although all three are essential for success as a global professional, each is especially crucial—and effec-tive—in certain areas, including the following:

Jobs and roles most often requiring cultural minimization to be successful include

• Health and safety

• Quality assurance

Competency Defi nition

Cultural Minimization To standardize or control the cultural differences that exist in the environment and respond in a way that will create greater consistency, irrespective of culture. To effectively limit the effect of any cultural differences.

Cultural Adaptation To adjust to the cultural differences and respond in a way that is the expected norm of the other culture. To effectively adapt to the other culture’s norms and behaviors.

Cultural Integration To create a new set of norms and respond with collaboration to fi nd solutions acceptable to both (or all) cultures affected, but not overrepresenting either (or any one) culture. To be effective in creating new norms and behaviors.

FIGURE 2.2. Competencies Affecting Behavioral Responses

3

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0Ineffective Barely

EffectiveSomewhatEffective

Effective HighlyEffective

GlobalProfessionals

InternationalAssignees

2

1

FIGURE 2.1. Number of Available Cultural Orientations and Ratings of Global Professionals’ Ability to Work Effectively with Colleagues from Different Cultures

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30 Cultural Agility

• Strategic company-wide practices (especially those considered key to com-petitive advantage)

• Global image or brand

Jobs and roles most often requiring cultural adaptation to be successful include

• Sales and marketing

• Government relations

• Working with regulatory agencies

• Local-level manufacturing operations

Jobs and roles most often requiring cultural integration to be successful include

• Global teams

• Joint ventures

• Postacquisition or postmerger integration

• Negotiations

Cultural Adaptation

Culturally agile professionals are able to navigate the differences in cultural norms and behaviors and to adjust—when needed—to be successful. As a culturally agile business leader, Yves Couette adapted his management style and organizational decisions to fi t with the alternative, antiestablishment norm of Ben & Jerry’s to gain trust and build cred-ibility with Ben & Jerry’s employees. There are many roles, tasks, and positions where adaptation to the demands of the host culture or another individual’s culture is needed in order for a professional to be successful. Activities where professionals need to work with infl uential national institutions, such as a country’s government or regulatory agen-cies, require cultural adaption to accommodate a different set of rules, regulations, and laws. Activities involving product development and design, especially in such areas as

fashion and food, also require cultural adaptation to understand and accommodate differences in taste and preferences. Activities in which the goal super-sedes the process for achieving it might also require cultural adaptation, such as maintaining local prefer-ences for production facilities in situations where doing so would not negatively affect the outcome. Likewise, sales, marketing, and customer service roles require cultural adaptation to develop the cli-ent relationship, build trust and credibility with the client, and meet the client’s expectations.

There are many roles, tasks,

and positions where adapta-

tion to the demands of the host

culture or another individual’s

culture is needed in order for a

professional to be successful.

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Cultural Adaptation and Client Development In the case of sales and client devel-opment, the person who is selling will, most often, need to adapt to the buyer’s culture in order to be perceived as credible and trustworthy—and, ultimately, to be successful. To illustrate this professional demand, researcher Chanthika Pornpitakpan assessed the reactions of Japanese and Thai “buyers” to American “sellers” in a sales context. 6 She found that in the scenarios where the Americans adapted their behaviors to be more con-sistent with the cultural expectations of their Japanese and Thai clients, they were per-ceived more favorably. The American sales team members were perceived as more attractive sellers (for example, likable, comfortable to deal with) and had better antici-pated outcomes of their sales presentation (for example, being granted a sales contract or considered for future sales) when they exhibited at least some level of cultural adapta-tion. For example, the Thais perceived the American sales team members more favor-ably and anticipated a better sales outcome when the Americans wore Thai suits (for example, Chut Phra Rachatan), accepted invitations to lunch, addressed them as “Khun” followed by fi rst names, and used less expressive gestures. The Japanese perceived the American sales team members more favorably and anticipated a better sales outcome when the Americans used the Japanese style of exchanging business cards, spent time building the relationship before doing business, and addressed them with the title “Buchoo.” Figure 2.3 illustrates the differences among how the American sales teams were perceived under the different scenarios of adaptation.

Adaptation of even the most basic behaviors can feel awkward at fi rst. It might even feel disingenuous or “phony” to use the behavioral norms of another culture. Chanthika tested this by asking the Thai and Japanese “buyers” whether they per-ceived the Americans’ attempt to adapt to their cultural norms as derogatory. Overwhelmingly, the Thai and Japanese clients perceived the adapters as “not at all” derogating their cultural identity. In other words, in the sales setting, there was no downside—beyond feeling a bit awkward at fi rst—for sales representatives trying to adapt their behaviors to be culturally consistent with those of the client.

Chris Houghtaling understands fi rsthand the benefi t of some cultural adaptation to the sales situation. Chris is an American currently living in Vienna, Austria, where he lectures in sales for the University of Applied Sciences, Wiener Neustadt. Chris is a culturally agile sales and marketing professional who, in 1999, completed his Interna-tional MBA through the University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Busi-ness with a joint degree from the Executive Academy at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, one of Austria’s leading business schools. According to U.S. News & World Report , this program has been ranked among the top three among International MBA programs for the past twenty-two years. 7 For the past twelve years, since graduating with his International MBA, Chris has been working in sales, leveraging his cross-cultural competencies to increase his success.

Prior to starting his International MBA, Chris recalls being attracted to an interna-tional career while working for USRobotics Corporation (USR). As part of USR’s new U.S. government sales team, Chris established an Internet presence for U.S. government

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32 Cultural Agility

agencies located outside the United States to gather product information and obtain pric-ing from government-approved resellers. This required him to coordinate with internal and external partners worldwide. He enjoyed working with people from different cultures, observing different professional styles and approaches to business. After com-pleting his International MBA, learning German, and working in Vienna for a couple of years, Chris relocated back to the United States and began a successful career in pharma-ceutical sales. Within the fi rst year, he turned around a territory that traditionally per-formed in the bottom 25 percent to become a top 20 percent territory.

In 2005, while working in northern Virginia, Chris tried a practical experiment with Ken Sharan, a colleague from India who was working in the Baltimore, Maryland, area. With the goal of improving their sales performance, they leveraged what they knew about cultural differences to develop better and deeper client relationships with foreign-born doctors by adapting their relationship-building styles to their clients’ cultures.

Chris, who was doing frontline sales with clients ranging from general practitioners to infectious disease and pulmonary specialists to hospital administrators, found that subtle and sincere cultural adaptations were viewed positively. He developed relation-ships with his clients who were Chinese nationals by researching facts and ideas from

FIGURE 2.3. Level of Americans’ Adaptation to Thai and Japanese Cultures and the Americans’ Perceived Effectiveness by Their Thai and Japanese Clients

7

Americans Selling toJapanese Clients

Americans Selling toThai Clients

Perc

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d E

ffec

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nes

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High Adaptation(and speaking theclient’s language)

High Adaptation

Some Adaptation

No Adaptation

6

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Source: Data from Chantihika Pornpitakpan, “The Effects of Cultural Adaptation on Business Relation-ships: Americans Selling to Japanese and Thais,” Journal of International Business Studies 30, no. 2 (1999), pp. 317–337.

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China’s rich medical history and discussing them with the Chinese physicians. To connect with his physician clientele from India, he learned about the various regions and religions of their diverse country. With sincere interest, he was able to establish a more open dialogue, better accommodate his clients, and build deeper relationships. For example, he could suggest more appropriate regional or vegetarian restaurants for business meetings; he could also incorporate his clients’ religious and national holidays into his sales planning and scheduling. Chris wished his Chinese physicians “Happy New Year” around the Chinese New Year and his Indian physicians “Happy Diwali” or “Happy Holi” at the appropriate times. These small gestures signaled to his customers that he cared about them and not just about making sales. His sincere interest in his clients’ cultures and his small culturally adaptive gestures made a big difference. Chris saw his sales dramatically increase among his culturally diverse clients. Among this group of clients, Chris’s market share jumped from 8.7 percent to 18.4 percent within six months, and the success was sustained over time. Ken enjoyed similar success.

Chris learned a lot from his and Ken’s practical experiment on the power of cul-tural adaptation. As he observed,

Sales professionals know that to be good at what you do, you need to approach each customer to learn what their needs, objections, and buying triggers are. However, with the strategy of standardizing marketing messages that is taking place in many organizations, there is pressure from companies to follow the standardized sales message and presentation, regardless of the customer. This causes sales professionals to become distracted from what they do best, building meaningful relationships that positively impact business . . . In the majority of the world, building relationships with your customers is much more important than in the U.S. Gaining trust and respect on a personal level before you can start to sell your product comes before making a smooth sales presentation.

The advice Chris offers resonates among culturally agile sales professionals. It is important to concurrently standardize marketing messages, integrate the various moti-vators for clients to purchase (that is, their buying triggers), and adapt the relationship to the clients’ cultural differences. In the case of client development, the latter is par-ticularly critical. With that in mind, Chris offers advice to other sales professionals and organizations working across cultures:

First, organizations and sales professionals need to evaluate if they are open to adjusting themselves, their style, and their messaging for each customer and if they are willing to put this openness into practice. The second is that companies and sales professionals need to recognize the fact that people from another country do not leave their social norms and values behind when they move, and it is to everyone’s benefi t to incorporate some of your customer’s social norms and values into your sales activities. Although this may feel unnatural to the salesperson, when done with

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34 Cultural Agility

honesty toward the person to whom you are directing your cultural openness, and not the sale, the customer will, in most cases, appreciate the effort and recognition.

As Chris notes, this adaptation might feel unnatural or awkward at fi rst, but it will be the key to success in the long run. Aside from the initial awkwardness, adapting one’s surface-level cultural behaviors—mixing mulch or washing one’s own car, wearing cer-tain clothes, selecting appropriate restaurants, exchanging business cards, remembering to greet a customer on certain holidays—should be relatively straightforward for most global professionals. Most can make these cultural adaptations, muddling through those unfamiliar surface behaviors at fi rst (the kisses, the fi rm handshakes, the bows) to feel less self-conscious and more comfortable with practice. The greater challenges for global professionals tend not to be in adapting to surface behaviors when needed; they lie in adapting to deeper aspects of a different culture, such as the differences in work practices, attitudes and values, and, at times, ethical norms.

My research concurs with the experiences Chris shared. When fi fty global sales professionals were rated by their supervisors on their effectiveness in interacting with clients from different countries, those with a higher level of cultural adaptation were more effective compared to those with a lower level. As Figure 2.4 illustrates, adapta-

tion is related to success with clients.

Cultural Adaptation in Manufacturing This is all very well for professionals in sales, where “the customer is always right.” But what about cultural adaptation in other sectors of the business world? Let’s consider the possible adaptations needed

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)

Low-RankedGlobal SalesProfessionals

Cultural Adaptation

Cultural Minimization

Cultural Integration

2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

FIGURE 2.4. Effectiveness of Sales Professionals and Their Cultural Orientations

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among professionals in the manufacturing industry. At fi rst glance, these roles for operations professionals might seem culture-free because there are robust universal common goals for production facilities: everywhere, production facilities hope to increase productivity, quality, safety, and effi ciency while reducing waste, time, inven-tory, and injury. The goals might be common, but how operations professionals moti-vate workers to achieve those goals will often need to be adapted to the local culture.

A study by the Australian researcher Giles Hirst and his colleagues compared pre-dictors of productivity in manufacturing facilities in the United Kingdom and China. 8 Specifi cally, they examined the effect on workers’ stress levels of the practice of empowering workers by giving them greater autonomy, discretion to make decisions, and control over their work. The production workers from the United Kingdom felt less stress as the result of being given greater autonomy. However, the experience for the production workers in China was the direct opposite: they experienced more stress from the same practice, given their cultural preference for directive leadership. This is rele-vant to productivity because Giles found in both countries that productivity decreased when workers felt that the demands on them were particularly high. Stress can exacer-bate the problem of interpreting work demands. Figure 2.5 illustrates this fi nding.

In a study I conducted with Ibraiz Tarique, about ninety global manufacturing managers were rated by their supervisors on their effectiveness in supervising people from different countries. In further analysis of these data, I found that the manufactur-ing managers with higher levels of cultural adaptation and cultural integration were

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Workers in China

Stress Level ofManufacturingWorkers in the

United Kingdom

Low Autonomy

High Autonomy

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

FIGURE 2.5. The Difference Between British and Chinese Workers’ Reactions to Being Given Autonomy

Source: Data from Giles Hirst and others, “Cross-Cultural Variations in Climate for Autonomy, Stress and Organizational Productivity Relationships: A Comparison of Chinese and UK Manufacturing Organizations,” Journal of International Business Studies 39, no. 8 (2008): 1343–1358.

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36 Cultural Agility

more effective than those with lower levels of these orientations. 9 As Figure 2.6 illus-trates, being able to both adapt and compromise, when needed, is related to success when supervising subordinates in a cross-cultural manufacturing capacity.

Cultural Adaptation in Government Sales and manufacturing are not the only sec-tors where cultural differences will affect the outcome of professionals’ activities. Shung Shin, Frederick Morgeson, and Michael Campion studied 910 midcareer Amer-ican professionals who were working for an international agency of the U.S. govern-ment. 10 They worked in public relations, as economic analysts, as political analysts, and in other such positions and were expected to spend two-thirds of their tenure with the agency working in international posts. As a result, the professionals in the study were well-seasoned global professionals. Shung, Frederick, and Michael found that although the overall duties of these professionals did not change as a function of being relocated, the way in which they performed their duties did. For example, when these professionals were in more collectivist or group-oriented countries, they performed more relationship-oriented tasks, such as teaching; coaching others; and coordinating, developing, and building teams. They performed these tasks less frequently in more individualistic cultures.

Cultural Adaptation’s Major Challenge: Ethical Dilemmas The government exam-ple we’ve just discussed illustrates how professionals might need to adapt the way they

High-Ranked GlobalManufacturing

Managers

3.0

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ult

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Low-Ranked GlobalManufacturing

Managers

Cultural Adaptation



2.5

2.0

1.5

1.0

0.5

FIGURE 2.6. Effectiveness of Manufacturing Professionals and Their Cultural Orientations

c02.indd 36c02.indd 36 28/06/12 12:12 PM28/06/12 12:12 PM


work in order to be effective in another culture. The previous examples illustrate how culturally agile professionals might need to adapt certain practices in order to be suc-cessful in their role. But what if we delve deeper into the interpretation of behaviors from the perspective of one’s values—and how those interpretations might vary in dif-ferent cultural contexts? I’m not saying that individuals’ values themselves would change—but that the global professionals’ interpretations of behaviors might vary with a broader understanding of the demands of the international or multicultural situation. Before working globally, a professional might judge a certain norm or practice as inap-propriate, wrong, ineffi cient, or even unethical—but might revise that initial impression after fully understanding the context. For example, in some countries it is appropriate to hire one’s family members to fi ll key positions in one’s organization. In many Western cultures, this nepotism might be seen as a corrupt or inappropriate form of favoritism. But in many Eastern cultures, the person you can trust the most to work hard for you would be someone who is a family member.

In some situations there will be a (more or less) universally accepted interpreta-tion of behaviors that are appropriate or inappropriate, right or wrong, effi cient or inef-fi cient, and ethical or unethical. Other times, the interpretation will need to pass through a culturally agile lens—one where the context is fully understood. Culturally agile professionals can more readily differentiate between situations where a local practice violates universally accepted norms, and situations where cultural adaptation is warranted.

Andrew Spicer, Thomas Dunfee, and Wendy Bailey compared seasoned global professionals—Americans who were living and working in Russia—with comparably placed American professionals who were working in America. 11 The two groups did not differ in their attitudes and intended behaviors in scenarios involving universally accepted ethical norms, such as failing to inform employees about the physical risk from exposure to hazardous materials, or investing money in capital equipment instead of paying wages. Personally, I was relieved to learn that all of the American profes-sionals in their study—whether working in Russia or America—viewed these behav-iors as immoral, unfair, and unjust.

When the scenarios turned to more situation-specifi c norms, however, the atti-tudes toward the situation and their intended behaviors in the situation changed depending on the group. The Americans working in Russia evaluated locally specifi c ethical dilemmas, such as paying small bribes to a government offi cial or keeping two sets of books for different accounting purposes, less harshly than did their compatriot counterparts working in the United States. Although they still viewed these practices as generally unethical, those working in Russia exhibited attitudes and intended behav-iors that were more consistent with the Russian norm, not judging them as seriously unethical. Figure 2.7 illustrates this fi nding. With their experience in Russia, they judged the scenarios with a greater understanding of the local demands and context. We could stop here and debate whether keeping two sets of books, for example, should be universally unethical. But let’s change the lens a bit. The authors noted that the two sets of accounting books—which is unethical in many contexts—might be reframed

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38 Cultural Agility

when the practice is needed in order to keep fi nancial information secret from those involved in organized crime. This is a cultural interpretation that the Americans work-ing in the United States would never have needed to consider—at least, I hope not!


It’s probably safe to assume that every organization has certain practices it would like to see maintained consistently around the world. Health and safety standards, codes of conduct, quality standards, fi scal controls, corporate values, and codes of ethics are typical examples of activities that companies typically wish to standardize and control

around the world. Global professionals with respon-sibilities for these areas often are asked to shape and infl uence the behaviors of colleagues, vendors, sup-pliers, associates, and subordinates to fi t with a cor-porate or industry norm. In these areas (for example, safety, ethics, and quality assurance), global profes-sionals often need to operate with cultural minimi-zation, working to override any cultural differences and ensure a common standard or outcome. But minimizing differences is often easier said than done. In order to accomplish it, global professionals

Global professionals often

need to operate with cultural

minimization, working to over-

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Intended BehavioralResponse to Russian

“Local” Ethical Dilemmas

Americans Workingin America

Americans Workingin Russia

3.0

2.5

2.0

1.5

FIGURE 2.7. Responses to Ethical Dilemmas

Source: Data from Andrew Spicer, Thomas Dunfee, and Wendy Bailey, “Does National Context Matter in Ethical Decision Making? An Empirical Test of Integrative Social Contracts Theory,” Academy of Management Journal 47, no. 4 (2004), 610–620.

c02.indd 38c02.indd 38 28/06/12 12:12 PM28/06/12 12:12 PM


need to concurrently see (and understand) the cross-cultural differences, and infl uence others to change or adapt their behaviors. That last sentence has two important moving pieces: (1) an understanding of cultural differences in the desired behavior, and (2) an understanding of how to successfully infl uence behavior. Cultural minimization is not as easy as it seems—not by a long shot.

Cultural Minimization in Health and Safety Practices To understand the way cul-turally agile professionals minimize cultural differences, let’s consider safety policies and practices. In this realm, the desired behaviors are relatively clear and objective. You can probably envision the posters in the lunch room: “Are you wearing your safety goggles?” “Is your mobile phone turned off when operating machinery?”

Maddy Janssens, Jeanne Brett, and Frank Smith conducted a study of the adoption of corporation-wide safety practices among production workers in three comparable subsidiary manufacturing plants, one each in the United States, France, and Argen-tina. 12 Although the policy was the same for the subsidiaries, the production workers from the three countries perceived the same U.S.-based safety policy very differently. For the Argentinian workers, their perception of the importance of the safety policies was deeply connected with their perception of their managers’ concern for their safety (as opposed to a concern for production). The French workers, in contrast, made little connection between their managers’ concern for their safety and whether safety was a priority in the organization. Now imagine that a well-intentioned senior leader from the U.S. headquarters is visiting each subsidiary to give an impassioned speech outlin-ing the company’s safety practices and emphasizing how much he cares about every-one’s safety, over production . The same speech would be likely to motivate the Argentinian workers to follow safety procedures—while producing bored eye-rolls among the French workers.

Let’s stay with safety speeches for a moment. Shell is the world’s leading oil and gas company, describing itself on its Web site as a company with health and safety as its “top priority.” Shell’s safety practices are tightly controlled and allow for no variation, irrespective of culture. In 2007, Shell appointed Darwin Silalahi as country chairman and CEO of Shell Indonesia. 13 With educational experiences including a degree in phys-ics from the University of Indonesia; an MBA from the University of Houston; an exec-utive education program at Harvard; and years of work experiences at BP, the Indonesian Offi ce of the State, and as the Indonesia Country CEO for Booz Allen Hamilton, Silalahi was the fi rst Indonesian to hold this senior-most position at Shell Indonesia.

In a speech to his Indonesian subsidiary encouraging adherence to Shell’s strict safety practices in Indonesia, Silalahi emphasized the policy but added a collectivist spin, one he knew would resonate among his group-oriented Indonesian workers: “At Shell, we believe we are all safety leaders. What each of us does individually results in our collective culture. We must each take personal responsibility for creating a cul-ture of compliance and intervention.” Silalahi was operating with cultural agility as he leveraged knowledge of the Indonesian culture—appealing to the group orientation to infl uence behavior—and underscored the importance of Shell’s safety practices.

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40 Cultural Agility

Cultural Minimization: Cultural Messages to Infl uence Standardization Success-fully maintaining standards takes more than speeches; it requires culturally agile pro-fessionals who can be infl uential across cultures. It’s challenging enough to infl uence colleagues, subordinates, supply chain partners, vendors, and the like in one’s own culture, but infl uencing them in a cross-cultural or multicultural context is fraught with potential misunderstandings, confl ict, and feelings of being manipulated. Appropriate infl uence methods are, in part, culture bound and can be leveraged to achieve success-ful acceptance of practices and policies that need to be implemented.

Ping Ping Fu and fourteen of her colleagues from around the world conducted an extensive study on cross-national differences in the effectiveness of infl uence strate-gies. 14 They found that individuals’ social beliefs affect how various infl uence tactics are perceived. For example, those who believe that life’s events are predetermined by fate and destiny perceived being assertive and coercive (as opposed to, say, building a positive social relationship) as an effective infl uence strategy. In collectivist or group-oriented cultures, building a positive social relationship (as opposed to, say, being assertive and coercive) was considered the more effective infl uence strategy.

Theo van der Smeede, a culturally agile Dutch professional, knows that being infl uential is critical to maintaining consistency around the world. When Theo was working as a quality and safety manager and adviser for Exxon Mobil, he was respon-sible for developing, assessing, and helping implement standard safety management practices and common processes around the world. He worked regularly in refi neries, chemical plants, and laboratory sites in Europe, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Sin-gapore, and Chile. Refl ecting on the cross-cultural challenges in standardizing prac-tices, he noted that the greatest diffi culty in maintaining consistency and standards across cultures was “trying to understand and adjust my approach to infl uence others from different cultures according to the situation, rather than pursuing my own head-strong approach.” Theo stresses that “even with the most straightforward practices, it is wrong to assume that cultural differences don’t exist. They do—differing by coun-try, organization, and team.” Theo acknowledges that some ways to infl uence behav-iors are shared universally, such as “the need to create ownership for new initiatives rather than pushing these down people’s throats.” Other methods, he quickly added, are more culturally dependent.

Theo’s cultural agility is best seen when he describes the many concurrent factors—organizational, individual, and cultural—that he needs to consider before successfully implementing any standard practice. Theo has seen differences between industries—for example, between oil refi neries and chemical manufacturing plants. The refi neries them-selves are more similar, and those working in them tend to be more willing to adopt common practices, whereas chemical plants are highly diverse, and the professionals who work in them are apt to question a new safety practice. He also notes the differences among individuals and how those differences can affect the implementation. Some peo-ple are more interested in adapting the practices put forth, tailoring them a bit for use within their respective units; others are more interested in innovating or being the ones to develop the practice they will eventually follow.

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Although he is sensitive to these individual and organizational differences, Theo has also observed many cultural differences affecting the implementation of safety man-agement practices. With an example of how to introduce a new standard safety practice globally, Theo illustrates how he has navigated around the differences. He describes col-leagues from his own culture, the Dutch, as being direct, logical, and questioning; they will vigorously debate the points of the new safety practice. With them, he allows the debate to ensue because, ultimately, once they are satisfi ed with the reasons offered in debate, “they are very committed” to its full implementation. Theo notes that his Belgian colleagues, though more reserved than the Dutch, will also debate prior to buy-ing into the new practice. With them, however, he needs to invite greater debate at the onset, an invitation not needed when working with his Dutch colleagues. Among his British colleagues, the debate cannot be disregarded even though (to his Dutch ear) it sounds less direct, more polite, and more focused on ways to improve the safety practice. His American and German colleagues will buy into the practices they have engineered themselves. Theo has found that bringing them in from the beginning, rather than con-vincing them of the need for the practice after the fact, allows for greater buy-in. Theo’s Saudi, French, and Italian colleagues will debate and discuss the practice, the alterna-tives, and possible improvements, but will more readily acquiesce to a “this is how it will be” directive from the appropriate leaders within the hierarchy.

With all of these moving parts, Theo revisits an approach, honed over many years in collaboration with safety management colleagues and under the advice of a psy-chology professor in Germany, to infl uence safety behaviors across cultures. At the core of this approach, Theo knows that he needs to understand individual, organiza-tional, and cultural differences in several areas, including

• Beliefs or attitudes toward the new practice

• Willingness to change behaviors

• Routines, norms, or habits affecting the desired behaviors

• The consequences of behaving—or not behaving—in a certain way

To the latter point, in particular, he encourages those who are trying to create a com-mon standard to identify positive and negative consequences most appropriate for infl uencing behaviors in any given cultural context.

As Theo’s case illustrates, infl uencing others to act in a manner that is possibly outside their cultural norm requires culturally agile professionals to thread the prover-bial needle—to accurately read and understand the cultural elements embedded in the situation and, at the same time, use the most appropriate infl uence strategy to change behavior so as to override or minimize those differences. Because cultural minimiza-tion requires such advanced skills, I strongly encourage organizations to select their most culturally agile professionals, like Theo, to staff positions that require signifi cant cultural minimization.

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42 Cultural Agility


The previous two sections have presented either end of a continuum. At one end, pro-fessionals are placed in situations where their decisions and behaviors (for example, sales and operations management) might require adaptation to the other culture’s way of doing things. In these cases, the other culture controls the situation either because of the power differential in the relationship (for example, the buyer, the regulatory body or government) or because forcing others to adapt their behaviors to the professional’s culture does not make sense. Asking production workers to change behaviors just for the sake of changing behaviors (and not for a strategic need) is often a wasted effort that can backfi re. At the other end of the continuum, some professionals’ decisions and behaviors (for example, those related to safety and quality) might require that their cultural norms (or their company’s norms) be maintained even when they are contrary to those of the host culture. In these cases, the professional is charged with the role of upholding a standard because it is in the best interest of the company (for example, quality standards, accounting rules, codes of ethics) or in the best interest of the col-leagues with whom the professional is working (for example, maintaining strict health and safety practices). At both ends of this continuum, the contextual demand of the role, activity, or job is determining the best way to manage the differences in cross-cultural behaviors and norms.

In many professional situations, however, the best approach will not be at either end of the continuum; instead an integrated (or compromised) approach, not fully

refl ecting either (or any) of the cultures involved, is the most effective. In these cases, global profession-als need to understand when—and how—to create an approach that works across cultures. The most common of these situations is the geographically distributed team—that is, one comprising members who belong to different cultures and are located in multiple countries.

Cultural Integration: Creating a Hybrid Team Culture In a series of studies to better understand cross-cultural team functioning, P. Christopher Earley and Elaine Mosakowski found that heterogeneous (that is, diverse) teams functioned better, over time, when they had created a hybrid team culture—their own norms for interactions, communications, goal setting, and the like. 15 These researchers advise that teams work on the “establishment of rules for interpersonal and task-related interactions, creation of high team performance expectations, effective communication and confl ict manage-ment styles, and the development of a common identity.”

Jason Newman, an American culturally agile bioscience researcher who has worked as a global project leader in Germany for CSL Limited (a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia), could provide many examples of the validity of these research fi ndings. Through his experience in leading teams of scientists from diverse cultures, Jason understands fi rsthand the importance of team-level cultural

Global professionals need to

understand when—and

how—to create an approach

that works across cultures.

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integration to achieve the team’s goals, noting that “team leaders need to recognize the culture lenses of the members and remove the hurdles for a team’s unique culture to emerge.”

Recognizing cultural differences and becoming culturally agile started in an unlikely way for Jason. He was born and raised in a culturally diverse suburb of New York City. He fondly recalls traveling to Quebec City, Canada, as the fi rst spark to kindle his interest in a global career. He learned something about himself during that trip: that he sensed and deeply appreciated cultural differences, including those related to language, food, and interactions. Jason’s cultural interests reemerged a few years later when he was in college, working as a lab technician with scientists from a num-ber of countries. Jason recalls many interesting conversations with colleagues and classmates from Asia, talking about cultural differences while sharing their common interests and academic pursuits in biochemistry and molecular biology in the Micro-bial Pathogen Department. Later in his professional career, Jason was able to draw on many of the lessons learned during those conversations, recalling that “in college, I learned not to assume similarities; even though we all spoke the same scientifi c lan-guage, the messages were internalized and acted upon in different ways. In retrospect, I was learning to collaborate outside of my own cultural norms.”

In 2004, Jason began to hone his global team skills in international roles. Working in a technical sales role for JRH Biosciences, a subsidiary of CSL, Jason now had responsibilities spanning the globe—in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His cross-cultural competencies were used daily and began to grow exponentially. Jason’s suc-cessful sales campaigns required careful consideration of regional business norms, of differences among his internal and external staff members, and of the importance of cultural differences in developing interpersonal relationships and team cohesion. Jason underscored that “when unaware, even seemingly minor faux pas could have negative consequences on client relations and team success.”

CSL noticed Jason’s cross-cultural competencies. In 2007, he accepted a position with CSL as a global project leader in the project management department based in Marburg, Germany. In this role, he managed a global development project team with R&D activities in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The diverse cultural back-grounds of his team provided a fascinating work environment—and also some chal-lenges for team leadership. His R&D teams differed in their risk tolerance: some were more conservative, whereas others took greater risks. The teams also differed in their methodological focus—the same tasks that a given team found essential, another team brushed off as trivial.

Jason knew that when he accepted the team leadership role, he also accepted the challenge of building collaborative trust and respect and establishing a team process that would work for everyone, irrespective of culture. He shared that “the lack of per-sonal relationships was undermining the team, and the cultural differences, had they remained unchecked, would have had a powerful negative infl uence on our team’s suc-cess.” Jason’s fi rst course of action was to develop a foundation of cross-cultural understanding.

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44 Cultural Agility

Recalling the powerful lessons he learned from conversations he had had in col-lege, and calling on the successful methods employed in his professional experience, Jason started with relationship building as the most direct route toward increasing the team members’ cultural understanding. He carefully selected team members from each development site to work collaboratively, offering them coaching opportunities for awareness building and reinforcing mutual respect and cohesion. Over time, Jason and his team created a hybrid and high-functioning team culture among his global team members, who were also culturally agile. Jason commented, “When I started working in my current role, I was concerned with the cultural differences and focused immedi-ately on the collaboration aspect to bring together the people, processes, and method-ologies. My past experiences had highlighted that without a functional understanding of cultural differences, signifi cant effort is required to build trust and collaboration as a result of cultural misunderstandings. When I see collaboration across sites and cultures and the application of best practices, I am proud of the time spent establishing links and building relationships that will continue to pay dividends.” As Jason’s example illus-trates, the creation of a global team’s hybrid culture is critical for a team’s success.

Cultural Integration: Does “No Blame” Mean “No Accountability”? Let’s con-sider another example of a hybrid team culture. In preparation for the 2000 Summer Olympics, held in Sydney, Australia, a priority was set to clean up Sydney Harbour—a massive undertaking that would involve a global budget, TV coverage, and a twenty-kilometer tunnel under an affl uent neighborhood north of the harbor. 16 Consultants were brought in to work with this extensive alliance of professionals to help create their project team culture. They ultimately helped the team compile a list of value statements, which included two core values—striving to produce solutions that were “best for project” and creating a “no-blame” culture—along with a list of ten principles to guide behavior: 17

1. Build and maintain a champion team, with champion leadership which is inte-grated across all disciplines and organizations;

2. Commit corporately and individually to openness, integrity, trust, cooperation, mutual support and respect, fl exibility, honesty, and loyalty to the project;

3. Honour our commitments to one another;

4. Commit to a no-blame culture;

5. Use breakthroughs and the free fl ow of ideas to achieve exceptional results in all project objectives;

6. Outstanding results provide outstanding rewards;

7. Deal with and resolve all issues from within the alliance;

8. Act in a way that is “best for project”;

9. Encourage challenging BAU (business as usual) behaviours;

10. Spread the alliance culture to all stakeholders.

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Although obviously the project was located in Sydney, the guiding principles did not fi t any culture completely. For example, one of the Australian project leaders in this alliance expressed concern that the “no-blame” aspect of the team culture was counter-cultural for the Australians. Describing the example of a colleague being late for a meeting, he noted how diffi cult it was when “you couldn’t call anybody up on what they hadn’t done. That it meant no one could go up to someone and say ‘tighten your sched-ule, you said you would be here at two o’clock. I’ve structured my day around you being here at 2 pm and you arrived at 3 pm. I’m losing confi dence that you are going to do what you say you’re going to do!’ . . . I think that [no-blame culture] is something Australians fi nd really diffi cult to deal with. In Australia it’s more like ‘Hey, you get lost or something?’” 18 In his view, “no blame” would translate to a lack of accountability.

In spite of the principles’ not being fully culturally comfortable for every team member, these professionals adhered to their integrated team culture and worked together exceptionally well. Not only was Sydney Harbour cleaned on time for the Olympics, but all the stakeholders were abundantly satisfi ed—including three eighty-ton whales who returned to the (now cleaner) waters of the harbor. 19

Cultural Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions As with work on cross- cultural teams, other professional situations require an integrated approach to cross-cultural differences. Integrating cultures is also critical when two companies come together through a merger or acquisition. In this context, one of the best examples is Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM’s PC division. Prior to the acquisition, certain ground rules were set by Lenovo’s chairman and CEO, Yang Yuanqing and Steve Ward. 20 These ground rules were characterized as three guiding principles of cooperation for the entire company to follow:

• Candor

• Respect

• Compromise

Yang and Ward also did one more thing: they chose their cultural “battles” care-fully. In other words, the Lenovo leaders did not try to impose a consistent approach unless one was needed. Nor did they try to culturally integrate practices if they antici-pated that doing so would be overly time consuming and not practically or strategically necessary. In a keynote address to the Academy of International Business, Liu Chuan Zhi, CEO and president of Legend Holdings Ltd. (the parent company that acquired Lenovo), described a salient example of this type of cultural agility and the foundation on which Yang and Ward built their approach to the acquisition. In speaking about cul-tural compromises between Lenovo and IBM, Liu sagely offered this approach:

In order to promote common interests, we divided issues into signifi cant and incon-sequential ones. For the latter, we felt that there was no point in wasting time and energy on them, so that we could focus our attention on the signifi cant issues that

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46 Cultural Agility

need to be addressed. We realized that, if we did not compromise, there would be confl icts where no progress could be made. And it might even lead to destructive factions of two different nationalities within the company. We have yet more work to do in the area of cultural integration. I am happy to say, though, that thus far we are progressing satisfactorily along this front. 21

It is a refl ection on Liu’s culturally agile leadership that he was selected as the recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Executive of the Year Award by the Academy of International Business Fellows.

TAKE ACTION Based on the information presented in Chapter Two, the following is a list of specifi c actions you can take to begin implementing the fi rst three competencies in the Cultural Agility Competency Framework within the context of your organization:

• Review the competency models currently being used in your organization (for example, the leadership competency model). Are any of the competencies in the Cultural Agility Competency Framework already embedded into competency models that your organization uses? Can you align them to make sense with your existing framework? Which of the competencies are missing from the existing framework? Can some or all of the missing competencies be added?

• Think about the ten most critical positions in your organization. When consider-ing each of these positions in a global context, is there a behavioral response (cul-tural adaptation, cultural minimization, or cultural integration) that would be most critical for success in the given role (for example, cultural minimization for qual-ity control managers)?

• In considering those critical global roles, is there agreement on the best possible behavioral response—or is the full repertoire of all three behavioral responses needed?

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D A V I D S . W E I S SAuthor of High Performance HR

Coauthor of The Leadership Gap and Innovative Intelligence

T R A N S F O R M I N G H R T O D E L I V E R V A L U E F O R T H E B U S I N E S S

HRL E A D E R S H I P - D R I V E N

Contents

Acknowledgments xiii

Preface xvii

About the Author: Dr. David S. Weiss xxvii

PART ONE: TRANSFORMING HR 1

CHAPTER ONE: BEING LEADERSHIP-DRIVEN 3

HR as a Driver of Business Leadership 5

HR Drives Value Through Leaders 8

HR is Driven to Lead 15

Conclusion 19

Summary 20

CHAPTER TWO: LINE OF SIGHT TO THE EXTERNAL CUSTOMER 21

Stage 1: From Control to Service Providers 22

Stage 2: From Service Providers to Partnerships 24

Clear Line of Sight to the External Customer 25

Implications for HR’s Internal Relationships 27

Conclusion 31

Summary 32

CHAPTER THREE: “LIGHTEN UP” TO DELIVER PRIORITIES 33

Lighten Up to Rebalance Work 34

Leadership and the Need to Lighten Up 34

Lighten Up by Removing the “Noise” from the System 37

The 4Ds: Delete, Delay, Distribute, Diminish 40

Conclusion 48

Summary 49


PART TWO: THE WORK OF HR 51

CHAPTER FOUR: THE HR TRIANGLE CHART 53

People Capabilities, Organizational Capabilities, and HR Value Propositions 55

Apply the Lighten-Up Process to the HR Triangle Chart 57

Conclusion 59

Summary 60

CHAPTER FIVE: PEOPLE CAPABILITIES 61

The Find People Capability 62

The Develop People Capability 68

The Retain People Capability 82

Conclusion 88

Summary 89

CHAPTER SIX: ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES 91

Cultural Transformation and Implementing Change 92

Restructuring and Design 93

Organizational Alignment 99

Return on Investment in Human Capital 108

Conclusion 119

Summary 120

PART THREE: THE HR VALUE PROPOSITION 123

CHAPTER SEVEN: HR VALUE PROPOSITION: AN OVERVIEW 125

The Seven Steps to Develop an HR Value Proposition 129

Confi rm that the HR Value Proposition Mitigates the Business Risk 130

HR Must Partner to Deliver the HR Value Proposition 133

Conclusion 134

Summary 135

CHAPTER EIGHT: BUILD LEADERSHIP CAPACITY 137

Management Capacity Versus Leadership Capacity 138

Element 1: Applying Innovative Intelligence 141

Element 2: Applying Emotional Intelligence 147

Element 3: Aligning Employees and Teams to the Future Direction 152

Element 4: Engaging Employees and Teams with the Future Direction 155


Integrating the Four Elements of Leadership Capacity 161

Conclusion 163

Summary 165

CHAPTER NINE: ACCELERATE CULTURE TRANSFORMATION 167

Why Is Accelerating Culture Transformation So Challenging? 168

What Is Culture? 169

The Laser-Beam Approach to Culture Transformation 171

Final Observations about Culture Transformation 187

Conclusion 191

Summary 192

CHAPTER TEN: IMPLEMENT CHANGE 195

Change and Transition 197

Eight-Step Implementing Change Process 198

Conclusion 229

Summary 230

CHAPTER ELEVEN: MAKING LEADERSHIP-DRIVEN HR HAPPEN 233

F: Forward Thinking 236

O: Outside-In 240

C: Co-Create 243

U: Up-to-Date 250

S: Synergies Within HR 252

Conclusion 257

Summary 260

Index 263

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CHAPTER FIVE

PEOPLE CAPABILITIES

People Capabilities:The HR outcomes that refl ect the fl ow of people through the employment life cycle, from

fi nding talent to developing talent, to retaining talent.

One of the important ways HR becomes a leadership-driven function is by excelling in the people capabilities roles—fi nding the best talent, developing the talent, and retaining the talent within the organiza-tion. HR must ensure that these people capabilities are performed in a quality manner, in a timely fashion, and at a reasonable cost. When HR delivers the people capabilities, it enhances HR’s standing with business leaders in the organization and contributes to HR having a place at the table for making signifi cant contributions to decisions that aff ect the achievement of the business strategies.

Often, HR is not the deliverer of all parts of the people capabilities. Some of the people capabilities will be delivered by internal resources other than HR or by external resources, while some of the people capabil-ities will continue to be delivered by HR. HR’s focus is on ensuring that the outcomes of the people capabilities actually occur, not on delivering all of the people capabilities themselves.

For example, even in a traditional work environment, the HR people capability to fi nd talent involves many players. These can include the business leader (who identifi es the need, conducts interviews, and selects

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62 Part 2: The Work of HR

the candidate), the HR professional (who develops the approach to sourcing the candidate and participates in some interviews), the search fi rm (that provides candidates for positions), other employees (who may identify candidates and participate in the selection process), and internal trainers (who may not even be part of HR but who may orient the new employee to the job).

Table 5.1 presents the people capabilities—from fi nding talent, to developing talent, to retaining talent. As explained in Chapter One, HR needs to take accountability for the outcomes (and not just the processes). Therefore, the table presents how the people capabilities are expressed as outcomes versus how they might be expressed as processes.

Table 5.1: The Outcomes for the People Capabilities

People Capabilities HR Outcomes HR Processes

Find Talent • Find the best talent

• Discover hidden talent

• On-boarding for success

• Selection

• Orientation

Develop Talent • Build leadership capacity

• Employee engagement

• Talent management

• Total rewards

• Voice of employees

• Training

• Compensation

• Employee relations

• Labor relations

Retain Talent • Retention of key talent

• Knowledge transfer from

departing employees

• Renewal post departures

• Retention

• Termination

The following sections describe each of the outcomes of the people capabilities and how HR can take accountability for delivering these outcomes.

THE FIND PEOPLE CAPABILITY

HR’s fi nd people capability (at the beginning of the employment cycle) includes delivering the outcomes of fi nding the best talent, discovering the hidden talent so that unknown candidates will be drawn to the busi-ness, and on-boarding new hires for success.


Chapter 5: People Capabilities 63

The Outcomes of the Find People Capability• Find the Best Talent: Ensuring that the business fi nds new employees

who will meet their work requirements.• Discover Hidden Talent: Ensuring that the business is able to draw

out the hidden talent, i.e. those individuals who may not know of the availability of the work.

• On-Boarding for Success: Ensuring that the new employee has become acclimated to the business, is likely to deliver the performance requirements, and is willing to remain with the business.

Find the Best Talent

Finding the best talent has always been critical to businesses. HR must have an excellent recruitment process that includes planning, attracting, assessing, hiring, and ultimately performing. In addition, many HR organizations have developed clear outcome metrics for fi nding the best talent, which typically include three variables: (1) time to hire; (2) cost of hire; and (3) quality of hire. For example, HR can measure the “time to hire” by tracking the time from when the internal hiring manager identifi es a need for a new employee to when the employee arrives at the business. They also can measure the “costs of hire” for internal resources and external support in the process. The most chal-lenging metric is the “quality of hire.” One measure of quality is the speed with which the new employee achieves an acceptable level of performance eff ectiveness. HR can also enhance the quality of hire by doing the following:

• Anticipate selection needs even before there is a request for a new employee. This enables HR to forecast skills requirements based on anticipated recruitment needs.

• Teach business leaders to be more consistent in how they specify needs and how they interview, select, and orient.



In many businesses, HR departments are discovering innovative ways to fi nd the very best talent for their organizations. When HR achieves this outcome, the business leaders in the organization often know and appreciate HR’s contribution and its leadership for the business in this people capability.

Here are some other examples of these innovations:

• An HR department in one organization has a practice of staying in contact with their second-choice candidates for jobs—those who did not get hired but who were excellent candidates. They realized that the second-choice candidate for one position may be a high-quality candidate for another position in their business and keeping in contact with them can signifi cantly reduce the time and cost to hire.

• In one organization, HR worked with business leaders to determine exactly what the needs were for future employees. HR learned that

Figure 5.1: The ROI of the Finding the Best Talent Outcome

• Develop a recruiting process that identifi es more precise needs of the work and therefore better potential candidates.

Figure 5.1 depicts the return on investment (ROI) for the HR eff ort in fi nding the best talent. HR’s role is to discover ways to reduce the time required to deliver the best possible outcomes.



the organization needed employees who excelled at working in teams. They introduced innovations to meet the business needs including hiring existing teams of employees who currently worked together on projects rather than hiring one person at a time. In other situa-tions they would hire an employee who was an eff ective member of an existing project team and then engage the new recruit to contact his or her former team members in their previous work situation to inform them of new work opportunities.

• Some other organizations have been eff ective at targeting diverse segments of the working population that are qualifi ed but unfairly disadvantaged due to archaic biases. In one legal organization, HR noticed that there was a systemic bias against hiring visible minorities, and HR worked with the business leaders to leverage that knowledge and hire highly skilled talent to their organization. Their core values and culture of diversity allowed them to gain a sustainable competitive advantage against their legal competitors.

Discover Hidden Talent

In many business sectors, the traditional ways of fi nding high-performing employees are not eff ective enough. HR is taking the lead to leverage every possible advantage they have to fi nd the talent they need for ongoing performance. Some are using social media to get the word out to candidates that a position may fi t their talents. They are also giving candidates access to social media so that they can market their talents to their business directly.

Figure 5.2 presents the challenge for HR of discovering hidden talent. The fi gure compares what the organization actually did (hired or did not hire) with what the “truth” is (whether that employee should be hired or not).

Most HR organizations focus their recruitment eff orts on the upper-left-hand box. They want to hire the person that should be hired and avoid hiring the candidate who should not be hired (the bottom-right-hand box). They reduce the “quality of hire” error rate associated



with the top-right-hand box by assessing candidates through behaviorial interviews, references, psychological assessments, work samples, and so on. However, the greater challenge for many HR organizations is the bottom-left-hand box of “the missed opportunities,” which asks: Are there available employees who would be good candidates for your organization whom you are not accessing?

Innovative HR organizations are meeting the challenge to discover the hidden talent that they often do not access through traditional recruitment processes. An eff ective technique to discover hidden talent is to develop an “employment brand.” Essentially, HR organizations use their business’s marketing approach to product and service branding for their recruitment advertising and the creation of a powerful employ-ment brand. An “employment brand” is the labor market’s perception of employment in your organization. The employment brand packages all employment initiatives under an integrated set of symbols and key messages. The messages must be clear and consistent—if not, your employment brand message may be lost.

The short supply of key talent challenges HR to expand its strat-egies for fi nding and retaining key resources. Some HR professionals focus on creative compensation models as the prime enticement of their employment brand. However, there are other compelling and exciting employment brand messages that are very attractive to potential candi-dates, including providing meaningful challenges, supporting personal

Figure 5.2: Discovering Hidden Talent



career growth opportunities, ensuring that key resources are managed by admired leaders, and accommodating employees’ needs regarding the balance between work and personal life.

HR should fi nd ways to enlist the executive leadership’s commit-ment to an employment brand that is appealing to current and potential employees. These ways include the following:

• Develop the employment brand with the executives based upon the business’s current and anticipated future needs.

• Align the employment brand tightly with the marketing brand that is known to customers. Ensure that the employment brand reinforces the marketing brand.

• Set up cross-functional, multi-level teams to advise on the employ-ment branding inputs and outputs and the evaluation of the branding.

• Leverage social media to create interest in high-profi le locations, and market to candidates as you do to customers.

On-Boarding for Success

“On-boarding” is the fi nal outcome in the fi nd people capability. An employment position is not really fi lled until the business can ensure that the new employee has acclimated to the business, is likely to deliver the performance requirements, and will remain with the business.

It is preferable to place on-boarding in the fi nd people capability rather than the develop people capability of the employment life cycle. This decision is driven by the needs of the business leader who is hiring rather than by the activities undertaken during on-boarding. When a business leader has a need for an additional employee, he or she believes that the hiring request is fulfi lled when the person is selected and on board, and not simply when the person arrives on the job for the fi rst day. HR, on the other hand, may view on-boarding as a training function because it has characteristics that are similar to training and performance develop-ment, including that it may be done in a classroom, it has a particular design, and it can be off ered in a repeated fashion. HR should defi ne this



process outcome based on the perspective of the business leader who is doing the hiring.

Eff ective on-boarding of new employees will allow business leaders to gain more immediate value from the new hire. Employees are typi-cally more open to instruction during the fi rst few weeks in their new role. HR should be guiding business leaders to use that time to work closely with new employees, build relationships, and create a common language they can draw upon as the employees become more indepen-dent in their responsibilities. They also should spend time after people are hired to work with them, have conversations about work, and build their relationships.

HR also has a role in orchestrating the on-boarding process through more formal means. For example:

• One business emphasizes a new employee on-boarding process which lasts for the fi rst three months on the job, until the completion of the employee’s probation. They also build in an expectation that some new recruits will not pass probation, and they off er a small fi nancial incentive for the employee who does not pass probation to leave the business.

• Another business has a new leader on-boarding program that includes presentations from all areas of the business and is held four to six times a year. The HR professional orients new business leaders through a one-on-one intensive session to review all elements of their new role and to begin the process of building a relationship with HR as an added-value resource. HR also participates in an assimilation process to discuss the work environment and the expectation that business leaders need to be people leaders as well.

THE DEVELOP PEOPLE CAPABILITY

HR’s develop people capability (in the middle of the employment cycle) typically includes performing all HR services from the completion of the new employee orientation until the time the employee considers leaving



or is about to leave the business. This capability is an important expecta-tion of HR, since it includes the employees’ full term of employment. The following are the outcomes of the develop people capability that are explored in this section:

The Outcomes of the Develop People Capability• Build Leadership Capacity: Ensuring that the business has the

leadership capacity it requires to continue to grow and develop.• Employee Engagement: Ensuring that employees are aligned to the

business direction and are engaged to give their discretionary eff orts to the business.

• Talent Management: Ensuring that the business has the talent it requires to deliver the work.

• Total Rewards: Ensuring that all monetary and non-monetary rewards and recognition motivate employees to perform in the desired way.

• Voice of Employees: Ensuring that the business is responsive to the opinions and needs of employees and that employees can be self-reliant to meet their own needs as appropriate.

Build Leadership Capacity and Employee Engagement

Two of the outcomes of the develop people capability—“build leadership capacity” and “employee engagement”—are frequently chosen as value propositions that HR promises to deliver to mitigate a critical business risk. For example:

• Build leadership capacity is often chosen as an overall HR value proposition when the business risk is associated with not having the required leadership to help the business grow and develop.

• Employee engagement is chosen as an HR value proposition when the business risk is associated with a signifi cant change (such as a merger or acquisition, change in the nature of work, or business



crisis) that may result in employees losing motivation to perform for the business.

Both of these outcomes are described in detail in Chapter Eight: Build Leadership Capacity. The rationale for presenting “employee engagement” as part of “build leadership capacity” is that employee engagement is one of the essential expectations of business leaders as people leaders. HR has the accountability to build the leadership capacity so that business leaders are able to eff ectively engage their employees and teams.

This section will therefore explore the remaining outcomes of talent management, total rewards, and being the voice of employees.

Talent Management

“Talent management” refers to the outcome of ensuring that the busi-ness has competent talent, both currently and in the future, to meet its business requirements. Figure 5.3 shows the three main areas of talent management.

Figure 5.3: The Three Main Areas of Talent Management

Talent management views any request for talent from the external customer perspective and asks how the needs of the external customer can be met. HR professionals are expected to consider which talent manage-ment option will ensure that the business has the talent it requires when



and where it is needed. HR professionals need to fi nd the best option to meet the request for talent, asking business leaders questions such as, “Is hiring a new employee the best solution or would it be better to develop the current cadre of employees to better meet the needs of the customer?” As a result, talent management requires HR to work col-laboratively across its various specialties to deliver integrated solutions that meet business needs.

Talent management includes HR’s accountability to ensure that business leaders and employees remain competent as the expecta-tions and demands of the business change. HR does not fulfi ll this responsibility alone. Business leaders develop their employees, peers contribute to their learning, and employees are expected to be self-reliant and to self-learn as well. In addition, external resources are often used as experts to teach employees and managers how to perform in the desired manner.

HR should help business leaders to become people leaders by encour-aging them to exercise seven essential accountabilities in the ongoing development of talent. These include the following:

1. Taking responsibility for the talent management of the employees in their units.

2. Having conversations about what is needed from leadership, employees, and teams to make the organization successful.

3. Developing backups for key talent (and for the business leader) so that the business leaders can support their employees’ career development.

4. Ensuring that time is allocated for employees to receive the develop-ment they require.

5. Taking responsibility for respectful and candid feedback to employees to target development to the employees’ specifi c needs.

6. Addressing problem employee performance appropriately and in a timely manner.

7. Asking for help when they are not sure what to do (i.e., the business leaders should fi nd a mentor to talk things through—and then act).



HR also has important accountabilities in the ongoing development of talent. For example:

• Identifying the competencies needed for the work to perform at an acceptable and at a diff erentiating level.

• Creating the context to help employees learn continuously so that they remain competent in their work areas as they accept new responsibilities and advance in their careers.

• Designing the career development process so that employees can fulfi ll their potential in directions that are in the best interests of the business and the external customer.

HR’s accountability is to ensure that employees have the opportunity to stay fully competent. The process outcome measure is the time, quality, and cost of the process to restore employees to full competence in their new or adjusted work responsibilities.

Consider the following scenario for a business with a traditional HR training unit:

An HR organization boasts that it has a training department with approximately 200 courses and 50 staff members to manage and deliver the programs. The HR staff believes they are doing a great service to the business. The employees who attend courses are pleased with the education and training. However, the executives see limited value and return on this signifi cant investment. All they see is a large number of courses that look more like a school than a focused professional development process.

HR undertakes a study of the training department. Many of the courses have fewer than 10 people in attendance. Intense tracking and fee transfer eff orts frustrate business leaders who send employees to the courses. The training area is viewed as an expensive school that is not focused on what the business needs to be doing and what the external customer requires.

The review includes interviews with the business’s 30 executives, most of whom are new hires in newly created positions with recent experiences at other major businesses. The executives are asked how they would design a training department from scratch if they had the opportunity to start over. The overwhelming majority of



the executives, including the veterans of the business and the newcomers, recommend the following:

• Focus internal training and development on strategic objectives. This means that the HR training department designs and delivers internally only the programs that will give the business competitive advantage or competitive parity.

• Create an environment in which people will be able to be self-reliant and learn on their own.

• Have the HR training department broker the remainder of the courses to preferred external service providers.

• Have HR keep the prime contact role with business leaders to identify needs and source the appropriate suppliers.

By focusing on planning, ongoing contact, and strategic service delivery, HR lightens up a great deal of work and energy to invest in other business outcomes. HR then proceeds to redesign the training area so that it focuses on the business requirements for the ongoing development of talent. Eventually, HR is able to run the training depart-ment with fewer people, and is able to deliver more value with its programs at a signifi cantly lower cost.

There are fi ve principles for HR professionals as they support the ongoing development of talent.

• Principle 1—The primary purpose of training is to teach people how to self-learn rather than teaching them content. Some businesses have identifi ed lifelong learning as a critical success factor. If people are always learning and are open to learning from others, the culture will be more agile and change will be more readily accepted. Busi-ness leaders will also fi nd that ongoing learning will help them with decision-making. Today’s work environment is increasingly complex and constantly changing. Business leaders must have the opportunity to learn continuously in order to be able to deal with the ambiguity and uncertainty of making decisions. Ongoing learn-ing is also essential for all employees. Businesses should be creating



opportunities for employees to upgrade continually so that their skills do not become obsolete.

HR’s role must focus on teaching people how to self-learn, not on teaching content. When HR creates an environment that supports continuous learning, the nature of what people learn changes. The purpose is not to impart the content. People should be able to learn the content continuously and independently. The emphasis is on teaching people how to learn—how to stay current and up-to-date on a day-by-day basis. They no longer have to wait for a course to be presented. They are taught the learning skills so that they can access the tools online and learn by themselves.

• Principle 2—Business leaders are accountable for creating an ongoing learning environment. While HR can be accountable for continuous learning in the business overall, HR should guide business leaders to take responsibility for ongoing learning opportunities in their work units. Business leaders as people leaders have a major accountability for the ongoing education of employees. In addition, business leaders become sharper and more knowledgeable in their own areas of exper-tise when they articulate knowledge and share ideas with employees.

• Principle 3—All employees are accountable for their own learning. The fi rst and second principles set the climate for employees to recognize that they are held accountable for their own learning. Employees need to have access to the appropriate sources of knowledge, and they need to take responsibility for their own continual learning—no one can do it for them. In the old working environment, knowledge was power. In the new working environment, knowledge is a shared resource. Since all knowledge is accessible, except perhaps specifi c strategic information, all employees have the opportunity to learn as well as to add value to discussions. It is essential for HR to respect the intellectual capacity of every employee to correctly grasp and comprehend this information in order for employees to be account-able for their own learning.

This principle also has many spin-off eff ects. When employ-ees take responsibility for their own learning, they tend to share



experiences readily across the business. Cross-functionality of teams is encouraged because people can contribute ideas to other areas even if they are not experts in them. HR can set the stage for this learning environment by creating group and learning settings meant for participation by all employees, not just those with the most seniority or the highest positions in the business.

• Principle 4—Learning occurs “just in time,” when and how it is needed. “Just-in-time” learning means learning anywhere, anyhow, and any time you need it. With just-in-time learning, people are able to adapt more quickly to changes. In the optimum environment, everyone is able to access knowledge that is readily available when they have a compelling need for it. Through the use of online technology, shared knowledge can come just in time. The prerequisite is for people to be willing to share information freely and openly and to have people prepared to self-learn. The principle of teaching people how to learn rather than teaching them content is based on employees getting information when they actually need to learn and not when they are scheduled to attend a course. Here is an example of just-in-time learning in a traditional manufacturing environment:

Consider a manufacturing plant where an inventive plant manager decides to facilitate just-in-time learning. In this work environment, stopping the workfl ow for a brief period of time will not put a severe dent in effi ciency. He places a fl ip chart in each work unit and then instructs each manager to stop everyone in his or her unit from working when something goes wrong and ask them to gather around the fl ip chart. The manager uses the fl ip chart to illustrate the scenario and to facilitate a discussion about how to do it right the next time. Learning in this plant environment is designed to happen as the need to learn occurs.

• Principle 5—The entire organization shares what has been learned. On a much broader scale, the entire organization can share what they learn about eff ective and ineff ective practices. If everyone knows what others know, the organization will have a wealth of knowledge. Also, the organization can lose a lot of knowledge when a person



retires or leaves. It is important to discover ongoing ways to map what people know and ensure that the intellectual capital remains with the organization as much as possible.

The idea of sharing information about ineff ective practices may be even more important than sharing information about what is eff ective. Ineff ective practices are those actions that the organization needs to “unlearn.” When these practices are shared with employ-ees, it helps them avoid the pathway to the problems previously encountered. The work environment should support sharing about what to lighten up so that others know what no longer applies and should not be done. Sharing ineff ective practices can help people avoid wasting time by making someone else’s mistakes.

By following these fi ve principles, HR can transform the role of training and development to an essential element of talent man-agement that delivers value for the business. HR can also create an environment for continuous learning in which employees have the tools to adapt as changes occur and to help set the stage for the implementation of the business’s strategic direction.

The talent management outcome also includes identifying suc-cessors for positions that may become vacant in the future. In par-ticular, HR should focus on talent management solutions for critical business positions that need successor candidates. Most businesses have very few positions that could be considered critical positions. Critical positions1 are defi ned as positions that have two features:

1. The position is essential to the strategic direction of the business.

2. The position has “unique characteristics” (e.g., unique stakeholder relations, highly specialized knowledge or technology, requirement for specialized experience) that need to be developed internally in order to accelerate the learning curve for the candidate.

1. See David S. Weiss and Vince Molinaro, “Focus on Critical Positions and Key Talent,” in The Leadership Gap (Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), ch. 12.



Once the critical positions are identifi ed, then the business allocates specialized funding for the targeted development of inter-nal candidates to be the successors for these positions (especially for positions where the incumbent is likely to leave the business). Metrics are also used to track successors’ development to reduce the possibility of risk to the business in those critical positions. The other non-critical senior positions still have identifi ed candidates who are ready to replace them in the event of a sudden or planned departure. However, it is clearly understood that in most cases these candidates are interim replacements and not formal successors for the positions.

A diff erent kind of problem appears in building future succes-sion capacity in owner-operated businesses. The owner’s emotional ties can sometimes block his or her ability to see the need to pass the leadership to the next person. Also, owners often select one of their children to be the next leader even when that child may not be the best qualifi ed or their selection process may create family problems that carry well beyond the workplace. Succession in owner-operated businesses often operates with a model of con-centric circles. The owner is in the center. The immediate family is often in the next circle outside the center. In the third circle are the trusted, long-standing colleagues (regardless of their positions in the business). The other circles are for the rest of the employees. Usually, those in the inner circles are considered for succession for senior positions before those in the outer circles. When I explained this concept to a frustrated HR VP in an owner-operated business, she began to understand why she felt excluded from the inner-circle conversations. It also clarifi ed why her opinions as well as some other executives’ ideas were ignored and some more junior directors’ ideas were listened to. It shaped her understanding of the owner’s desires for succession and how he would most likely want to proceed. She confi rmed this impression with the owner and discovered that acceptable candidates for succession came primarily from the inner circles.



Total Rewards

The “total rewards” outcome focuses on the full suite of monetary and non-monetary rewards that can be off ered to employees to motivate them to perform and stay with the business. This includes designing compen-sation and recognition programs to create a desirable environment and eliminating motivators that encourage people to do things that are not desirable. The question for HR and the business leaders is whether the total rewards actually drive the desired behaviors that the business requires.

It is often helpful if HR annually provides each employee with a total compensation statement to increase their knowledge of their total rewards package. HR can also lighten up some of its roles in the total rewards area. For example, HR can streamline most of the technical components of pay and benefi ts and outsource them to specialists in this area.

In addition, some businesses have empowered employees to adjust their mix of total compensation as well as their fl exible benefi ts within specifi c guidelines. If employees need fi nancial guidance, they could have resources available to them for advice up to a specifi c budgetary limit. The fl exibility to adjust their compensation and benefi ts allows employees to allocate their fi nancial assets to meet their individual needs (e.g., dental care for families with young children versus life insurance and pension plans for older employees). Some businesses apply this fl exible total-rewards approach to executive perquisites as well. They allow each executive to select the combination of perquisites they would like (based on the funds allocated for this purpose), whether they join a health club or move some of these dollars into a retirement plan. This approach also removes HR from the transactional role of managing these perquisites for the executives.

Voice of Employees

A traditional expectation of HR is to be the voice of employees. HR can assist in a number of ways, such as:

• Creating an environment wherein employees can have direct access to voice their own opinions within the organization.



• Voicing employees’ concerns and ideas if they do not receive satisfac-tion through their leaders.

• Helping executives know what employees think and feel.

HR has direct ways to learn about the feelings and perceptions of employees—for example, through employee surveys. Some businesses are using sampling theory to survey employees and to increase the frequency of the survey process. Here is what one HR organization did:

HR decided to use sampling theory to collect data from employees more frequently. Their usual method of gathering data was through an annual employee survey but the executives wanted data to be collected monthly. HR decided to conduct a “pulse” survey with a random sample of 10 percent of the population. The sample was large enough to give a reliable prediction of the entire workforce population. They were thus able to collect the data and have a better sense of employee attitudes and beliefs without burdening all employees to complete a survey monthly.

This approach is particularly useful for businesses undergoing rapid change. HR works as a business partner to executives, often helping them to know what the employees feel and how they are responding to the change. HR should prepare the executives to anticipate that the employee survey results will be uneven. Employees may not receive changes well, even if the changes are in the best interests of the customer and/or the business. However, if HR and the executives know that the response to changes tends to fl uctuate, they will have a better chance to respond quickly to the needs of employees and the business.

HR often off ers employee relations (ER) services as a one-on-one counseling support function to give voice to employees’ issues. The employee relations role can be a challenge for HR professionals if they are the fi rst point of contact for employees’ concerns. Sometimes it can also be all-consuming for HR to have to respond to unplanned individual crises. HR can lighten up their work in employee relations in the following ways:

• Educate and support business leaders in fulfi lling their role in employee relations. HR is then positioned as the second line of



defense to address employee issues in situations where the business leader has not resolved the issue eff ectively.

• Designate an HR professional who is an employee relations specialist to respond to employee relations issues. This will remove the unpredict-able employee relations interruptions for HR business partners.

• Position HR as the fi rst line of defense to address employee issues in situations where it would be inappropriate for the business leader to handle them (e.g., harassment cases, human rights situations, illegal acts by employees, compliance issues, or legal cases).

• Provide employee assistance programs through external, confi dential service providers for employees’ personal, family, and work-related issues.

In some cases the voice of employees is represented by a collective body (not HR) such as a union or an employee association. However, HR still has an important role as the voice of employees along with these employee representatives.

Figure 5.4 presents two confl icting scenarios. The left-hand scenario suggests that when employees select a representative body (i.e., a union or employee association), those representatives become the intermediary between the employees and management. This scenario suggests that all communications proceed through the union. However, although unions

Figure 5.4: The Three-Way Relationship in a Unionized Environment



may prefer the intermediary scenario, it is almost always dysfunctional for businesses. It is within business leaders’ management rights to com-municate directly with their employees. The scenario on the right-hand side of Figure 5.4 shows the proper way of communicating.

There are times when the union is the voice of the employees—for example, during collective bargaining and when representing employ-ees for grievances and arbitrations. There are also specifi c times when management will engage in discussions and negotiations directly with the union. However, on a day-to-day basis, the managers continue to have direct contact with employees for all work assignments and for other performance-related matters. HR functions as the voice of employees in this scenario as well. HR can continue to be the voice of employees through talent management, employee surveys, and employee relations as long as HR does this consistently (and not as an infl uencing tactic during the identifi ed time for bargaining a new collective agreement).

In addition, HR has recognized that the traditional adversarial way of approaching unions creates internal confl ict and a dysfunctional organization. Businesses that have made sincere attempts to forge new relationships with employee associations and unions have made signifi cant gains. My fi rst book, Beyond the Walls of Confl ict: Mutual Gains Negotiating for Unions and Management (1996),2 describes how to change the nature of these relationships. Businesses and unions that have used the principles and techniques proposed in that book have been able to move from adversarial relationships to ones that are more constructive. The potential is there to elevate the relationship with employee associations and unions to a level that adds value to the business. HR has the capability to transform what may be perceived as a strategic liability into a strategic asset and to partner with business leaders in this process. When HR contributes to making that kind of change, it often has a huge impact on the business, its leaders, and its employees.

2. The book, written by David S. Weiss, has been reprinted and is now available under a new title: In Search of the 18th Camel: Discovering the Mutual Gains Oasis for Unions and Management (Kingston, ON: Queen’s University IRC Press, 2003).



THE RETAIN PEOPLE CAPABILITY

The retain people capability focuses on retaining employees, or at least their knowledge, to avoid the risk associated with early departures and unwanted terminations.

Employees leave organizations for many reasons, including seeking other career opportunities, escaping from the current employment situa-tion, being asked to leave by the organization (terminations, downsizing), and completing their fi xed term of employment (retirement, contract completion). HR is accountable for ensuring that people who leave the business do so with dignity. The challenge to HR in the retain people capability is to increase the probability that key talent is retained in the organization and, if employees do depart, that they transfer their know-ledge so that the business does not lose the key asset of the employees’ intellectual capital when they leave.

Here are the essential outcomes in the retain people capability:

The Outcomes of the Retain People Capability• Retention of Key Talent: Ensuring that the business does not have

any unwanted departures that could compromise the enterprise’s performance.

• Knowledge Transfer from Departing Employees: Ensuring that the business continues to have access to valuable knowledge when an employee departs.

• Renewal Post-Departures: Ensuring that the business is able to renew the employee commitment after other employees leave the organization (voluntarily or involuntarily).

Retention of Key Talent

HR must develop strategies for retaining key talent—especially those who are instrumental in providing competitive advantage for the business. When other businesses are raiding key talent, retention strategies take on an even higher degree of importance.



Here is an example of how an organization was able to retain their key talent:

A fi nancial planning business had an urgent need to develop a retention plan for highly coveted fi nancial analysts because of its competitor’s aggressive recruiting practices. The competitor placed many advertisements that compared its benefi ts plan with the fi nancial planning business’s benefi ts plan (the competitor’s package was considerably better) and concluded with a strong message to call the competitor. HR saw the risk and worked with the business leaders to develop a countering strategy to retain the talented fi nancial analysts. Their strategy was to build the employment brand for their business for both external recruits and existing key talent. Some of the retention tactics that HR devised included:

• Financial incentives such as fl exibility in pay and benefi ts to meet employees’ personal needs;

• Workplace environment incentives such as personalized work space and fl exibility regarding work and personal life balance, including working from home options;

• Focus on achieving employees’ full potential by providing continuous development, additional autonomy to make decisions, and specifi c career advancement opportunities;

• Developing plans with the key talent “fast trackers.” This approach included letting the key talent know they were fast trackers and that they would be given the oppor-tunity to develop new skills through work transfers or by playing leadership roles on various projects;

• Providing a special page on the business’s intranet site: “How to Talk to Headhunters.” It included a list of questions to ask recruiters so that employees could make an educated choice if they were considering an opportunity elsewhere.

The principle in retention is to have one-on-one conversations to discover the underlying motivators that will entice employees to stay rather than leave. HR then provides a menu of choices from which employees are able to design their own retention plan that will meet their needs precisely.

For example:

One business was populated by young, highly skilled industrial designers. Many of these employees were coveted by their competitors. HR needed to develop a retention strategy. They realized that these employees did not care about some of the organization’s traditional



recognitions, which were very important in other parts of their business. For example, family BBQ parties and 10-year pins had little motivation for them.

This task was quite complex because what tends to keep younger employees happy is very diff erent from what matters to older employees. Benefi ts and compensation were, of course, part of this retention strategy. However, they found that new ideas were required for younger employees. HR decided to develop a menu of choices with a specifi c budget for the indirect methods of retention. They were able to fashion a retention approach that suited the individual needs of the younger key resources.

Knowledge Transfer from Departing Employees

Some organizations lose more than talent when employees depart from the business—they lose the employees’ intellectual capital. HR is then challenged to fi nd a way to retain the intellectual capital before the person leaves the organization. HR shares this outcome with both the departing employee and his or her business leader. The accountabilities can be divided as follows:

• Departing employee: The departing employee should be held account-able for recording the knowledge either through interviews or by directly inputting the knowledge in a wiki system on themes and topics that employees can easily search.

• Business leader of the departing employee: The business leader of the departing employee should be accountable for ensuring that the employee’s knowledge is not lost from the business.

• Human resources: HR is accountable for defi ning the process, ensuring that business leaders are able to fulfi ll this accountability, and mon-itoring the process to be certain that the knowledge transfer has taken place. In some cases, HR may be the content limiter to control the dissemination of the knowledge so it is used by the proper resources.

There are many challenges with knowledge transfer from departing employees. Here are some suggestions for how each challenge can be addressed:



• How can the process be controlled so that it does not become an overwhelm-ing challenge? One organization decided to invest in knowledge transfer only for employees who were perceived to have special-ized knowledge or experience that was not readily available in the public domain.

• How can useful information that should be transferred be determined versus information that is not useful or is out of date? One HR organization decided to collect information and questions from the associates of the departing employee, who clearly defi ned what the associates wanted to know. The departing employee was asked specifi c ques-tions and the responses were documented in a central database that was searchable. This approach increased the associates’ interest in the departing employee’s knowledge after it was collected. Another organization asked new employees what they needed to know, and those employees met with the departing employees to collect the information. The new employees then met together to share what they had learned.

• How can a business motivate employees who are departing to share their knowledge? In most situations where employees depart voluntarily (e.g., retiring, transferring to another role, taking a leave of absence), the departing employees are quite honored to share what they know as a legacy for the business. One organization hired a cadre of students from the local university to collect the departing retirees’ career stories. The stories were printed in a self-published internal book that became part of the business archives. Each departing employee received a copy of the book as a gift when they retired.

• How can a business leverage knowledge from employees after their departure? One organization decided to off er mentorship roles to employees close to retirement as a way to encourage knowledge transfer. The organization then used the retirees to be mentors post-departure. For example, one retired senior vice president with experience on the board of directors became the mentor for a new VP who was starting to get involved with the board.



Here are some innovative examples of how HR in various organiza-tions has ensured knowledge transfer from departing employees:

Story #1: One retiring vice president believed her experience and knowledge was not widely known in the business. She worked with HR to invest some of her training budget to hire a consultant who could help her document her experiences in her role over many years and the key insights that she believed should be shared. The report was eventually used in the on-boarding of her replacement.

Story #2: An HR director of training and development in a large college was retiring. He had established some innovative development programs for faculty, administration, and management. He took on the accountability to document his journey over the past 10 years in order to build the training and development programs, with particular emphasis on the compelling reasons for the programs and their unique features. He also developed an ex post facto vision and a set of strategic objectives. Although that plan had not been in place 10 years earlier, it helped in the communication of what he achieved to his eventual replacement.

Story #3: The CEO of a well-known center for people with disabilities was retiring after 20 years of outstanding leadership, innovation, and fundraising. HR coordinated a meeting for over 100 people, including current and former employees, key stakeholders, health-care providers, and funders. They divided the large group into eight major themes, and participants self-selected themselves into groups to answer three questions: (1) What was the situation like 20 years ago? (2) How is that situation diff erent today as a result of the CEO? and (3) What were the major milestones that occurred in the journey from 20 years ago to today? The ideas were documented, shared with the entire group, and compiled in a book of impact stories in the eight areas of exploration.

Renewal Post-Departures

HR’s retain people capability includes ensuring that the business is able to renew employee commitments after a major downsizing. The challenge, though, is that downsizing and terminations can become a major time consumer for many HR professionals. It also can have a negative impact on the employees who stay with the business if the downsizing is not done



properly. As a result, HR must ensure that the following best practices in downsizing guide them when employees depart the business:

• Provide early warning for employees and suffi cient time for them to prepare and execute redeployment and re-employment initiatives.

• Adopt aggressive redeployment eff orts to minimize the need for layoff s.

• Identify and secure alternatives to job elimination (e.g., job sharing, reduced wages, reduced work weeks).

• Provide funds and/or opportunities for employees to develop skills or retrain and facilitate access to internal and external resources (e.g., colleges and universities) for these services.

• Provide ongoing outplacement and support services up to the time of termination and, preferably, to the point of reemployment.

If staff reductions must occur, HR needs to be able to ensure that the impact of the downsizing is minimized for those who are retained. Therefore, it is advisable for HR to let an outplacement fi rm focus on the downsizing of staff while HR concentrates on rebuilding for the long term and motivating the retained employees. HR should concentrate on the renewal of the business, investing in human capital to enable the retained employees to rebuild the enterprise, and delivering value for the business and the external customer. Some renewal practices that HR should emphasize in partnership with business leaders include the following:

• Ensure the employees understand the compelling reasons that necessitated the downsizing and its implications for the ongoing viability of the business. Be open about information and share knowledge willingly.

• Engage retained employees in problem-solving groups to help deter-mine the future direction for their part of the business.

• Honor the past and provide retained employees with the opportunity for social support through the transition. At the same time, look to the future evolution of the business.



• Avoid referring to the retained employees as “survivors,” as if they were lucky they were not fi red. The more appropriate language is to refer to the business as being in a renewal stage that will be built with the business’s valued employees.

CONCLUSION

When HR is able to deliver the people capabilities of fi nd, develop, and retain, the business leaders will be more willing to partner with HR for competitive advantage. The people capabilities must be delivered with precision, quality, and timeliness, and at the appropriate cost. However, some HR organizations make the mistake of viewing success in the people capabilities as their only focus until they “get it right.” Many executives are demanding more from their HR business partners and are becoming more impatient in expecting it. Just as executives want strategic value to mean higher revenue and at the same time lower cost, they want HR to deliver the people capabilities and at the same time contribute to the organizational capabilities and the HR value propositions that are described in the next few chapters.



SUMMARY

• One of the important ways HR becomes a leadership-driven function is to excel in the people capabilities roles—fi nding the best talent, developing the talent, and retaining the talent within the organization.

• HR must ensure that the people capabilities are performed in a quality manner, in a timely fashion, and at a reasonable cost. HR is not necessarily the deliverer of the people capabilities but it must ensure that they occur eff ectively.

• In the fi nd people capability (at the beginning of the employ-ment cycle), the outcomes include fi nding the best talent, excelling at discovering hidden talent, and on-boarding new hires successfully. Innovative HR organizations are taking on the challenge to discover the hidden talent that they often would not otherwise access through innovative recruitment processes.

• In the develop people capability (at the middle of the employ-ment cycle), the outcomes are to ensure there is the leadership capacity to deliver the business strategy, that employees are engaged, that HR is implementing eff ective talent management solutions, that total rewards for employees are motivational, and that the voices of employees are heard.

• In the retain people capability (at the conclusion of the employment cycle), the employee either leaves the business or attempts are made to retain the employee so that he or she does not leave. HR must develop strategies for retaining key talent—especially those who are instrumental in providing competitive or comparative advantage for the business. When other businesses are raiding key talent, retention strategies take on an even higher degree of importance. HR also must ensure that there is an eff ective knowledge transfer during



departures and a renewal of employee commitment after others leave the business.

• Many executives are demanding more from their HR business partners and are becoming more impatient in expecting it. Just as executives want strategic value to mean higher revenue and at the same time lower cost, they want HR to deliver the people capabilities and at the same time contribute to the organiza-tional capabilities and the HR value proposition.


Contents

A Note from Warren Bennis xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction xvii

1 The Pillar of Self 1

2 The Pillar of Balance 23

3 The Pillar of Agility 43

4 The Pillar of Change 67

5 The Pillar of Confl ict 89

6 The Pillar of Creativity 113

7 The Pillar of Coaching 135

8 The Pillar of Collaboration 161

9 The Pillar of Results 187

10 The Journey Continues 211

Notes 223

About the Authors 233

Index 235

Buy This Book



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7The Pillar of Coaching

I have learned that people will forget what you said; people will forget what you did; but people will never forget how you made them feel.

—Maya Angelou

Coaching unquestionably requires focused effort and dedication, but the rewards can be enormous. Bob Nardelli, the former CEO of

Home Depot, believes that without a coach, people “will never reach their maximum capabilities.”1 In addition, a recent study out of Stanford demonstrates that formal coaching increases retention rates for students.2 Given the fact that most business schools lack a sound curriculum in coaching-related skills,

LEADING WITH CONVICTION

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more and more companies are picking up the ball and making coaching an integral part of their strategy to develop and grow talent. Coaching sends the signal to employees that an organi-zation cares enough to cultivate their success. And coaching need not be outsourced—leaders can and should develop their own coaching skills.

More and more, CEOs are realizing that their recent recruits, although smart, motivated, and eager to get ahead, lack critical interpersonal skills associated with emotional intel-ligence—including collaboration, persuasion, and managing conflict. Coaching by leaders helps individuals develop and employ these skills—and vastly improve their performance.

Roger Enrico, the former CEO of PepsiCo, knew this better than anyone. He personally ran a three-day leadership development program for ten senior executives at a time. Enrico did the teaching himself—without any outside consul-tants. Over the course of the program, the executives developed a “change project” to take back to their respective units. They spent sixty days implementing the project, after which they went back to Enrico for three days of follow-up coaching. Several hundred executives went through the program. All told, the work generated $2 billion in revenue growth and created a strong leadership pipeline.

Later, when Enrico was looking for his successor, a person whom he had watched closely during his training sessions—Steven S. Reinemund—emerged as the obvious choice. Like-wise, when Enrico was searching for someone to head Pepsi’s restaurant venture, he didn’t have to look far to zero in on

THE PILLAR Of COACHING

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David Novak. for his part, Novak went on to use this same leadership development approach all around the world, engag-ing hundreds of thousands of his staff to make the Yum! Brands restaurants (KfC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, later spun off from PepsiCo) better.3

Yet despite the fact that leaders such as Roger Enrico recognize the clear upside of building a coaching pillar, some others still perceive coaching as a purely corrective measure—a last-ditch effort to rein in poor performance. Although it was once used largely to remediate troubled employees, today, in most major organizations, coaching has become an integral part of the standard leadership playbook for elite executives and rising stars. According to Harvard Business Review, “Ten years ago, most companies engaged a coach to help fix toxic behavior at the top. Today, most coaching is about developing the capabilities of high-potential performers.”4

Still, many companies delegate the challenge of coaching to the HR department, thus divesting the manager of any coaching responsibility. One underlying purpose of coaching, however, is to give employees what amounts to a gift—the gift of time. Our research shows that when leaders dedicate time to coaching, the effort is correlated with retention and perfor-mance. The leader-as-coach model manifests itself, in many ways, through the concept of “servant leadership” developed by Robert K. Greenleaf, a philosophy and practice by which leaders achieve results for their organizations by giving priority attention to the needs of their colleagues and those they serve.5 This transforms the role of the leader into that of a mentor and


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a coach, and as a result, employees develop a sense of belong-ing—a sense that the organization cares about their well-being and career development.

Beyond retention and personal development, coaching helps people embrace change. As we have seen, organizational change is a complicated endeavor. Human nature causes us to cling to what is familiar and resist what is new and unknown. The first step to change is self-reflection, which is fueled by feedback. The critical role of a coach is to offer that feedback, and to help bring people to a place that they might not reach on their own.

As a leadership tool, coaching is effective at every level of the organization. And its effectiveness goes far beyond a tar-geted intervention for underachievers or an enrichment program for high performers. Coaching should be an essential competency of every leader. for a coaching mind-set to take root within an organization, senior leaders need to communi-cate that coaching is the responsibility of every single manager from the top down. It is not a role that should be delegated to a subordinate, a consultant, or the human resources depart-ment. Leaders know that coaching is a critical responsibility that they themselves must own.

Coaches are driven by a deep conviction that they can help others to be their best. As advocates for change, they are focused on both the process and the outcome of coaching. To be an effective coach, you need to be aware of your own tem-perament, propensity toward conflicts, and the motivation underlying the desire to change others. The deeper you dig,


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the greater the chance you will begin to see yourself realistically. If you avoid dealing with your feelings, or if you don’t know your own trigger points, doubt and resentment may rise to the surface at the wrong moment. The bottom line is that you need to know your shortcomings and modulate your own behavior before you can elicit the best from the people around you.

Beyond self-awareness, building a coaching pillar requires agility. Leaders need to be able to blend hard and soft skills and to balance authority and influence. To engage the minds of the people you coach, you must alternately probe and listen, provide honest feedback, and approach difficult conversations with grace and patience. You need to walk the line between being firm and being supportive, listening and directing, focusing on tasks and being sensitive to the emotional needs of others. In addition, to build a coaching pillar, a leader must be driven by an inner belief that people can change. Coaching is an upbeat, glass-half-full endeavor that requires you to find the best in others.

CHALLENGES INHERENT IN COACHING

Alana, the founder of a service-based company in the North-east, was accustomed to high achievement. Extremely driven, her pace was considered a sprint, and she built a successful career in management consulting at a relatively young age. With an idea that she picked up from colleagues in financial


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services, and financing from private investors, she started a company and grew it over time to $100 million in revenues through sheer force of will. But soon after that, revenue hit a wall and she and her management team found it difficult to break through certain barriers to growth. Alana’s behavior during that time called her leadership skills into question, and morale around the company became a problem.

It did not take long to see that Alana herself was the biggest problem. Although she was brilliant at driving the busi-ness, her leadership style was abrasive and abusive. Her staff suffered from a sort of corporate Stockholm syndrome, having invested too much time and energy to leave, but nonetheless feeling entirely exhausted and demoralized. They needed clear direction and a sense of how their work fit into the overall mission of the company. They also needed a less volatile CEO. Unfortunately, the longer sales remained stalled, the more Alana acted out. She blocked any and all attempts to modify her behavior; in fact, she fired those who were willing to give her honest feedback. She was advised many times to get coach-ing, but she steadfastly refused.

In time, Alana brought in a few seasoned managers to fill the gaps, after which her investors managed to convince her to step away from day-to-day operations and focus on strategic planning and business development. The most significant effect of this shift was that she was no longer in charge of managing people.

Over the next several years she focused on the strategic side of the business and developed a compelling growth strat-


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egy. The leadership team managed the people side of the enter-prise. It was a successful formula and the business began to grow again. With projections on the upswing, the leadership team created a positive and productive environment that was attracting talent. Over the next several years the company grew revenues to over $500 million. The rapid success drew the attention of other investors and a number of attractive offers began to roll in. Alana, however, could not relinquish control, and she shifted gears again to reclaim a day-to-day leadership role.

Unfortunately, Alana’s high IQ and past achievements were not sufficient to equip her to lead, and most of the young people who had joined the company became disillusioned. Performance suffered and the company’s fortunes changed sig-nificantly. The great tragedy was that she never came to terms with her role in the company’s decline and was therefore unable to change her behavior and live up to her full potential.

Alana’s disdain of coaching is not unique. Very often abrasive executives perceive being coached as a stigma. Their strong egos make them oblivious to their surroundings and deprive them of the opportunity to learn and lead more effectively.

If Alana had been open to receiving feedback things could have been different. She might have turned herself and her company around. But coaching takes a leap of faith. It forces individuals to explore their weaknesses and expose their vulnerabilities. In the same way that senior executives and CEOs benefit from outside coaching, so too can individuals


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in an organization benefit when leaders are able to build this pillar within themselves. Building a coaching pillar helps to improve performance and change behavior. Implemented effectively, coaching can help deliver results. Conversely, when a leader neglects to build a coaching pillar, results suffer. Make no mistake, coaching is one of the most effective skills a leader can have and is a central component of leading with conviction. As a tool to manage and motivate employees, coaching is a key for unlocking personal and organization potential.

Because the ultimate goal of coaching is to change behav-ior and improve performance, leaders need to be aware of some of the difficulties inherent in the process. The following are some of the challenges we have witnessed that can force coach-ing efforts off the rails.

Cultural Norms

Coaching requires something that is exceedingly difficult for most of us—an honest dialogue. How many times have you come out of an important conversation feeling uneasy because what you said was not what you really meant? The cost of repeated failures to communicate—in terms of time, produc-tivity, and organizational performance—can be huge. People are typically taught to be polite and courteous. In many cul-tures negative feedback is perceived as counterproductive. We are told as children that we should avoid embarrassing other


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people by revealing our thoughts about them. Therefore we grow up believing that avoidance is acceptable behavior. We learn to couch our remarks in a way that avoids putting people on the spot. This behavior becomes habitual, and by the time we get to the workplace it is deeply ingrained.

Many corporate and organizational training programs reinforce these habits by coaching managers to “say something nice” before offering critical feedback. In some eastern cultures this practice is associated with “saving face.” Regardless of culture, these norms can create confusion, cloud the truth, and impede dialogue. Therefore an honest dialogue requires a com-bination of courage and respect. It calls for a clear message that is balanced with the appropriate delivery.

The Desire to Be Liked

Leaders want to be liked, the same as everyone else. Conse-quently, real coaching generally falls by the wayside in favor of euphemisms and pats on the back. But avoiding difficult con-versations rarely fosters effective relationships. In fact, quite the opposite is true. When people fail to meet our expectations, we tend to accumulate negative feelings toward them. When we avoid acknowledging our disappointment, our feelings remain hidden below the surface. If a manager fails to address an issue with an employee, the employee will continue that behavior and assume all is well. Eventually, the manager will be forced to address the issue, but the reaction, having built


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up over time, may seem exaggerated and emotionally charged. This “cashing out” of negative feelings triggers behaviors that are associated with low emotional intelligence: passive-aggression, anger, and silence.

The same effect applies when a manager fails to live up to an employee’s expectation. We encountered a situation recently in which a manager repeatedly cancelled regularly scheduled meetings with a direct report. The employee felt that he could not safely mention how much this behavior frustrated him. His resentment built up over time. finally, after a fifth cancellation, the employee stormed into his manager’s office and angrily threatened to quit. Addressing the issue at the outset would have freed up energy and fostered more produc-tive communication.

The desire to be liked creates miscommunication in the same way that cultural norms cause us to couch our remarks. It is not uncommon, then, to hear employees complain during an exit interview that their manager never shared her views about negative performance. In fact, many individuals are sur-prised to read the long list of gripes their managers have reported to the HR representatives. A dismissal conversation is the first time they are hearing the feedback.

Lack of Skills

Our research shows that a lack of skill in preparing and con-ducting coaching sessions is another reason leaders avoid


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meaningful interactions. When attempting to tell it like it is during a negative assessment, for example, a manager may backpedal. This may stem from either limited experience engaging in challenging conversations or painful memories of a time when a confrontation caused them embarrassment. Regardless, poor skills and low confidence can cause coaching to go hopelessly awry. Managers become defensive and say things they don’t mean, leading to hurt feelings and resent-ment. Trust is broken and misunderstanding prevails. The anti-dote to skill deficiency—in this case and others—is training. With training and experience, the level of skill and confidence a leader brings to the task of coaching become an asset.

Fear of Unintended Consequences

Concern over negative repercussions can cause us to hold back. The CEO of a fortune 100 company we work with, for example, became frustrated with his senior VP of human resources for not moving quickly enough to manage certain staffing issues. As a result, their meetings were tense and super-ficial. The CEO hinted at the problem but was never explicit. The senior VP suspected that his boss was dissatisfied but didn’t ask why. Both were reluctant to bring the problem into the open. The CEO was concerned that negative feedback would throw the senior VP further off his game. The senior VP was hesitant to broach the subject for fear that the conversation would result in his dismissal. Rather than approaching the


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problem honestly and constructively, both executives left the problem unresolved and lived with the uncertainty. Con-sequently, the CEO didn’t get the support he needed from HR, and the senior VP was never an effective member of the execu-tive team. Business suffered, and the board eventually replaced both executives.

Shortage of Time and Energy

Leaders are often fighting fires. Confronted with competing agenda items and time pressure, they can be reluctant to engage in difficult interactions. Challenging situations require prepa-ration and follow-up and can entail reviewing a paper trail. One senior executive at a large finance company admitted that he had no problem calling an employee into his office and expressing dissatisfaction with his performance. What both-ered him, however, was realizing that he should have had the conversation much sooner. His schedule slowed him down. Because of his own procrastination, he became anxious, and his delivery was defensive. As a result, he earned a reputation for being rude and difficult.

Avoidance of Intimacy

Honest dialogue has the potential to create intimacy—a situ-ation that makes many leaders uncomfortable. Maintaining a safe distance requires less energy and emotional commitment.


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All things considered, avoidance may seem like the best option to a manager. An executive from a leading German firm we work with confirmed that raising prickly issues required a much higher level of engagement than simply “carrying on.” He therefore continued to maintain a blissful avoidance of problems while serious issues languished unresolved.

Limited Trust

Coaching, at its essence, requires trust. When a culture is driven by internal competition and clouded with secrecy, it becomes difficult to carry out an honest conversation. In one case, an executive from a large global company realized that he needed coaching but was extremely reluctant for fear that the conversation was secretly being tape recorded. Needless to say, trust is hard to build and easy to destroy. Yet, without trust, effective coaching is impossible.

Although all of these factors make coaching a challenge, establishing an open and honest dialogue is worth the effort.

Benefits of Coaching

Coaching is a process aimed at helping people to get better in performing their roles. The following are the positive outcomes of coaching:

(Continued )


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Maximizes human potential Builds skills and confidence Enhances commitment to learning Improves job satisfaction and development Radiates a culture and values of compassion and

caring Develops a meaningful partnership that results in

creativity and innovation Prepares individuals for increased responsibilities Expands the role of executives from being managers

to being teachers and facilitators Opens up the organization for an honest dialogue

that improves performance Accelerates results in terms of customer satisfaction,

employee retention, and profitability

PREPARING TO COACH

Effective coaching requires leaders to redefine their role in several different ways.

first, they need to move away from pure authority in favor of interaction. They need to go from being directive to becoming a facilitator. At its essence, coaching is about build-ing a sustainable trust, enabling both parties—the coach and the coachee—to be candid. Once the trust level is established,


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the coach becomes less concerned with being “politically correct” and more focused on improving performance and managing behaviors.

Next, an effective coach needs to grapple with two appar-ently contradictory objectives. for starters, they must under-stand the aspirations of their people: what are their hopes and dreams, as well as their strengths and weaknesses? If an indi-vidual aspires to be an IT director in five years, how can you support that goal? But they must also be entirely versed in the goals of the wider organization. The best coaches are commit-ted to the coaching process, yet they are staunchly results-oriented. Every individual’s goals should be considered in the context of the organization’s needs. This ideal means that in order to help people succeed, leaders must thoroughly under-stand the goals and landscape of their organization.

In addition, coaching requires an explicit top-down com-mitment. Leaders must demonstrate a dedication to the process. Jeff Immelt of GE, for example, dedicates almost 50 percent of his time to coaching and interacting with his top executives. He understands that coaching is a partnership aimed at enhanc-ing performance and that it builds self-esteem and mutual respect. In fact, in one of his presentations to Harvard MBA students, he said that if he were to repeat his MBA, he would take fewer courses on marketing and finance and more on how to develop people. GE, more than any other company, has produced the largest number of CEOs from its ranks.6 It is driven by a culture that rewards managers who are committed to developing their people.


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Even beyond an organizational commitment, the wider corporate culture needs to be conducive to coaching efforts in order to make them stick. It’s clear that what works in an entrepreneurial culture like Google, for example, won’t fly at Philip Morris. Some companies expect people to “think differ-ent” and disrupt the status quo, whereas others build their business around process guidelines and protective procedures. Companies like Siemens and GE tend to appreciate individuals who are daring competitors. Companies like DuPont and Sinopec might expect employees to be more process oriented and risk averse. The leader’s job is to recognize the behaviors that the organization rewards and build them into each indi-vidual’s development plan.

Taking organizational culture and values into account as you coach enables you to determine which skills and behaviors to cultivate. There’s no point in training managers to be risk takers if they work for a strictly risk-averse organization. Like-wise, it makes no sense to develop consensus-building skills in a highly competitive culture where the highest values are speed and execution. Your coaching efforts should match the orga-nizational focus.

finally, coaching demands good communication. This means the willingness to listen. Warren Bennis calls it being a “charismatic listener.” Active listening, of course, entails asking questions. But what differentiates a good coach from the rest is the ability to actively and meaningfully listen to the responses. We have all been trained in effective communication tech-niques, but the challenge comes in dedicating the time to


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follow through when your attention is pulled in many different directions. However, the cost of failing to listen actively is, at a minimum, a missed opportunity to have an honest dialogue, and in the worst case, a loss of trust.

A common pitfall for managers is approaching issues with a certain bias and therefore not seeking to understand the other person’s perspective. This may be the result of arrogance or rigidity. Either way, it tends to turn the dialogue into a mono-logue. To ask good questions, a coach must project confidence without arrogance—because good questions demonstrate a personal vulnerability that invites others to share in a similarly open way. Active listening is the centerpiece of an honest dialogue and a centerpiece of coaching. Using a structured approach to get the dialogue started is helpful, as long as you can adjust it to suit your style and situation.

The next section presents a conversation framework that allows leaders to manage a coaching session, remain on track, and create a rhythm in the discussion. Once you get going, a natural dialogue will develop around this framework.

A FRAMEWORK FOR THE COACHING CONVERSATION

We have developed an effective framework that we consis-tently use as we coach executives from a variety of organiza-tions and across cultures. This model is built on three major


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components: preparing for the coaching meeting, the meeting itself, and follow-up.

Phase 1: Precoaching Reflection

1. Examine and understand the landscape, the culture, and the demands of the organization.

2. Analyze the individual you are coaching in terms of per-sonality type and his or her strengths and weaknesses.

3. Collect data on the individual, including achievements as well as behaviors and skills that need to be developed.

4. List meaningful questions that need to be asked. Start with the easy and end with more complex questions.

5. In terms of delivering critical feedback, anticipate the indi-vidual’s reaction and be prepared for defensive behaviors ranging from silence to outbursts of anger and blame.

Phase 2: During the Coaching Interaction

1. Create an environment that is conducive to interaction. Sit next to the individual or at a round table, for example, as opposed to sitting behind the desk. This sends the message that “we are in this together.”

2. Open with positive remarks. Share some of your own dif-ficulties from your own experience.

3. Acknowledge the tension in the situation and assure the person of confidentiality and trust.


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4. Ask questions that require the individual to dig deeply. Listen closely to both verbal and nonverbal responses.

5. Agree on the issues surfaced and development needs. Remain positive.

6. Explore solutions collectively. Ask for options. Solicit ideas for correcting the behavior under discussion or the skill that needs to be improved.

7. Chart a roadmap and get a commitment for implemen-tation.

Phase 3: Postcoaching

1. Set periodic meetings to measure progress.2. Praise changes and progress, no matter how small. This is

an opportunity to deepen trust and build confidence.3. Continue to collect data and accumulate observations to

be shared and discussed.

The Top Ten Coaching Questions

It is possible to provide a very rewarding coaching session by merely asking a series of questions. The following are the top ten questions that could be used in a Socratic coaching approach.

(Continued )


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THE IMPORTANCE OF LISTENING

facilitating these kinds of questions requires coaches to be “charismatic listeners.” When coaches actively listen they build trust. Listening is one of the most effective influence tools. It radiates a sense of caring and empathy. furthermore, when the listening is authentic it results in a better attitude, stronger partnership, and greater commitment to the desired outcome. Listening is best depicted in the Chinese character, which symbolizes three required elements (see figure 7.1). first, we must listen with the ears for verbal messages. Second, we listen with the eyes to observe nonverbal messages. Third, we listen with our hearts to sense the emotions expressed in the message.

1. What do you want?2. Can you elaborate?3. How do you feel about it?4. What ideas do you have?5. What are the lessons?6. How will you achieve your plan?7. If it goes wrong, what is your backup plan?8. How are you going to measure progress?9. What support do you need?

10. What can I do to help?


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Figure 7.1: The Chinese Character “To Listen”

EarEyeOne (undivided)

Heart

The Effective Leveling Checklist

In coaching it is critical to conduct an open and honest dialogue. This involves giving people feedback, or what we call leveling. To level is to give honest and straightfor-ward feedback in order to encourage development, build the relationship, or both.

When leveling, you need to be . . .

1. Clear about your objective and the purpose of the feedback

2. focused on behaviors rather than the person3. Specific, rather than general4. Straightforward and not apologetic for the point you

are making5. Aware of timeliness and location6. Willing to test your assumptions7. Sensitive to self-esteem issues8. Sincere, credible, and emotionally controlled


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THE COACHING METAPHOR: A REALITY CHECK

Our mental models for coaching are forged in the sports arena. Yet celebrity coaches are idiosyncratic, and their methods and results vary widely. Vince Lombardi and Phil Jackson are larger-than-life figures with egos to match; Bobby Knight threw chairs and was nicknamed the General; Joe Paterno failed to take a stand when confronted with a situation that tested his morals; and Billy Bean revolutionized baseball eco-nomics and became the centerpiece of a bestselling book. In other words, every coach’s profile is unique. Sometimes the sporting analogy holds; sometimes it’s off the mark. However, if there is one coach who we believe sets an example for coaches on and off the field, it would be John R. Wooden, UCLA’s iconic head basketball coach.

Wooden, who passed away on June 4, 2010, at the incred-ible age of ninety-nine, was nicknamed the Wizard of West-wood.7 In his twenty-seven-year tenure, he coached UCLA to ten NCAA national championships in a twelve-year period (1964–1975), including seven in a row (1967–1973), an unprecedented feat. Within this period, his teams won a record eighty-eight consecutive games. He was named national coach of the year six times, and the Pac-10 Coach of the Year Award in both men’s and women’s basketball was renamed the John Wooden Coach of the Year Award. While a student and bas-ketball star himself at Purdue University, Wooden was the first player to be named basketball All-American three times. In


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1932, he led Purdue to the Helms foundation’s unofficial national championship and was named national player of the year.

Wooden was beloved by his former players, among them Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton. His leadership philoso-phy was, “Adjust to your players, but don’t expect them all to adjust to you. Teamwork is not a preference, it’s a necessity. A good leader is first, and foremost, a teacher.”8 To encourage others to reach deeply within themselves, to become better and to accept the things that they cannot improve, a leader must become a master of self-awareness. Leaders should reflect on their own actions and consider the reasons for using a particu-lar style of leadership before they actually use it. Wooden did just that. He spent fourteen years observing himself and iden-tifying twenty-five behaviors he believed were necessary to achieve success. In 1948 he summarized this monumental work in his Pyramid of Success.

Wooden’s Pyramid of Success is legendary. In it he identi-fies fifteen essential building-block behaviors—including industriousness, alertness, and poise—which are held together by underlying traits such as faith and patience. To Wooden, coaching was about gaining and showing mutual esteem, respect, loyalty, and devotion. He did not create the Pyramid to dictate his beliefs, but rather to live by them himself. Through great introspection, adaptability, and the mastery of emotions, he developed both self-discipline and a path to dis-cipline for those under his supervision. As a coach, Wooden was an expert observer. He was quick to spot a weakness and


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correct it or use it as a teachable moment. He was willing to sacrifice personal considerations for the welfare of all. That defined him as a team player. He never used the word “winning” or exhorted his teams to be “number one,” only to be “the best you can become.” He believed that successfully developing the building blocks of character ultimately led to competitive greatness.

Abdul-Jabbar recalled in the New York Times that with Wooden there “was no ranting and raving, no histrionics or theatrics.” He continued: “To lead the way Coach Wooden led takes a tremendous amount of faith. He was almost mystical in his approach, yet that approach only strengthened our con-fidence. Coach Wooden enjoyed winning, but he did not put winning above everything. He was more concerned that we became successful as human beings, that we earned our degrees, that we learned to make the right choices as adults and as parents.”

“In essence,” Abdul-Jabbar concluded, “he was preparing us for life.”9

These are essential lessons for leaders—as coaches and as individuals. In the organizational setting, the leader as coach must be consistent, thoughtful, and grounded in the organiza-tion’s reality. Leaders who coach need to ask good questions and demonstrate patience. They need to exhibit empathy and provide honest feedback. Coaches need to encourage two-way dialogue and also obtain a commitment for change. To manage this, you must first cultivate these traits within yourself and then practice coaching others toward greatness.


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Five Guiding Principles for Building a Pillar of Coaching:

1. Leaders must make coaching an organizational priority, beginning from the top down.

2. Every leader should develop the skills needed to coach.3. Coaching should not be delegated to the HR depart-

ment.4. Effective coaching requires the ability to level; that is, to

engage in open and honest feedback.5. Coaches must ask good questions and actively listen to

produce positive outcomes.

Contents

1. When Asian Leaders Are at Their Best 1

The Leadership Challenge Around the World 3

The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership 5

– Model the Way 6

– Inspire a Shared Vision 9

– Challenge the Process 10

– Enable Others to Act 11

– Encourage the Heart 12

The Five Practices in Action 14

2. Model the Way 17

Find Commitment Through Shared Values: How Values Guide Us in

Deciding to Engage . . . or Not 19

Teach the Values: Affi rming Shared Values Through Education and Action 23

Walk the Talk: Showing Others How to Model the Way in Hard Times 27

Confront Critical Incidents: Leading Through Shared Values 29

Teach by Following Through: How Being Consistent with Your Values

Builds Trust 31

PRACTICE: Model the Way 34

3. Inspire a Shared Vision 37

Envision a Better Future: Showing There’s Opportunity in a Crisis 39

Find a Common Purpose: Helping Others to See Themselves in the Picture 44

Appeal to Shared Aspirations: The Way for Others to See How a

Common Vision Serves Their Interests 48

Listen, Learn, and Follow Through: Enlisting Others by Connecting to

Their Interests 52

PRACTICE: Inspire a Shared Vision 56


4. Challenge the Process 59

Encourage Initiative in Others: Making It Possible for Others to Lead and Learn 62

Be an Active Learner: Letting Mistakes Teach Valuable Lessons and

Point to a Better Way 65

Accept Coaching: Learning from Others’ Experiences 69

Seek Advice: Having the Courage to Ask for Help 71

PRACTICE: Challenge the Process 78

5. Enable Others to Act 81

Build Trusting Relationships: Showing Concern and Interest in Others 83

Be the First to Trust: Letting Others Know You Care, One Small Action at a Time 87

Develop Cooperative Goals: How Managing a Friend Resulted in

Leading a Team 90

Appreciate Differences: Seeing Things from Others’ Perspectives Improves

Relationships and Performance 94

PRACTICE: Enable Others to Act 99

6. Encourage the Heart 101

Expect the Best: How Believing in Others and Small Gestures

Make a Big Difference 103

Be Clear About Goals and Rules: Rewarding Progress Requires

Systems and Celebrations 107

Show Appreciation—or Put Your Own Success at Risk 110

Show You Care: Learning How to Appreciate the Work of Others 114

PRACTICE: Encourage the Heart 116

7. Make a Difference 119

You Are the Most Important Leader in Your Organization 120

Leadership Is Learned 122

First, Lead Yourself 124

Leadership Is a Choice 127

Notes 131

Acknowledgments 133

Suggested Readings 137

About the Authors 141

Buy This Book



17

TITLES ARE GRANTED. Leadership is earned. It’s your behavior that wins you respect.

Leaders around the globe have told us that leading means you have to be a good example. You have to know what you stand for, and then you have to actually live the beliefs and principles you say are important. If you want to gain commitment and achieve the highest standards, you must be a model of the behavior you expect of others. Leaders Model the Way.

To effectively model the behavior you expect of others, you must first be clear about your guiding principles. You must clarify values. Charles Mak, based in Hong Kong as president of International Wealth Management for Morgan Stanley, explained: “You have to open up your heart and let people know what you really think and believe. This means talking about your values.” You must understand what you stand for, what beliefs and values guide your thinking and actions, and then clearly and distinctively communicate your values.

C H A P T E R 2

Model the Way

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SIA You must find your own voice. But you aren’t just representing

yourself in clarifying values. You speak and act on behalf of a larger organization. Forging agreement around common principles and common ideals is essential to giving people reasons to care, not simply orders to follow.

Model the Way means more than just discovering and articulating common values. You must also set the example. Words and deeds must be consistent. Exemplary leaders set the example through daily actions that demonstrate they are deeply committed to their beliefs. As Prabha Seshan, principal engineer for SSA Global, told us, “One of the best ways to prove something is important is by doing it yourself and setting an example.” She discovered that her actions spoke volumes about how the team needed to “take ownership of things they believed in and valued.” There wasn’t anything Prabha asked others to do that she wasn’t willing to do herself, and as a result, “while I always trusted my team, my team in turn trusted me.” For instance, she wasn’t required to design or code features, but by doing some of this work she demonstrated to others not only what she stood for but also how much she valued the work they were doing and what their end-user expected from the product.

In the rest of this chapter, we hear the voices of Asian leaders in their stories about how they and others Model the Way. The cases demonstrate that Modeling the Way is about earning the right and the respect to lead through direct involvement and action. They show relentless effort, steadfastness, competence, and attention to detail. And quite often the actions leaders took to set an example were simple things. The most memorable actions demonstrate the power of spending time with someone, of working side-by-side with colleagues, of telling stories that made values come alive, of being highly visible during times of uncertainty, and of asking questions to get people to think about principles and priorities.

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All the cases in Making Extraordinary Things Happen in Asia are from real people in real organizations. The individuals who experi-enced these situations are the authors of each story. They lived what they have written about. Their names, and the names of their orga-nizations, have been changed or left unidentified in order to allow for maximum openness and disclosure. All other details, however, are as we received them in our leadership research. We have edited the examples only for length and clarity (trying to retain the voice of the original storytellers).

Find Commitment Through Shared Values: How Values Guide Us in Deciding to Engage . . . or Not

To become a credible leader, you first have to comprehend fully the deeply held beliefs—the values, standards, ethics, and ideals—that drive you. You have to freely choose them and then authentically communicate them to others. However, leaders aren’t just speaking for themselves when they talk about values. They’re also making a commitment for a group. Therefore, leaders must not only be clear about their personal values, but they must also make sure there’s agreement on a set of shared values. In the story that follows, we see how Ming was quite clear about his values and was also able to understand and align the values of others. There are several interesting examples of the impact of shared values. We see both how leaders can build a sense of shared values and how powerful that alignment is. We learn that, when there are gaps between what leaders say and what they do, constituents not only feel confused, but they can also feel betrayed.

Leadership begins with looking inside yourself. To effectively lead a team, you need to understand the team’s values, affirm those

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SIA values, and demonstrate them to others. But before you can do that,

you need to understand your own governing values by clarifying what drives you and what underpins your moral compass.

On the surface, the idea of identifying our governing values may not seem a particularly difficult task. The challenge lies in how honest we will be with ourselves and how much time and effort we want to invest in this exercise. I can say from first-hand experience that it is well worth the effort. I have seen how self-knowledge helps both parties understand their personal goals and their alignment with the team. Reinforcing the shared values strengthens the team.

One experience I had in clarifying values involved mentoring four university students as part of a social enterprise competition. My role was to provide pragmatic, professional advice on building and scaling a new venture created by these students, so it was important for me to understand why they committed to doing this. Although their participation was a course requirement, there was clearly some-thing else driving them besides obtaining academic credits.

During our first session, I spent time getting to know the team and questioning them about their interests. While they did not have substantial work experience, these students shared an honest belief that it was possible to build a company that could both deliver a profit to shareholders and create a positive impact in local communi-ties in Asia. They expressed values that included altruism, open-mindedness, integrity, and independence. Their idea was to develop a website to source and direct donations to fund university education for underprivileged high school students in Asia.

When it came time to see whether our values were aligned, I shared with them my vision in setting up my own company. This is a consulting company that advises small businesses on branding and marketing strategy and, when I started out, a lot of time was invested not just in defining the revenue model, but also the underlying

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characteristics of the clients, employees, and vendors we wanted to work with. Three things were of particular importance: (1) identify-ing the values behind the company; (2) affirming values with key stakeholders; and (3) finding role models to emulate.

I spent the entire first working session seeking to understand these students and communicating my own belief system to them. By the end, it was clear that we shared the same values and wanted to develop a similar culture for their social venture in Asia.

Clarifying values puts everyone on the same page, but to really build trust, a good leader needs to affirm the shared values within the organization. While this example shows how affirming shared values served as a building block for success, here’s another experi-ence that illustrates what happens when values are violated—when values and actions are not aligned.

I once counseled Li, who excelled at her job, consistently received high performance reviews, and yet had a rather unhappy working relationship with her boss, Jin. Li was a quiet introvert and a hard worker who preferred to focus on managing her direct reports and getting the job done. Li believed in honesty, loyalty, and integrity in maintaining a professional working environment and she had no interest in involving herself in firm politics. Not only did Jin never make an effort to understand Li’s belief system, but, by ignoring it, he proceeded to violate each and every one of her core values.

Although Jin relied heavily upon Li, he frequently undermined her and her team publicly to raise his standing in front of the firm’s leadership. While Li struggled to negotiate around her boss’s weak-nesses, he would constantly take credit for her work and was quick to blame her whenever project milestones were delayed or any mis-takes were made. Li felt betrayed. She was also confused, because her boss gave her positive performance reviews and compensation increases, yet his behavior was inconsistent and unpredictable. The

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been having an extramarital affair. The affair was not very discrete, and it soon became the topic of water cooler conversation at the firm. Li was so disgusted that she eventually resigned to join another company. Li and I discussed her situation prior to her move. She found any options that involved her staying with the firm unappeal-ing because that would mean going against her values. In the end, Li followed her conscience and joined another firm where her values were aligned with those of her boss.

Ironically, Li’s previous employer had an established set of values and code of conduct that had been distributed to all employees. Her experience revealed that, while it is easy to put values on paper and communicate them to others, it is quite another thing to put them into practice and affirm them. While many firms espouse generic values, employees can tell when the messages are hollow and lack credibility. This means the onus is on them to proactively find man-agers with similar value systems, rather than waiting to find out the hard way that they have value conflicts with them. It means model-ing the way through action and personifying shared values. Your team should be inspired by what you do rather than what you say.

The lesson from these two experiences is that you have to look for leaders who embody your values. Look for signals and consis-tency in behavior to confirm that what they do aligns with what they say. Nothing teaches your constituents to model certain values more than demonstrating them yourself during a time of crisis. If you teach others to model the values, they can use your example as a guideline when they find themselves in moral grey areas. The chal-lenge as leaders is to use our value systems to execute and follow through on our commitments. Leaders model the way by identifying their core values, affirming shared values, personifying these values, and demonstrating how to lead by example.

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Teach the Values: Affirming Shared Values Through Education and Action

People can’t implement values and standards they aren’t clear about, nor can they commit to values and standards with which they don’t funda-mentally agree. That’s why it’s so important for leaders to be clear about values and to affirm shared values. But affirming shared values doesn’t mean you necessarily take a vote if you believe values and standards need to change for the organization to be more effective and for people to be more engaged. It does mean, however, that you have to educate constituents about why new principles are important, and assure them that you’ll stand by them in your actions and reward people for being consistent with them. In this story we see how Liang confronts an outdated set of standards, teaches others about a more appropriate set of guiding principles, and takes personal responsibility for their implementation.

As a graduate of an engineering school in North America, I was trained to be creative and try out different solutions to problems. The thinking behind this is that there’s never a right or wrong answer so long as you understand the fundamentals of the task and the logic of the problem, and you apply the principles correctly. When I was assigned to build an IT support team in Hong Kong to implement and maintain our essential business messaging system, I learned that not everybody shared this point of view.

I initially expected to find people for the team who shared my values, but after several rounds of headhunting, it became obvious that this was not going to be an easy task. The main challenge was overcoming cultural differences. People in the Far East tend to ask for solutions or instructions rather than find a solution for them-selves. This may be rooted in their emphasis on using “model

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SIA answers.” Usually, when a problem is encountered, the first reaction

is to seek out a standard solution and if one cannot be found, to report the problem to a superior or delegate it to subcontractors; the person then waits for instructions on how to proceed. When solu-tions come back, they are seldom challenged, especially if they come from superiors, because they are now regarded as “model answers.” And because people do not question the solution, they usually do not even bother to understand why it has been adopted or whether there are better options.

Given this situation, I came to realize that it would be very hard to find people already capable of performing what the job required, and even if I did find them, they might not be interested in working for an internal IT department. The only solution was to educate a team in a different set of standards that would make them more effective and more engaged in their jobs.

While that solution may sound simple and obvious, it was easier said than done. First, my fundamental understanding of how IT should be carried out was very different from what my team was used to. The traditional method for general IT operations in Hong Kong involved purchasing big solutions, keeping out of solution formulation, and staying out of trouble. Therefore, what I needed to do was to clarify my core values and make sure everybody under-stood what these were and how they could reflect on their everyday work. So I published a list of guidelines:

• There is no model answer. Every solution must be backed by fundamental theories.

• Every presentation on projects should have at least three propos-als, accompanied by staff recommendations and justifications.

• For any problems that cannot be solved, a brainstorming session can be called. However, I will not provide solutions but only

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discuss fundamental concepts that would be helpful in construct-ing solutions.

• Before agreeing to purchase any system, a prototype has to be built to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal and show if the presenter truly understands the solution.

• The use of open source software is preferred and encouraged because these tools usually require in-depth knowledge of the fundamentals.

• Experimenting is encouraged to spawn innovation.• Small, recoverable mistakes are tolerated, so long as they do not

occur repeatedly, to encourage learning by mistakes.

Needless to say, many of my team members were skeptical about these ideas because they contradicted existing practices. There were also concerns that, once an issue came up, those who had identified the proposal or implemented a change would be blamed.

To ease these concerns, I needed to show them that I really believed in my stated values and stood behind them. I did this by implementing the following:

• Extra resources were pulled in for an experimental lab where staff could test out new ideas and do preliminary tests on existing ones.

• Once a solution or change plan was approved, I took full respon-sibility for it. In no way would staff who acted according to plan be blamed when an issue arose.

• When a change was made to the live system, I would be in the office together with staff. Usually these changes were done late at night or on weekends to minimize disruption to users. By being there, I showed support, coordinated everything to make sure it was on track, and provided technical and managerial support as needed.

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SIA • When any concerns about approved changes were raised by other

departments, I took full responsibility.

Through these measures, I modeled how I expected things to be done and clarified my expectations to staff. The result was a big success. As my staff experimented with different open source tools, they gradually developed the fundamental knowledge needed to build complex IT infrastructures. This brought tangible benefits to my company. My staff were better able to assess the offerings from Hong Kong and Southeast Asia “consultants,” who are really no more than product salespeople with very limited knowledge about how their products integrate into different environments. When called for, my staff were even able to bypass these consultants alto-gether. Their enhanced knowledge of open source systems meant they could perform many small tasks solely by integrating open source software, which saved substantially on software costs.

Since the team had a free hand in trying out new technologies and applying their newly gained knowledge directly to their work, job satisfaction was very high and the turnover rate was very low. This further reduced the operating costs of the IT department, while maintaining a highly skilled workforce that could tackle complex issues without the need to engage expensive external consultants.

When I started working with this team, I faced cultural barriers and the lack of suitable candidates. I was able to overcome these obstacles by clearly defining the core values of the IT department, standing firm behind these values, and instilling confidence in my team that I would stick with them. This approach enabled me to train a highly skilled IT team that was even better than some outside consultancies. Their skills in optimizing solutions and streamlining operations have helped to reduce costs and contributed to our com-pany’s competitive advantage.

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Walk the Talk: Showing Others How to Model the Way in Hard Times

Constituents are always watching what their leaders do to see whether they are truly committed to the espoused values. And when tough times challenge core beliefs, people are even more vigilant in observing how leaders respond. Adverse circumstances offer significant opportunities for leaders to teach important lessons about appropriate norms of behavior. They make your choices very evident and your commitment even more visible than in good times. This next story reminds us that staying true to your personal values when “the rubber meets the road” is the truest test of walking the talk.

Leaders will often face tests and challenges during difficult times. What sets great leaders apart is their ability to demonstrate their ideals through personal example and show they are passionately committed to making the company better. They not only talk the talk, they walk the walk—the “talk” being the set of values they believe in and the “walk” how they demonstrate and communicate these values. If leaders don’t practice what they preach, they will not have the trust of their teams.

I have experience with a leader who successfully modeled the way in this regard. He was the managing director (MD) of a Swiss private bank that I joined in February 2009, and he stayed true to his values to pave our way through difficult times.

The bank we worked for was one of Switzerland’s oldest banks. Throughout its history, it remained a partnership, meaning the partners had unlimited personal liability, and this led to a very con-servative and careful culture when it came to client selection. Before it set up in Hong Kong in 2008, it had only two branch offices, both in Switzerland. Even the expansion to Hong Kong involved

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move was tipped by the potential for business that the partners saw by servicing clients in the region, especially in China.

Unfortunately, the Hong Kong office opened right around the time of the 2008 financial tsunami. During the tough months that followed, the partners in Switzerland pointed fingers at us for not meeting our revenue targets. They paid a visit to our office several times in 2009 to express their disappointment to all five of us—two front-line salespeople and three in the back office. However, our MD in Hong Kong had great faith in his team, and he gave a master lesson in how to Model the Way.

Our MD was passionate about his job and had been in private banking for more than fifteen years before joining the Swiss bank. He gave up a well-paid career in a large private bank because he saw great potential in becoming a partner in the Swiss bank’s Asian operation.

His approach was both pragmatic and supportive. Having been through the ups and downs of the banking world, he believed there was always a light at the end of each tunnel. He also believed that a bank’s success depended on the whole team, and he demonstrated this by showing confidence in every one of us, even under strains and pressures. When the Swiss partners talked about pay cuts and even layoffs during their visits, our MD stood up for us. He stuck his neck out to protect the interests of both the bank and his staff, and he took responsibility for the whole team. After these meetings, he would take us to lunch to reassure us. He reiterated again and again that he would personally guarantee that we, as a team, would make it through this crisis together. This personal touch showed that he cared about his staff and their well-being.

Apart from comforting words, he also “walked the walk.” Although he defended us to the Swiss partners, the reality was that

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the Asian operation was not meeting its target due to external factors. Minimizing costs was the only option left. Since our MD did not believe in pay cuts or layoffs, he started by cutting his own costs. He traveled economy class on all business trips and stayed in cheaper hotels. There were also times when he personally paid for meals with clients to minimize the costs incurred to the bank. On top of that, he continued to value his staff and kept telling us we were an asset to the bank. He also did his very best to help us meet our revenue targets during the bad months.

This leader performed a true act of modeling the way. Good leadership takes strength of character and a firm commitment to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason. It means doing what you say, when you say it, which builds trust between the leader and the team.

Confront Critical Incidents: Leading Through Shared Values

Your constituents are always watching you, looking to see whether your actions are consistent with your expectations of others. They not only want to hear that it’s important to “never give up,” as the leader in this case espouses, but they also want to see what you do when confronted with a critical incident that tests your commitment to a set of beliefs. In this story you will see how the leader’s example spurs the drive and com-mitment of his constituents.

I learned a tremendous amount from Ri, my country leader, who was a successful role model in terms of perseverance and customer focus. When I first joined the firm, I was already an expe-rienced search consultant, but I tended to work within my own comfort zone. I avoided taking on challenging projects and tended

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quite frustrated with one global search assignment and did not know how to continue. Ri was a strong-minded person, and he could have pushed the client to change their specifications so our life would become easier. Instead, he realized that if we could find a candidate who met the client’s expectations, we would not only successfully complete the search assignment, but, most importantly, win the client over as a long-term account. “There is no search assignment where you cannot find the candidate,” he told me. I had two reac-tions to this. First, it was a rather bold statement. Second, I had many reasons to argue that it was not true. However, I also felt the power of his words. It was almost as if he were saying, “We do not give up on any project we take on.”

Soon afterward, two things happened that made me see the value of his words and how his perspective and persistence changed my own viewpoint. We had an important global key account. One consultant who had been working on a project for them that was not successful left our firm. Given this was a key account relation-ship, we needed to continue working on the project. Ri took on the project himself, although he did not have to. He said, “When things go well, everyone is a hero. However, the true hero is someone who does not drop the ball even when things are in trouble.” He did not just say the words. More importantly, Ri followed them through and completed the assignment through to the end. After he set this example, I took much more seriously his original statement that there was no search assignment where you could not find the right candidate.

Another incident further enlightened me. Ri and I were sched-uled to visit an important client. On the morning of the visit, he had a problem with his leg and could not move it. It would have been reasonable to simply call the client and postpone the meeting.

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However, as it might be very difficult to schedule another meeting, Ri decided to go to the meeting on crutches. You can imagine the surprise when the client saw us. They did not expect that someone would hobble into the meeting on crutches! The incident taught me a good lesson in perseverance and customer focus.

With these two examples in mind, I became fully committed to my difficult search assignment. I felt I needed to demonstrate that I, too, would not drop the ball. I also believed I could find additional strength within myself to conquer the challenges, given I did not need crutches to come to work! Eventually, we found the right candidate.

In summary, there were several useful points about these leader-ship experiences. The leader had a strong vision of what he wanted to achieve. He made bold statements to make me feel the power of his learning points but, most importantly, he kept his word. He set an example through his own behavior so that I had a real-life role model to follow.

Teach by Following Through: How Being Consistent with Your Values Builds Trust

This case illustrates how you build trust when you understand your personal values and act consistently with them. Even when you are clear about what you believe in, you still have to earn your credibility with your constituents. They want to see the values in action. They want to see you following through on your promises. To be an effective leader you have to match your words with your deeds. You have to set the example for how you want others to behave. Trust is built in the little

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you believe.Many leaders in Asia can deliver fabulous, rousing speeches.

However, when it comes to setting an example through their com-mitment to shared values, a lot of them fall short. As a result, I have known subordinates who find their leader’s visions to be out of reach and only mentioned once a year when the CEO speaks at the annual company dinner. Clearly, this is not good enough. Leaders need to lead by example to prove they are deeply and personally committed to the visions they champion. Good leaders do what they say they will do. I am fortunate to work for a CFO who is a perfect example of this.

My boss is a veteran of Wall Street with more than thirty years of corporate finance and accounting experience, including some fifteen years as CFO of NASDAQ-listed companies. John is an expert on financial matters and, unlike a lot of Asian CFOs, he understands the high-tech business extremely well.

When he started with us, John sat down and shared his personal values with me and the rest of the team. For example, he talked about the fact that people always think the finance department plays a supporting role and call it the “back office.” John believes that if you only understand accounting and finance, and you only know how to close the books and how to talk to the bank about financing, then you are indeed only adding value as a back office supporting unit. He thinks a finance department can do much more. To John, a proper CFO should be extremely savvy about the whole of the company’s business and not just be concerned with managing the finances. The CFO should be able to drive business growth directly, by challenging other departments on different business initiatives and on what they can and cannot do.

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John laid out his views on what it meant to be a CFO and how the finance department would support the organization. He wanted to make sure his direct reports understood that they would have to start thinking from a broader business perspective. None of us would be simply closing the books. He also made it clear that, in order to succeed as a team, we had to all share this perspective. The reason for this was because. when his direct reports went into meetings with other departments, they were individually representing the entire department.

I cannot say his message won us over immediately. I remember thinking to myself, “Let’s wait and see how he does it.” Frankly, I thought this might be just another visionary speech with no action or substance. His actions that followed surprised me, though, in that they taught me the importance of putting values into practice and in this way affirming shared values.

John took me along to a number of meetings with other senior executives, sometimes simply to teach and mentor me. Afterward he would take me to lunch and ask if I thought his behavior had matched the values that he championed. John then asked me a very important question: Did I think I could get anything done if I didn’t have the trust of others? I paused and began to comprehend what he was trying to tell me.

You can’t just be hardheaded and force people to follow your advice, even if you are right, and especially if you don’t have an important title like CEO, COO, or CFO. You first have to gain their trust. John was showing me that I have to help people solve some simple problems before they will let me make anything bigger happen. He was setting an example. He told me that in the early part of his career, he fell into the trap of knowing the right things to do but executing them badly. As I spent more time with John in

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better understanding about how his behavior upholds the common values that he promotes.

As a leader, John was able to (1) share his values with the team; (2) make sure the whole team bought into his values; (3) seize opportunities to teach; and (4) teach by setting a personal example. I gained a lot from this experience. His actions were much more powerful than his words, and this had a big impact on my own approach to leadership.

PRACTICE: Model the Way

To Model the Way, you clarify values by finding your voice and affirming shared values and you set the example by aligning personal actions with shared values.

Here are a few key lessons the leaders in this chapter learned about how to put these essentials into practice:

• Leadership begins with looking inside. The challenge lies in how honest you will be with yourself and how much time and effort you invest in discovering who you are and what you care about.

• Clarifying values puts everyone on the same page, but to really build trust you need to affirm the shared values within your organization.

• You can’t just expect people to follow you; you first have to gain their trust.

• Leaders seize opportunities to teach; they teach by setting a per-sonal example.

• Exemplary leadership requires a firm commitment to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason. It means doing what

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you say, when you say it, which strengthens the relationship between you and your team.

• It’s easy to put values on paper and communicate them to others, but it’s quite another thing to put them into practice and affirm them. You must Model the Way through action and personifying shared values. Your team needs to be motivated by what you do.

• Nothing teaches your constituents to model shared values more than demonstrating them yourself during a time of crisis. They can use your example as a guideline when they find them-selves in challenging situations.

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHORS xi

FOREWORD BY EDWARD E. LAWLER III xiii

PREFACE xvii

Part One: Transformation, Talent, and Human Resources 1

1 Transforming GE: Building a Sustainable Corporation from the People Up 3

Ecomagination: Why GE Is Turning Green 8

People Movers: How HR Is Leading the Way Forward 12

Healthymagination: Improving Health Care for GE Employees and for Society 14

Eight Lessons for Business Leaders, Sustainability Professionals, and HR 20

The New Winning Strategy: Leveraging HR for Sustainable Growth 26

2 Sustainability: The Global Challenge, the Business Opportunity,

and the People Factor 29

Sustainability Milestones: The Brundtland Commission and the Dow Jones

Sustainability Index 30

The Age of Sustainability: Trends and Realities 33

The Triple Bottom Line: How to Defi ne and Measure Sustainable Growth 40

The Sweet Spot: How to Develop Sustainable Business Strategies 46

Sustainability and Profi tability: How to Grow Your Sweet Spots 50

Transformation: The Business Benefi ts of Sustainability 54

Revving Up: Where HR Meets Sustainability 61

Questions for Business Leaders, Sustainability Specialists, and

HR Professionals 64


Part Two: From Traditional HR to Sustainable HR 67

3 Embedding Sustainability in the Workforce Life Cycle 69

Building Sustainability into Core HR Processes 72


HR Professionals 80

4 Employee Selection and Sustainability 83

Johnson & Johnson: When HR Fails the Sustainability Test 84

Recruitment: Winning the Global War for Talent 87

Hiring the Workforce of Tomorrow 92

The Value of Values Alignment 94


HR Professionals 105

5 Career Development and Sustainability 107

Onboarding and Sustainability 107

Training for Sustainability 108

Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders 111

Evolving Employee Assistance 117

Compensation and Incentives for Sustainability Performance 120

Nonfi nancial Incentives for Sustainability Performance 122

Retention and Sustainability 125

Compliance, Discipline, and Sustainability 127



6 Workforce Management and Sustainability 131

Performance Appraisal: Evaluating and Rewarding Sustainability Performance 132

Workforce Planning: Meeting Your Future Needs 142

Labor Pool Analysis: Understanding a Changing Workforce 149

Termination and Sustainability 158

Sustainable Retirement and Postretirement 161




7 HR Deliverables and Sustainability 171

The Care and Feeding of Employees 173

How Sustainability Is Expanding HR’s Responsibilities 176

Wages and Benefi ts Policies: The Return on Investing in Employees 185

Employee Wellness Programs and Sustainability 190

Creating Better Working Conditions 193



Part Three: Organizational Development and Change: HR’s Role

in Building Sustainable Companies 201

8 Sustainability and Organizational Capacity 203

Organizational Capabilities: Levers for Sustainable Success 204

Innovation 206

Collaboration 212

Long-Term Orientation 218

Outward Focus 224

Interdependent Thinking 231

Learning 234

Adaptability 240



9 Sustainability and Culture Change 243

The Three Levels of Organizational Culture 244

Why Traditional Corporate Cultures May Resist Sustainability 248

When Culture Sabotages Sustainability: Why BP Cannot Operate Safely 254

When Culture Advances Sustainability: How AEP Created a Zero-Harm Culture 262

Lessons on Culture Change from BP and AEP 271

Evaluating Your Organization’s Culture 273



10 How to Get Where You Want to Go: Sustainability and

Organizational Change 277

Why Change Occurs: Danger and Opportunity 279

Three Dimensions of Sustainable Change 283


Ad Hoc Change 286

Systematic Change 288

Sustainability and the Classic Change System 292

Top-Down Change Versus Bottom-Up Change 297

Appealing to Hearts 301

Talking About Change 303

Jump-Starting Sustainable Change 306



Part Four: Sustainability and Employee Engagement 315

11 How Sustainability and Engagement Can Transform Your Business 317

The Link Between Sustainability, Engagement, and Profi t 320

How “Acme Corporation” Leveraged Sustainability for Greater Profi tability 322

The Golden Triangle: Seeing the Entire Business Case for Sustainability 327

How Starbucks Creates Value from Values 331

Measuring the Impact of Sustainability on Employee Engagement 334

How HR and Sustainability Professionals Can Work Together 337

Getting Started with Sustainability and Employee Engagement Programs 337

Strategic Volunteerism as a Starting Point 344

Employee Engagement, Sustainability, and Transformation 349



NOTES 353

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND THANKS 369

INDEX 377

Buy This Book



chapter

5now that we have shown how sustainability can be integrated into the recruitment and employee selection process for companies, we turn to the next parts of the workforce cycle: career development, rewards, and retention.

Onboarding and Sustainability

In a general sense, career development begins with onboarding, the orientation process through which new employees learn about the com-pany’s mission, goals, and strategies, as well as the policies, processes, and programs that will affect their employment. Onboarding is also when new employees begin to assimilate the knowledge, skills, and culture that will help them succeed in their jobs. Ideally sustainability is integrated into the entire range of corporate training and career develop-ment programs, and that means emphasizing its importance from the first contact that a new employee makes with the organization.

Dave Stangis, vice president for corporate social responsibility and sustainability at Campbell Soup Company, notes that the company’s commitment to sustainability is signaled to job applicants beginning with a symbolic yet significant gesture: the conversion of the entire recruitment process into a green, paperless one, using downloadable

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108 talent, transformation, and the triple bottom line

online tools in place of physical documents. This step alone has attracted a larger number of sustainability-minded job candidates applying for positions with Campbell’s.

Reinforcing the message, Stangis himself has made a commitment to appear at most new employee onboarding programs to talk about cor-porate social responsibility (CSR) at Campbell’s. “Our daylong orienta-tion program, attended by everyone from marketing interns to senior hires, now includes a module dedicated to CSR and sustainability,” he explains. “We talk about our destination goals, about how we’re trying to drive our sustainability strategy inside the company, and how each one of them is going to be asked to help us drive the strategy. I even give them some specific examples of how they can do that.”1

Stangis appears before newly hired employees at Campbell’s company headquarters in Camden, New Jersey; those in remote locations, such as the Pepperidge Farm operation in Norwalk, Connecticut, hear from him by telephone or computer hookup. “But everyone gets the same message,” Stangis emphasizes, “whether they work in an executive office or on the production line. That consistency is very important to us.”

Training for Sustainability

A growing number of companies are integrating sustainability into their training programs. Some have established special classes, workshops, or seminars on such topics as environmental protection, community rela-tions, stakeholder engagement, and cross-cultural sensitivity, either to create general awareness or as a matter of competency training—that is, to teach what needs to be known for specific job functions.

For example, British Telecom’s (BT’s) online training tool, Sus-tainability Matters, is designed to help sales and marketing profes-sionals understand how sustainability affects their work. As part of a company-wide sustainability portal housed on the company’s intranet, it includes product development and selling tools that over six hundred BT employees accessed and studied within the first few months of its 2011 launch.

career development and sustainability 109

Targeted educational programs on specific aspects of sustainability are useful and often essential, but some companies are now incorporat-ing sustainability across the entire corporate training curriculum. GE’s famous Crotonville training program, which educates corporate leaders from around the world, stresses the importance of embedding sustain-ability concepts into every seminar and workshop rather than isolating the topic in dedicated programs. This reinforces the idea that leaders from every corporate division and functional area should embed sus-tainability into every business decision.

Other companies that take both training and sustainability seriously have followed a similar path—in some cases, as a direct result of experi-menting with other approaches and finding them inadequate. The apparel retailer Gap, for instance, had struggled for a number of years with ways to improve the sustainability of its supply chain management. Marketing garments made in countries throughout the developing world, sometimes in geographically remote facilities that are difficult to inspect and monitor, Gap was subject to continuing criticism from activists concerned with the environment and workers’ rights—not because of anything Gap itself was doing wrong, but because of viola-tions occurring in Gap’s supplier factories, sometimes without Gap’s direct knowledge.*

For years, Gap executives tried collaborating with outside stake-holder groups to solve these problems, with mixed results due to a lack of understanding of some complex cause-and-effect issues. As the authors of one study put it,

Many of the problems they [Gap] were addressing in the factories or in the supply chain were not solely being “caused” by the factories, mills, spinners, and farms but by the entire

*Since the mid-1990s, when Nike was discovered using contract factories that employed children to stitch Nike-branded sports merchandise, it has been common for companies to be held responsible for the actions of their direct contractors (Tier I) and in some cases for those of their contractor’s contractors (Tier II).


system of design and manufacturing. Manufacturing a pair of pants is not an inherently unjust or environmentally degrading activity, but the industry’s structure and the inter-actions among its members and regulators along the supply chain were producing unsustainable results.2

Gap’s work with labor activists wasn’t solving the problems because those efforts were focused downstream, on the contractors, rather than upstream, on Gap’s own designers and purchasing agents. As the same authors remark, “There were few conversations about whether the gar-ments were being designed for good labor practices in the first place or whether the specifications of fabrics and colors considered the environ-mental implications of their processing.” As it turned out, Gap itself was causing many of the problems.

Once the internal sources of the problem were recognized, Gap took steps to address them. This became much easier in 2008, when the executive in charge of sustainability, the senior vice president of global responsibility, was given an expanded role comprising several HR func-tions, including global talent management. In this role, he took on the task of incorporating social responsibility into the product skills courses provided to designers and managers as part of Gap’s Retail Academy curriculum.

Managers are now being coached to consider how the decisions they make upstream can have unintended impacts on suppliers downstream. Suppose a particular product begins to fly off the shelves of Gap retail outlets, increasing projected demand for the next three months from 100,000 units to 200,000 units. Prior to the training, this would have been considered a no-brainer by the Gap manager in charge of obtain-ing more of that product; he or she would simply contact the contract manufacturer in China, say, and double the order, making the supplier more money while happily reporting the expected revenue boost to his or her supervising manager.

Today that manager is being taught to consider whether the manu-facturer has the capacity to double its production without instituting


excessive overtime, using underage workers, or risking unsafe produc-tion processes. Gap managers now understand the importance of considering such issues and trying to work them out with the contractor in advance, in order to eliminate any risk to Gap or to the manufacturer, its employees, and its relationship with Gap.

HR led the training changes at Gap. By contrast, at Hitachi, the global technology and infrastructure conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, a similar effort to incorporate sustainability into the company’s manage-ment training program was delayed because the HR leadership was reluctant to make changes in its traditional approach. Not until the installation of a new CEO who took some dramatic steps in the direc-tion of sustainability did the changes to the management training program get under way. It remains to be seen whether this overhaul will be fully successful in the face of internal resistance.

The lesson is a simple but important one: HR is often pivotal in determining both the need for and the pace of change that goes on within organizations around sustainability, and its role in developing effective training on the subject is particularly critical.

Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders

As we’ve seen throughout this book, sustainability is a new way of doing business that strongly suggests changes in most of the strategic, organizational, and day-to-day processes that companies employ in pursuit of their business objectives. So it should come as no surprise that sustainability offers a fresh perspective on talent and leadership development, including methods for identifying and developing high-potential employees. In this section, we look at how that task has changed with operating environments made more difficult and complex by the need for sustainability.

Around the world, business leaders, academics, researchers, and con-sultants have been studying both the new challenges that are driving the movement toward sustainability and the most effective organiza-tional responses to those challenges. Although their recommendations


vary, something close to a consensus has been emerging about the kinds of skills and capacities that leaders will need in order to be most effec-tive in addressing the sustainability challenges of the years to come. Here’s how one shrewd observer sums it up:

There are five factors that differentiate high performers in the way they respond to these changes in the external environ-ment: setting strategy and vision, the ability to drive a global programme in a coordinated way, identifying appropriate performance metrics, effectively engaging stakeholders, and organisational culture and leadership development—equip-ping individuals in the organisation with the knowledge and skills as well as broader mindsets they need to do this. Com-panies at the start of the journey frequently miss the fifth factor. They often believe that they can meet this challenge through awareness raising or retreating to relying on a “values driven culture,” but this is a lazy answer. There are some very concrete knowledge and skill sets that leaders across the organisation require.3

When it comes to creating the concrete knowledge and skill sets as well as the broader mind-sets needed to drive success in the era of sustainability, employee selection is certainly important. But so are new ways of developing the careers of talented employees and future leaders of the organization so as to nurture these qualities. A number of far-sighted organizations are pioneering systems that might be considered leading practices in this area.

One company that has devised a unique approach to this task is Mahindra & Mahindra, a leading Indian maker of cars, trucks, trac-tors, and other vehicles. The company has formed talent councils at several levels of the organization whose mandate is to ensure that young leaders are being groomed for advancement through varied managerial experiences, bolstered by a serious commitment on the part of the


company’s top executives to the importance of talent development and sustainability. Here is how Rajeev Dubey, Mahindra’s president of HR, after-market, and corporate services, describes their system:

We recognise that our sustainable values require new skills combined with old skills in new ways . . . When we look at an individual’s potential, in addition to business skills we also ask how she/he relates to Sustainability, Affirmative Action and CSR. For us, especially at the senior levels, the spiritual or higher-order purpose is really important.

A supportive and creative environment is provided to create this set of required skills and competencies on an ongoing basis, through a network of Talent Councils for each of our eight business sectors and major business functions. These Councils are headed by a President, supported by a team of senior business leaders. This network of business and func-tional Councils is overseen by the Apex Talent Council, which is headed by the Group CEO. The Apex Talent Council integrates the workings of the Councils, and ensures a syn-ergistic assessment of Group talent, succession planning for critical positions and individual development plans . . .

The CEO of the Group, Anand Mahindra, assumes the role of a “Talent Steward” and gives at least ten days of the year to Talent Management, where he sits down and engages in a deep-drill, free and frank discussion with the top leadership team of the Group, on talent issues. This involvement gives credence to the whole process and has made people take it seriously . . . people come to me and tell me that one of the better HR initiatives introduced in the past few years is this Talent Management process.

So, although we cannot “scientifically” prove that it works, we are confident that it does.4


Note the distinctive characteristics of the Mahindra approach to talent management: multilevel task forces dedicated to identifying and nurturing leaders of the future; personal involvement by top executive managers, up to and including the CEO; serious time commitment to the talent evaluation and development process, including a full ten days by the CEO; and, of course, the deliberate inclusion of sustainability (and other elements of “the spiritual or higher-order purpose” of the business) in the key qualities sought in promising leaders. It’s an unusu-ally comprehensive and rigorous approach to succession planning and career development for an organization’s best young leaders.

Mahindra is not the only company to have created an innovative career development program designed to inculcate sustainability skills, knowledge, and values into the best future leaders. Unilever, the Anglo Dutch manufacturer and marketer of global consumer brands, is another example.

Recognizing that markets in the developing world represent the major growth opportunities for Unilever in the decades to come, the corporation has created a global leadership development program designed to engage and energize the knowledge and talents of desig-nated high-potential employees from around the world. The program includes residential study, discussion, and seminar modules at a leading business school, as well as two-month field visits to “next-practice” organizations. These include both government and nonprofit organiza-tions that are pioneering creative ways to serve the needs of the poor in markets that were formerly too impoverished to support significant business activity but that today are growing in economic importance. Unilever employees in the program must create proposals for new businesses that are both socially responsible and potential sources of sustainable future growth for the company. In other words, they are looking for Sweet Spots.

The company is also diversifying and expanding its programs for developing young leaders through other initiatives. These include a global mentoring project, launched in 2009 with a group of twenty- three exclusively female mentees (chosen deliberately in order to coun-


terbalance the traditional emphasis on male talent at Unilever, as at other established corporations), and the establishment in Singapore of a new state-of-the-art leadership training facility, dubbed “Four Acres Singapore” in tribute to the company’s well-known Four Acres center in London. “Singapore is an ideal place for the [new] center,” says Uni-lever CEO Paul Polman. Singapore is Unilever’s headquarters for Asia, East and Central Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, which already account for more than half of its global sales as well as 70 to 80 percent of its growth.5

Again, notice how Unilever’s new approach to career development reflects the impact of the company’s transformation to sustainability: the focus on emerging markets; the readiness to look at nonprofit orga-nizations as potential role models for business innovation; and the energetic effort targeted toward underrepresented demographic groups, such as women, in the search for talented leaders for tomorrow.

IBM has also worked to identify young leaders within the organi-zation and to make sustainability an essential part of their career development. Like Unilever, IBM is focused on the developing world and the need to offer training and experiences that will enable its most talented employees to make the most of the opportunities there: cross-cultural sensitivity, understanding of social and environmental trends, readiness to engage stakeholders of many kinds, and so on. IBM’s Cor-porate Service Corps, jointly developed by the corporate citizenship (that is, sustainability) and HR departments, is one such program.

The six-month Service Corps experience has three key elements:

• Three months of preparation, including online, wiki-enabled learn-ing, facilitated phone conversations, team-building and leadership development workshops, and a “deep dive” into the current state of international development and corporate responsibility practice.

• One month living and working in the developing country, including team-based work focused on core societal, educational, and envi-ronmental challenges in collaboration with local NGOs, SMEs (small or medium-size enterprises), or government agencies.


• Two months of postservice work spent synthesizing lessons learned and engaging in structured activities to share experiences and trans-fer knowledge. Participants are encouraged to share the Service Corps experience with colleagues, family, friends, and their home community and to stay connected with IBM’s business development process as well as the local teams with whom they worked.6

When the Corporate Service Corps program was first announced in 2008, IBM intended to offer two hundred places to participants each year. Swamped by over five thousand applicants, the company decided to expand the program to five hundred individuals per year.

By 2011, IBM was reporting that the Corporate Service Corps had deployed teams of workers to twenty countries, from Vietnam and Romania to Kenya and Brazil. The total value of their work to the NGOs, SMEs, and government agencies served was estimated at $25 million. Moreover, the program had become so popular and successful that IBM had created at least two additional programs to provide different kinds of opportunities for sustainability-related service, learning, and career development. One is the Executive Service Corps, launched in 2010, which sends senior IBM executives to work with city officials on economic development projects, in particular those that can use tech-nology to create world-class “smarter cities” featuring enhanced public services. The other is the Smarter Cities Challenges, which will send executives to one hundred cities around the world, half in developed nations and half in emerging markets.7

The idea of sending company leaders abroad to experience the chal-lenges and opportunities of working in a different culture is nothing new. An overseas stint has been a traditional part of many corporate cultures since at least the 1950s, when many peripatetic executives claimed that the acronym IBM stood for the phrase “I’ve Been Moved” (providing an ironic, and not altogether positive, gloss on the notion of HR professionals as “people movers”). But the Unilever and IBM pro-grams represent a distinctly new approach to talent development and career management—one that combines the traditional desire for a


broadened international perspective with a focused understanding of the new risks and opportunities presented to the company in the age of sustainability. Future leaders who participate in these initiatives are expected not only to develop a deeper understanding of the cultural and economic realities of life in other countries but also to generate new ideas about how the resources of their companies can spur growth and progress around the world. The goal is to find and build Sweet Spots by the dozen.

It seems likely that in the near future, one or more of the world’s leading companies will be led by a CEO who has emerged from a program like Mahindra & Mahindra’s talent councils, Unilever’s global leadership development program, or IBM’s Corporate Service Corps. When that happens, it will represent a minor milestone in the history of sustainability, with the future of a major corporation guided by an indi-vidual who has walked the walk of sustainable development, learning its realities through the unequaled medium of personal experience.

Evolving Employee Assistance

Many companies have support programs designed to help employees deal with personal problems: financial or legal difficulties, marital or family issues, alcohol or drug abuse, and the like. There’s a clear business rationale for such traditional programs: problems of this kind often have a serious impact on worker morale and productivity, so the sooner they are remedied, the sooner the affected employee can return to being a valuable member of the company team.

But in the age of sustainability, there’s another reason to take employee assistance seriously: sustainability begins in your own backyard. How can an organization claim to be making an effort to address the problems of the community or the world when it fails to address the problems its own people are experiencing? With this “home truth” in mind, many companies that are striving for sustainability have taken the traditional employee support programs one or several steps further, offering services that go broader and deeper than in the past.


In Chapter Four, we looked at the hiring practices of BerylHealth, the health care call center company that has built a growing business based on its culture of caring for others. Beryl consciously models the same caring philosophy in its treatment of employees. Lara Morrow, Beryl’s “queen of fun and laughter,” told us that caring is the “glue of our culture,” adding, “We bend over backwards to treat each other like family. It gets us through some hard times, and it gets us through the great times.”

When we interviewed Morrow, she gave us a sense of what that com-mitment means in concrete terms:

It so happens we’ve had two children of employees die within the last month. Just one of those things, but it’s been a terrible summer for us—a very catastrophic time. That’s when the real meaning of my job kicks in. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately sitting at hospitals, going to funerals, collecting money to help the families, organizing bake sales, things like that. It’s so sad. But when tragedy strikes, we really take care of our own.

CEO Paul Spiegelman adds,

We employ single moms that are on the phone full-time, working really hard. Sometimes we represent their entire social outlet—not only their second family but almost their first family. So we feel responsible to take care of one another. Early on, we were doing some community work, and someone said to me, “What about us? Don’t we have to take care of our own first?” I thought that was a really interesting per-spective. So we’ve made a choice to invest in our people, to invest in our culture and environment in a way that creates a positive life experience for our employees, not just a work experience.8


In a company like Beryl, employee assistance expands beyond offering referrals to counseling programs or legal services to include accommodation of personal needs on the job, encouragement of mutual assistance efforts by workers themselves, and personal involvement by HR leaders and other company executives in beyond-the-expected efforts to help employees deal with troubles or tragedies. This commit-ment to creating “a positive life experience” for employees is another example of how the line between work and life is blurring (as discussed in Chapter Four). In this case, the blurring is based on the authentic recognition that employees are human beings with emotional and psy-chological needs that deserve respect, attention, and care as well as on the strong business case for role-modeling the caring behavior and attitudes that Beryl needs to see in its employees in order to charge premium prices for its services.

Beryl is certainly not the only company that is providing extraordi-nary levels of personal care to employees. Others are hiring full-time chaplains to provide spiritual and ethical support to employees. We know one HR leader at a billion-dollar consumer products business who eats lunch in the company cafeteria every day so that rank-and-file employees can tell her about their personal problems and alert her to opportunities to offer assistance.

Wegmans, the popular northeastern grocery store chain (whose sus-tainable HR policies we discuss in more detail in a later chapter), also provides extraordinary levels of employee assistance. It has a company-wide policy that allows any employee who goes back to college to hand his class schedule to his supervisor and be assured that his work hours will be adjusted to accommodate his needs. Wegmans employees swap stories about unusual, informal gestures of support offered by company executives to workers in need, such as the financially struggling employee whose household lights were turned back on after his boss at Wegmans personally intervened with the utility company.

Any company that is striving to build or maintain a reputation for caring about customers should make sure it is earning that


reputation with those upon whom it is even more dependent: its employees.

Compensation and Incentives for Sustainability Performance

In any organization that is striving to become more sustainable, it’s important to ensure that employees get the training, tools, encourage-ment, and incentives to behave sustainably in performing both simple and complex tasks.

Let’s take a simple task: getting your employees to turn off the lights when they leave the office. Research shows a significant gap between the fraction of employees who make a point of turning off the lights when they leave the office (50 percent) as compared with those who do the same when they leave home (93 percent). This gap represents a significant opportunity for businesses to save natural resources and many millions of dollars.9

What explains the difference in people’s behavior at home and on the job? One obvious reason is that they have a personal financial incen-tive to avoid wasting energy and money at home. The same isn’t true at work.

To close this behavior gap and others like it, companies are setting enterprise-wide sustainability-related goals, such as using less energy per unit of output, and are getting employees to participate by including these goals in evaluation and compensation decisions. The relative weight of these considerations should reflect the economic value created by the sustainable behaviors and the loss of value caused by the non-sustainable behaviors.

A look back at the Triple Bottom Line table in Chapter Two (Table 2.1) suggests the kinds of goals and related behaviors that can be incen-tivized. Some may apply to all employees, such as turning off lights and computers, conserving water, and recycling. Others may relate to more complex, job-specific tasks, such as reducing hazardous waste or materials in the production process, or developing greener products or


services that address environmental problems directly. Economically sustainable behaviors might include using local suppliers; working with small, minority-, women- or veteran-owned businesses; or efforts to create jobs in economically depressed areas. Socially sustainable behaviors include reducing workplace injuries and accidents, enhancing the safety of your products, or hiring for ethnic, cultural, and point-of-view diversity.

As the Sweet Spot concept indicates, many of these behaviors result in benefits to all three parts of the Triple Bottom Line. As a senior PepsiCo executive once observed, “You cannot imagine the tangible financial benefits that accrue to a plant with a twenty-year history of solid environmental protection and good relations with the town. A plant that runs smoothly year in and year out is worth its weight in gold.”

HR can play a key role in designing compensation and incentive systems that measure and reward desired sustainability behaviors. We don’t mean to imply that financial incentives are the only way, or even the most powerful way, to influence behaviors at work. Personal satisfaction and organizational pride can often trump money in their behavior-shaping impact. But new behaviors are easier to instill when they are aligned with financial incentives. And when pay policies are not aligned this way or, worse yet, when they are perceived to be at odds with expressed values and desired behavior, the tension may lead to confusion, misunderstanding, cynicism, and lack of trust.

Failure to have evaluation and compensation support for highly visible commitments like sustainability can send the message to employ-ees that the commitment is just talk. Andy worked with a technology company that repeatedly claimed that worker safety was among its highest priorities, yet linked less than 3 percent of bonus pay—itself just a fraction of total compensation—to safety performance. This meager financial incentive appeared to do more harm than good, fostering cynicism, undermining safety-minded managers, and damaging the credibility of the organization’s leaders, who were known to be paid overwhelmingly on the basis of productivity and profitability.


Conversely, when employees are handsomely rewarded despite poor sustainability performance, it creates credibility problems both inside and outside the company. Transocean, BP’s pipeline operating company, awarded its executives 66 percent of their maximum possible safety bonuses, which accounts for 25 percent of their total yearly bonuses, in 2010—the same year that a rig operated by Transocean exploded and caused the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The payouts cast serious doubt on whether financial incentives were meaningfully linked to performance.

Nonfinancial Incentives for Sustainability Performance

A meaningful alignment between sustainability behaviors and com-pensation can be a powerful accelerator toward your objectives. But there are inherent limits to the power of financial incentives in getting employees on board with sustainability. Many incentives can be far more powerful and meaningful to recipients than pay.

When Cascade Engineering gives a single mother the chance to get off welfare and receive training, child care, and other support that she needs to hold down a steady job (Chapter Four), the rewards are likely to go beyond the paycheck both for her and for other Cascade employ-ees. When Walmart and other companies moved heaven and earth to help the tens of thousands of terrified, abandoned, and suddenly home-less people of New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the employees of those companies undoubtedly felt better about their employers, themselves, and their jobs. By the same token, most managers and employees want to achieve good safety records, not because they get compensated for it, but because they don’t want their colleagues to get hurt.

Responsible corporate behavior cannot be achieved through pay alone, nor should it. For many people, sustainability relates to their feelings, their identities, their values, and how they choose to live those values on the job. These are factors that transcend the annual employee evaluation or the bonus payout.


Fortunately, there are other effective tools companies have to encour-age and reward sustainable attitudes and actions; many of them speak to these nonfinancial motivators, and companies need to use them all if sustainability is to become a lasting cultural force in the organization.

One of the most powerful of these tools is promotion. Several of the HR leaders and other executives from sustainability-focused organizations with whom we spoke told us emphatically that the most meaningful step they’d taken to demonstrate the seriousness of their environmental and social goals was to advance and promote people who “get it”—employees who are on the same cultural and aspirational page as the organization—and to make it known that this was one of the key factors in their rise. Of course, being promoted usually leads to a larger salary, bigger bonus opportunities, and other perks. But the symbolic meaning of promotion may be even greater than its financial value to the promoted individual. It also sends a more public message about the path to success than a pay increase, and can have an impact on many more employees than just the one who is being promoted. Promotion confers prestige, responsibility, respect, and authority, and word gets around among the many other workers who are always calculating their own odds of advancement and looking for ways to improve their chances: “Around here, you don’t get very far unless you walk the sus-tainability walk.” This impact on others is hard to quantify, but it can be enormous. And as those attuned to sustainability rise in the ranks, future decision making in the organization becomes ever more likely to reflect those values, in a self-reinforcing cycle.

Other nonmonetary forms of recognition can also be surprisingly effective in shaping employees’ attitudes and behaviors. It’s easy to trivialize award programs—Employee of the Month, Most Improved Safety Record, Greatest Contributor to Sustainability, Corporate Citizen of the Year, and the like—but they can serve as powerful cultural touch points and statements about the values and unspoken beliefs that define an organization. In regard to a sustainability element like employee safety, providing financial incentives may even feel slightly off. Is it really


necessary or sufficient to give people a check to reward them for not cutting off their own fingers on the assembly line? But a safety award or other form of recognition can go a long way toward sending an unmistakable public message about its importance.

There’s sound psychology behind those familiar factory signs: “This plant has gone 504 days without a lost-time accident.” They enlist per-sonal and group effort and pride in advancing sustainability goals, and they serve as visible reminders that can influence countless small daily decisions.

Dave Stangis of Campbell’s credits a corporate recognition program with much of the early success of the organization’s push toward sustain-ability. “Our biggest awards of the year,” he explains, “are given for extraordinary performance in community service and sustainability. They’re presented by our corporate officers at a big event at the Susque-hanna Center here in Camden, and they mean a lot to the individuals and team who receive them—as well as to everybody else in the orga-nization, who recognizes the message those awards send.”10

On the other side of the coin, such nonmonetary signals as poor performance appraisal scores or disciplinary procedures against employees who act in irresponsible or nonsustainable ways can also communicate powerfully that you mean business when it comes to sustainability.

As we’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter Nine, the multistate electric company American Electric Power (AEP), based in Columbus, Ohio, has developed a strong safety culture. It wasn’t always as effective as it has become. Almost every year, the company would experience one or more fatalities among either AEP employees or contractors, which was always viewed as a terrible black mark on the company’s record. It would invariably be among the first things that CEO Mike Morris would talk about in his annual letter in the sustainability report. A fatality meant that the entire year was a failure from a safety perspective, no matter how well the company may have done on any other safety metric.

Negative reinforcement was one of the tools AEP had to use in its quest to achieve a safety culture. Former plant manager and now AEP


safety director Ken Frazier recalls, “I happened to walk by when one of my workers—actually the union steward at my plant—was watching while another employee put himself in a very hazardous situation and said nothing about it. I told him, ‘Take the rest of the day off—without pay.’ He was very annoyed. ‘Why send me home?’ he said. ‘I didn’t do anything.’ ‘That’s exactly why you’re going home,’ I told him, ‘because you didn’t do anything.’”

The ultimate impact of the incident was completely positive. “A few weeks later,” Frazier says, “that steward came up to me and apologized. And he went on to become one of my most vocal supporters around health and safety issues.”11

As AEP labored to improve its safety culture, the company’s safety team became increasingly obsessed with eliminating fatalities. By mid-December 2008, the company had gone almost a whole year without a single death. The anticipation and hope for a fatality-free year were high, and so was the focus on avoiding any risky behaviors that could mar the perfect record.

The quest culminated at about 11:00 pm on December 31, when a large number of top safety officials at AEP phoned a special conference number from wherever they happened to be to experience their own special countdown to the New Year. They spent the hour talking about how they had accomplished what they hoped was about to happen. At the stroke of midnight, they enjoyed a shared telephonic outbreak of joy and celebration for their happy corporate achievement.

It was a special moment—a bonding experience, an emotional reward, and a memorable incentive for everyone in the group to devote himself or herself to an even better safety performance in 2009. Yes, money matters. But sometimes the heart can be even more powerful than the head or the pocketbook.

Retention and Sustainability

Retention is important to employers, and employees are often asked directly or in annual surveys about their intention to remain on the


job or depart. The business reason for efforts to improve retention is quite clear: the departure of employees, especially skilled, experienced employees, can be expensive. The company loses the skills of an employee (often to a competitor) and also must spend time and money replacing him. No wonder many companies have realized that every percentage point of improvement in the retention rate represents a significant boost to their financial bottom line.

One professional services firm we know had long proclaimed itself “a great place to work.” But only after the firm commissioned a study which found that it cost three times the annual salary to replace a departing worker did the firm develop and institute an ambitious program to increase employee satisfaction. The program was costly—but it was a lot cheaper than needlessly losing highly skilled and valuable employees.

Sustainability relates to retention in several specific ways:

• Values alignment tends to increase retention rates. As we’ve seen, sustainability values are proving helpful to many companies in their effort to attract workers—particularly younger workers—who believe in environmental and social causes and want to express those beliefs in their careers. Once these employees have become part of the team, shared values serve as a barrier to departure, encouraging workers to remain with a company and coworkers whose values mirror their own.

• Sustainable HR processes and policies may also improve retention rates. As we’ve noted, sustainability begins at home. Treating employees well encourages them to remain on the job. As we noted in Chapter Four, Beryl’s HR policies have contributed to a turnover rate that is around one-quarter that of most businesses in the call center industry, saving the company millions of dollars annually.

• Companies that violate sustainability norms may suffer needless talent losses. When employees are on the edge of staying or leaving, your organization’s sustainability commitment, or lack thereof, may prove to be a deciding factor.


Compliance, Discipline, and Sustainability

The HR department plays several roles with respect to compliance and discipline. We will highlight a few of these briefly in order to shed light on how they relate to sustainability.

• Developing codes of conduct and other internal company stan-dards. Codes of conduct often incorporate legal or regulatory require-ments as well as standards that are more stringent or more inclusive than those demanded by the law. Thus a company code of conduct may specify, “We will not hire anyone under the age of fifteen,” despite the fact that laws in some jurisdictions may permit the hiring of younger workers under certain conditions. Similarly, a company may establish a rule forbidding smoking in the workplace despite the fact that local laws contain no such requirement. HR often plays the lead role in drafting, updating, and disseminating such rules on behalf of the organization.

• Developing and administering processes for investigating potential code violations and adjudicating and resolving them fairly. To be effec-tive, internal rules should be accompanied by an established process for investigating and adjudicating possible violations and administering reasonable discipline. Those who manage the process should be recog-nized as unbiased and fair, which means that managers from the HR department are often ideal for the role—for example, when a conflict between a worker and a supervisor needs to be resolved.

• Handling specific problems. A related role in regard to compliance is sometimes called “keeping the organization out of trouble” or “making this problem go away.” When a sensitive compliance or discipline issue arises that threatens the public image, legal standing, or financial secu-rity of the organization, HR is often called on to resolve it. Transparency is crucial here. Some HR departments mistakenly confuse “resolving the problem” with “sweeping it under the rug.” This can cause major problems if it appears that the company is hiding something of material interest to stakeholders.


The emergence of sustainability as a central business value has complicated the area of compliance and discipline in several ways. One is the simple reality that the Triple Bottom Line introduces new areas of concern to be covered by company codes, from more stringent envi-ronmental principles to rules regarding such social considerations as customer privacy and engagement with community groups.

Globalization has also made the HR compliance task more compli-cated because cultural differences can play a significant role in many behavioral issues. A company’s approach to child labor, employee ben-efits, and even something seemingly as basic as human rights, all of which are high on the sustainability agenda, can be confounded by varying definitions of “responsibility” in the context of different politi-cal, cultural, and ethical mores.

Compliance and discipline have also become more complicated due to the blurring of the lines between business and personal life (discussed in Chapter Four). Defining clear, fair, defensible boundaries between employee behaviors that companies may control and those they may not is becoming increasingly challenging. Many companies have a strong interest in encouraging healthy behaviors on the part of employ-ees so as to minimize health insurance costs and absenteeism. But does that give them the right to refuse to hire—or to fire—employees who smoke or eat junk food off the job? The answer is far from clear.

Modern communications technologies raise similar issues. We know of one HR department that is trying to determine whether it can disci-pline an employee for his after-hours Facebook exchanges with a particu-larly aggressive customer. Angry over a perceived service failure, the customer tracked down the employee’s personal Facebook page and posted a series of harsh complaints and insults—to which the frustrated employee responded in kind. Was the employee guilty of violating company rules concerning treatment of customers—or does the fact that the exchanges occurred off company premises and on the employee’s own time and personal web page make his behavior off-limits to discipline?

Again, the answers are far from obvious. But in the age of sustain-ability, when companies are increasingly called on to address problems


and issues beyond business, and when employees increasingly expect to bring their values to work, questions like these are likely to become increasingly common.

Questions for Business Leaders, Sustainability Specialists, and HR Professionals

• To what extent do your organization’s onboarding and training pro-grams educate employees on sustainability? Does the organization offer special classes, workshops, or seminars to address industry- specific sustainability issues, or are sustainability issues embedded in more traditional training courses? If sustainability principles and prac-tices aren’t currently part of your organization’s training, what specific steps could you take to change that?

• How does your HR department manage the careers of high-potential employees to encourage the development of such qualities as strategic vision, global coordination, performance measurement, and stake-holder engagement, especially when it comes to issues related to sustainability?

• To what extent does your organization consider sustainability as part of succession planning for critical positions?

• What kinds of employee assistance programs does your organization provide? Do you support employees in crisis? Do you provide assis-tance programs that care for employees on a routine basis?

• Is your company ready now to start linking sustainability measures to executive or employee compensation, incentives, or performance appraisals? Are there business or sustainability goals that could be advanced by making that link? Is there an obvious business case to be made for doing so?


• What kinds of financial or nonfinancial rewards can be used to incen-tivize sustainability? Are your incentives aligned with your stated priorities?

• Do you measure the cost of employee turnover today? How could sustainability initiatives help reduce that cost?

• What are peer organizations inside and outside your industry doing to incorporate sustainability into their compensation, incentive, or performance appraisal programs? How does your plan compare with what they are doing? What are the specific strengths and weaknesses of their efforts, and how might those inform any actions your organiza-tion might take?

• Does your code of conduct incorporate any sustainability areas or specific aspects of the Triple Bottom Line, beyond compliance with laws and regulations? How do you account for cultural and other contextual considerations when enforcing your code of conduct? How is the blurring of the line between work and personal life affecting your disciplinary process in regard to behavior on or off the job?

Contents

About the Online Assessments v

Introduction 1

Part One: The Four Cs of Team Development 9

1 The Search for the High-Performing Team 11

2 Context: Laying the Foundation for Team Success 21

3 Composition: Getting the Right People on the Bus 37

4 Competencies: Developing Team Skills for High Performance 57

5 Change: Devising More Effective Ways of Working Together 85

6 Bringing the Four Cs Together: Designing a Team-Building Program 103

Part Two: Solving Specific Problems Through Team Building 127

7 Managing Confl ict in the Team 129

8 Overcoming Unhealthy Agreement 155

9 Reducing Confl ict Between Teams 169

10 Leading Innovative Teams 183

Part Three: Team Building in Different Types of Teams 205

11 Managing the Temporary Team 207

12 Creating Effective Cross-Cultural Teams 219

13 High-Performing Virtual Teams 235

14 Managing Interorganizational Alliance Teams 247

Part Four: The Challenge of Team Building for the Future 267

15 Challenges for Building Effective Teams 269

Notes 278

The Authors 287

Index 289

Buy This Book



103

6

BRINGING THE FOUR Cs TOGETHER

Designing a Team-Building Program

The goal of any team-building program is to help the team engage in a continual process of self-examination to gain aware-ness of those conditions that keep it from functioning effectively. In chapter 5, we identified a number of symptoms of unhealthy teams. Having gathered data about such problems, the team must learn how to use those data to make decisions and take actions that will change team context, composition, or competencies in ways that will lead to a growing state of team health. Team build-ing in this sense is an ongoing process, not a one-time activity.

As we noted in chapter 5, team building often begins with a block of time, usually two or three days, during which the team starts learning how to engage in its own review, analysis, action planning, decision making, and action taking. Following the first meetings, the team may periodically take other blocks of time to continue the process, review progress made since the last team meeting, and identify what should be done to continue to improve the team’s overall effectiveness. It is also possible that in time, the team will develop its skills for development to such a point that team members are always aware of areas that need improvement and will raise them at appropriate times with the appropriate people, thereby making it unnecessary to set aside a special meeting for such action.

There is no single way to put together a team-building program. The format depends on the experience, interests, and needs of the team members; the experience and needs of the team leader; the skills of the consultant (if one is needed); and

104 T E A M B U I L D I N G

the nature of the situation that has prompted the need for team building.

This chapter describes a range of design alternatives for each phase of a team-building program. Those planning such an activ-ity may wish to select various design elements from among the alternatives that seem applicable to their own situations. Although the design of a team-building program generally follows the cycle described in chapter 5, in this chapter we outline some of the specific steps and actions that we take when designing a program.

Preparation

There are certain phases or steps in any team-building program. The first phase is describing the purpose of the program and introducing the team-building process to team members. We briefly describe the options available for team leaders as they begin to prepare their teams for team building.

Goals

The goals of this phase are to explain the purpose of team building, elicit agreement to work on certain problems, get com-mitment for participation, and do preliminary work for the team-building workshop. Any team-building program must be well conceived, and those involved must have indicated at least a minimal commitment to participate. Commitment will increase if people understand clearly why the program is being proposed and if they have an opportunity to influence the decision to go ahead with the program.

If this is the first time the team has spent some time to-gether with the specific assignment to review their effective-ness and plan for change, they will likely be anxious and

B R I N G I N G T H E F O U R C s T O G E T H E R 105

apprehensive. These concerns must be brought to the surface and addressed. Questions of deep concern probably will not be eliminated, but team members’ concerns may be reduced as a supportive climate is established and as people test the water and find that plunging in is not very difficult. Experience will be the best teacher, and people will allay or confirm their fears as the session proceeds. Those conducting the session should anticipate such concerns and raise them prior to the first meeting to reduce any extreme anxiety by openly de-scribing what will happen and what the anticipated outcome will be.

Alternative Actions

Among the possible actions that managers might take to get started are these:

1. Have an outside person interview each team member to identify problems, concerns, and the need for change.

2. Invite an outside speaker to talk about the role of teams in organizations and the purposes of team development. The speaker might discuss the Four Cs of team performance and how they might relate to the performance of that team.

3. Gather data on the level of team effectiveness. (See the team-building checklist in figure 5.1 and the other instruments presented in this book or online.)

4. Have a general discussion about the need for developing a team competency—which can emerge through a team-building program.

5. Invite a manager who has had successful team-building experiences to describe the activities and results in his or her unit.


Creating an Open Climate for Data Gathering

The second phase of the team-building program is creating a climate for gathering and sharing data. The goals for this phase and alternative approaches follow.

Goals

The goals of this phase are to create a climate for work; get people relaxed; establish norms for being open with problems, concerns, and ideas for planning and for dealing with issues; and present a framework for the whole experience. The climate established during the start-up phase influences the rest of the program.

Alternative Approaches to Data Gathering

There are several alternatives that the team can use for data gathering. These alternatives follow.

Alternative 1 The manager or team leader can give a short opening talk, reviewing the goals as he or she sees them and the need for the program, emphasizing

his or her support, and reaffirming the norm that no negative sanctions are intended for any open, honest behavior. The role of the consultant, if there is one, can be explained by either the manager or the consultant.

Participants can share their immediate here-and-now feel-ings about the meetings by responding to questions handed out on a sheet of paper (figure 6.1). They call out their answers (to set the norm of open sharing of data), and the person at the flip chart records the responses.

The data can be gathered openly from team members and tabulated on a whiteboard or it can be gathered anonymously,

www.josseybass.com/go/dyerteamassessments

Figure 6.1 Attitudes About Change

How confident are you that any real change will result from these meetings?

1 2 3 4 5

I am not confident at all. I am somewhat confident. I am highly confident.

To what degree do you feel that people really want to be here and work on team development issues?

1 2 3 4 5

People don’t really wantto be here.

People have some interest inbeing here.

People have high interest inbeing here.

How willing do you think people are to make changes that may be suggested?

1 2 3 4 5

People will be unwillingto change.

People have some willingnessto change.

People are very willing tochange.

How willing do you think you and others will be to express real feelings and concerns?

1

1.

2.

3.

4.

2 3 4 5

We are not very willingto express feelings.

We have some degreeof willingness to express feelings.

We are very willing toexpress feelings.

Instructions: Answer the following questions on a scale of 1 to 5.


with the results tallied (with high and low scores on each item and the mean score) and then presented to the team. After seeing the results, the team should be asked to discuss these questions: Why are the scores rather low (or high)? What could be done here to help people feel more positive about these meetings? If the team is large, subgroups should be created to discuss these questions for twenty minutes and report back to the entire team.

This alternative for beginning is to set the norm that the program is centered on data gathering, data analysis, open sharing, and trying to plan with data. This also allows group members to test the water about simple, immediate data rather than more sensitive work group issues to see how they will respond and react to the questions.

Alternative 2 After preliminary remarks by the manager, the team members could be asked, “For us to get a picture of how you see our team functioning, please take a few minutes to describe our team as a kind of animal or combination of animals, a kind of machine, a kind of person, or whatever image comes to mind.” Some teams in the past have been described as:

• A hunting dog—a pointer. “We run around and locate problems, then stop and point and hope that somebody else will take the action.”

• A Cadillac with bicycle pedals. “We look good on the outside, but there is no real power to get us moving.”

• A centipede with several missing or broken legs. “Although the centipede can move forward, its progress is crippled by the missing and broken legs.”

• An octopus. “Each tentacle is out grasping anything it can but doesn’t know what the other tentacles are doing.”

As people share the images and explain why they came to mind, some questions for follow-up are: What are the common


elements in these images? Do we like these images of ourselves? What do we need to do to change our image? Discussion aimed at answering these questions becomes the major agenda item for subsequent group meetings.

Alternative 3 In this alternative, the team is asked, usually by a consultant or trained observer, to work on a major decision-making problem—such as an arctic or desert survival exercise, or Tinker Toy tower building—and to function under the direc-tion of the team leader in a fashion similar to the way they have previously worked on problems.1 The consultant acts as a process observer for the exercise. After the exercise, the consultant has the group members review their own processes and determine both their strengths and their deficiencies in solving problems. The consultant shares his or her observations with the group. In some instances, we have found it useful to videotape the team doing the exercise and then replay the videotape so team members can see how they performed.

As the exercise is reviewed, lists of positive and negative features are compiled. The agenda for the following session is set, based on the question, “How do we maximize our strengths and overcome deficiencies?” For example, if the process review indi-cates that the group is highly dependent on the leader, that some people are overwhelmed by the “big talker,” and that the group jumps to decisions before everyone has a chance to put in ideas, the agenda would focus on how to reduce or change these nega-tive conditions.

Group Data Analysis and Problem Solving

After the team understands the purpose of the team-building program and data have been generated regarding the team’s func-tioning and performance, the next phase is to focus on analyzing the data and developing a plan of action to solve the team’s problems.


Goals

One goal of this phase is to begin to take action on the problems identified in the previous phase. Assignments are made and dates set for completing the work. Another goal is for the team to practice better problem-solving, decision-making, planning, and delegation skills.

Whatever the start-up method or combination of methods used, this third phase usually has two parts: (1) the team begins to engage in the problem-solving process, and (2) a process consul-tant or observer helps the group look at its context, composition, and competencies in working on problems as an effective team as a prelude to improving its problem-solving capabilities.

The process consultant or observer usually tries to see to what extent the group is effective at both task activities and relationship-maintaining activities. Ineffective teams are often characterized by one or more of the following condi-tions, and the consultant should watch for evidence of these conditions:

• Domination by the leader• Warring cliques or subgroups• Unequal participation and uneven use of group resources• Rigid or dysfunctional group norms and procedures• A climate of defensiveness or fear• A lack of creative alternatives to problems• Restricted communications—not all have opportunities to

speak• Avoidance of differences or potential conflicts

Such conditions reduce the team’s ability to work together in collective problem-solving situations. The role of the consul-tant here is to help the group become aware of its processes and begin to develop better group skills. Specifically, after becoming


aware of a process problem, the group needs to establish a pro-cedure, guideline, or plan of action to respond to the negative condition.

Alternatives for Data Analysis

There are several alternatives that the team can use to analyze the data that have been gathered and generate solutions to team problems. These alternatives follow.

Alternative 1 Following the opening remarks, the consul-tant, outside person, or team leader presents data that have been collected from the team members through observations, inter-views, or instruments prior to the meeting. The team is asked to analyze the data. What do the data mean? Why do we respond the way we do? What conditions give rise to negative responses? What do we need to change to get a more positive response to our own team? The team might sort the data into the categories of context, composition, competencies, and change to identify the root causes of the team’s problems.

This analysis can best be done in subgroups of three to four people and then shared with the whole group and compiled into a list of issues and possible change actions. The summaries form the basis for subsequent sessions. The team also puts the data into the A, B, and C categories described in chapter 5. Category A items, those that can be worked on now in the meeting, are the major work issues on the agenda.

Alternative 2 This design requires some extensive case analysis prior to the team-building sessions. A consultant or someone in management pulls together one or more studies, vignettes, or critical incidents that seem to represent recurring problems for the team. Another possibility is to have each member take a problem area for him or her and write it up as a short case. The group task is to look at the cases, try to discern


the underlying conditions that trigger recurring problems, and then plan action steps for reducing the likelihood that such problems will reoccur.

Alternative 3 In this alternative, objective data gathered from records about the team are compiled and presented to the group members. Such information as production records, the grievance rate, absenteeism, turnover, lost time, budget discrep-ancies, late reports, cost increases, and so on are included in this feedback. The team’s job is to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data, diagnose the causes of the negative trends, and then plan for improvement.

Alternative 4 Instead of presenting data from prior data collection methods to the team, data about the conditions or problems of the team can be raised at the team meeting. Each person is asked to come prepared to share his or her answers to the following questions:

• What keeps this team from functioning at its maximum potential?

• What keeps you personally from doing the kind of job you would like to do?

• What things do you like in this team that you want to have maintained?

• What changes would you like to see made that would help you and the whole team?

Team members or the leader may have other items they would like to put on the agenda.

Each team member takes a turn sharing information. The responses are listed and common themes identified. The most important issues are listed in priority, and they become the items for discussion.


Problem-Solving Process

By this point, regardless of the alternatives selected, the team should have identified a series of problems, concerns, or issues. It may be helpful in the problem identification stage of team building for the team leader or consultant to share with the team the Four Cs of team performance and then list the problems the team faces in the four categories: context problems, composition problems, competency problems, and change management prob-lems. In this way, the team can determine which problems reside within the team and which are related to context issues that may not be under the team’s direct control.

The team next moves into a traditional problem-solving process by engaging in the following actions:

1. Put problems in order of priority and select the five or six most pressing ones to address during the workshop.

2. Begin the classic problem-solving process: clearly define the problem, describe the causes of the problem, list alternative solutions, select the alternative to implement, develop an action plan, perform the action, and evaluate the results.

3. Conduct a force-field analysis.2 Identify the existing level of team performance on a set of performance metrics, formulate a specific goal to improve performance, identify the restraining forces (the factors that are barriers to better performance) and driving forces (the factors that encourage high performance), and develop a plan to remove the restraining forces or add driving forces.

4. Begin role negotiation. Negotiate between people or subunits that are interdependent and need to coordinate well with each other to improve effectiveness.

5. Set up task force teams or subunits. Give each team a problem to work on. It should develop a plan of action, carry out the plan, and assess the results.


6. After all problems have been listed, the team can sort them into categories based on the nature of the problem: (A) we can work on the problem here within our team, (B) someone else must handle the problem (and identify who that is), or (C) we must live with this problem, since it appears to be beyond our ability to change.

7. Set targets, objectives, or goals. The group should spend time identifying short- or long-range goals it wishes to achieve, make assignments, and set target dates for completion.

The Appreciative Inquiry Approach to Team Building

Up to this point we’ve focused on using a problem-centered approach to team building: the team identifies the problems it faces and then engages in problem solving to improve its perfor-mance. An alternative team-building approach is to focus on the more positive aspects of the team in a process called appreciative inquiry (AI).3

The AI approach to team building starts with the assumption that every team has some positive characteristics that can drive it to high performance. The issue for the team is how to discover and tap into these positive characteristics. Rather than focus on the negative—the problems that the team experiences—this approach focuses on the positive characteristics of the team. To begin the team-building activity, the manager, team leader, or consultant asks team members to answer the following questions4

1. Think of a time when you were on a hugely successful team, a time that you felt energized, fulfilled and the most effective—when you were able to accomplish even more than you imag-ined. What made it such a great team? Tell the story about the


situation, the people involved, and how the team achieved its breakthrough.

2. Without being humble, what was it about you that contributed to the success of the team? Describe in detail these qualities and what you value about yourself that enables team success.

3. It is one year from today and our team is functioning more successfully than any of you imagined. What are we doing, how are we working together differently, what does this success look like, and how did we make it happen?

Members of the team pair up and share their answers to these questions. They then can move into larger subgroups and share their stories, or the entire team can be brought back together to report their stories and their feelings about the future of the team. Gervase Bushe, professor of leadership and organiza-tion development at Simon Fraser University, who uses the AI approach, explains how one team improved its performance through AI:

In one business team I worked with one member talked about a group of young men he played pick-up basketball with and described why they were, in his opinion, such an outstanding “team.” He described their shared sense of what they were there to do, lack of rigid roles, [and] easy adaptability to the constraints of any particular situation in the service of their mission. But what most captured the team’s imagination was his description of how this group was both competitive and collaborative at the same time. Each person competed with all the rest to play the best ball, to come up with the neatest move and play. Once having executed it, and shown his prowess, he quickly “gave it away” to the other players in the pick-up game, showing them how to do it as well. This was a very meaningful image for this group as a key, unspoken, tension was the amount of competitiveness members felt with each other at the same time as they needed to cooperate for the organization’s good. “Back alley ball” became an important


synthesizing image for this group that resolved the paradox of competitiveness and cooperation.5

By sharing such powerful images, a team may be able to envi-sion a different way of functioning from its current pattern and create new values and beliefs that will enable it to plot a new course. The role of the team leader or consultant is to help the team identify images and metaphors that they can incorporate as they seek to improve team performance. The team members should ask and answer the following questions: (1) How can we as a team become like the high-performing teams that we’ve experienced in the past? and (2) How can I as a member of this team contribute to helping our team achieve its full potential? As the team and its members answer these questions, commit-ments are made to change the team in a positive direction. The team can use the images of team excellence to motivate the team to a higher level of performance.

The AI approach is often useful when team members tend to focus on the negative, continually bringing up negative images of the team and complaining about other team members. The positive approach of AI can give energy to an otherwise impotent and demoralized team. However, when using AI, the team should still be willing to confront important problems and not see the world completely through rose-colored glasses.

Using Feedback to Improve Team Performance

A major issue that often arises following the identification of problems is the sharing of feedback with individuals, subgroups within the team, or the team as a whole. Certain actions, func-tions, personal styles, or strategies on the part of one or more people may be hindering teamwork and preventing other team members from achieving their goals or feeling satisfied with the team. If this is the case, it may be legitimate to engage in an open feedback session.


Goals

The team should share feedback among individual team members in such a way as to help them improve their effectiveness and give feedback to the whole team with the same objective in mind. The goal of a feedback session is to share data about performance so that difficulties can be resolved. It is critical that a feedback session not slip into name calling, personal griping, or verbal punishing of others. All feedback should reflect a genuine willingness to work cooperatively. For example, one might say, “My performance suffers because of some things that happen in which you are involved. Let me share my feelings and reactions so you can see what is happening to me. I would like to come up with a way that we all can work more produc-tively together.”

Types of Feedback

Feedback is most helpful if it can be given in descriptive fashion or in the form of suggestions. Here are some examples.

Descriptive feedback: “John, when you promise me that you will have a report ready at a certain time, as happened last Thursday, and I don’t get it, that really frustrates me. It puts me behind schedule and makes me feel very resentful toward you. Are you aware that such things are going on? Do you know what is causing the problem or have any ideas on how we could avoid this type of problem in the future?”

Suggestions: “John, let me make a suggestion that would really help me as we work together. If you could get your reports to me on time, particularly those that have been promised at a certain time, it would help my work schedule and reduce my frustration. Also, if I don’t get a report on time, what would you prefer I do about it?”


Other possibilities: The following are some other ways group members might go about sharing feedback with one another:• Start-stop-continue activity. Each person has a sheet of

newsprint on the wall. Each team member writes on the sheets of other members’ items in three areas: things that person should begin doing that will increase his or her effectiveness, things the individual should stop doing, and things he or she should continue to do. (More on this in chapter 7.)

• Envelope exchange. Each person writes a note to other team members with specific, individual feedback, covering the same issues as in the previous activity, and gives the notes to the other team members.

• Confirmation-disconfirmation process. Group members summarize how they view themselves and their own work performance—their strengths and areas that need improvement. Others are asked to confirm or disconfirm the person’s diagnosis.

• Management profile. Each person presents the profile of his or her effectiveness from previously gathered data (there are a variety of profile instruments). The group confirms or disconfirms the profile.

• Analysis of subunits. If the team has subunits, each subunit is discussed in terms of what it does well, what it needs to change, and what it needs to improve.

• Total unit or organizational analysis. The entire department, division, or organization looks at how it has been functioning and critiques its own performance over the past year, identifying things it has done well and areas that need improvement. Group size is, of course, the main constraint with this option. Beckhard and Weisbord have developed approaches for working with large groups.6


• Open feedback session. Each person who would like feedback may ask for it in order to identify areas of personal effectiveness and areas that need improvement.

• Prescription writing. Each person writes a prescription for others: “Here is what I would prescribe that you do [or stop doing] in order to be more effective in your position.” Prescriptions are then exchanged.

Action Planning

The end result of all the activities mentioned so far is to help the team identify conditions that are blocking both individual and team effectiveness so that the team can begin to develop plans for action and change. Action plans should include a com-mitment to carry the action to completion.

Goals

The goals of this phase are to pinpoint needed changes, set goals, develop plans, give assignments, outline procedures, and set dates for completion and review. Often the plan is a set of agreements on who is willing to take a specific action. All such agreements should be written down, circulated, and fol-lowed up later to ensure that they have been carried out.

Options for Action Planning

Following is a set of actions that are possible during this phase:

1. Personal improvement plan. Each person evaluates his or her feedback and develops a plan of action for personal improvement. This plan is presented to the others.

2. Contract negotiations. If there are particular problems between individuals or subunits, specific agreements for dealing with conflict issues are drawn up and signed.7


3. Assignment summary. Each person summarizes what his or her assignments are and the actions he or she intends to take as a follow-up of the team-building session.

4. Subunit or team plans. If development plans have been completed, they are presented and reviewed.

5. Schedule review. The team looks at its time schedule and its action plans. Dates for completion and dates for giving progress reports on work being done are confirmed. The next team meeting is scheduled. If another team development workshop or meeting is needed, it may be scheduled at this time.

Implementation, Evaluation, and Follow-up

Follow-up is an integral part of any team-building program. There must be some method of following up with team members on assignments or agreements and then some form of continuing goal setting for improved performance. These follow-up activities can be done by the whole team together, one-on-one between team members, or a combination of the two. Fortunately, some excellent research has been done that describes follow-up pro-cesses that have proved to be successful.

Wayne Boss of the University of Colorado became interested in the “regression effect” following a team-building session.8 He observed, as have others, that during a two- or three-day intensive team-building activity, people become very enthusiastic about making improvements, but within a few weeks, the spark dwin-dles, and they regress to old behaviors and performance levels. Boss wondered whether there is a way to keep performance high following the team-building session and to prevent regression. He began to experiment with a one-on-one follow-up meeting he called the personal management interview (PMI). The PMI has two stages. First is a role negotiation meeting between team leader and subordinate (usually lasting one hour) during which both clarify their expectations of each other, what they need from each other, and what they will contract to do for each other.


Second, following the initial role negotiation session, the two parties meet regularly. Boss found that these meetings have to be held on a regular basis (weekly, biweekly, or monthly), but if they are held and follow the agreed-on agenda, performance stays high without regression for several years. States Boss, “Without exception, the off-site level of group effectiveness was maintained only in those teams that employed the PMI, while the teams that did not use the PMI evidenced substantial regression in the months after their team-building session.”9

What goes on in these interviews that makes such a differ-ence? Despite some variation, each interview tended to deal with the following issues:

• Discussion of any organizational or work problems facing the subordinate

• Training or coaching given by the supervisor to the subordinate

• Resolution of any concerns or problems between supervisor and subordinate

• Information sharing to bring the subordinate up to date on what is happening in the team and organization

• Discussion of any personal problems or concerns

These were common agenda items, but the first part of every meeting was spent reviewing assignments and accomplishments since the previous session. Time was also spent on making new assignments and agreeing on goals and plans to review at the next PMI. These assignments and agreements were written down, and both parties had a copy that was the basis of the review at the following meeting.

Boss has the following suggestions for conducting an effective PMI:

• The PMI is most effective when conducted in a climate of high support and trust. Establishing this climate is primarily the responsibility of the superior.


• The interviews must be held on a regular basis and be free from interruptions.

• Both parties must prepare for the meeting by having an agreed-on agenda; otherwise, the PMI becomes nothing more than a rap session.

• When possible, a third party whom both the supervisor and the subordinate trust should be present to take notes and record action items.

• Meetings should be documented by use of a standard form to make sure the key issues are addressed in a systematic way. Both parties agree on the form.

• The leader must be willing to hold subordinates accountable and ask the difficult “why” questions when assignments are not completed.

Boss has found that performance drops off if these meetings are not held but increase if meetings are started, even if they have never been held before or had been stopped for a time. Boss has tracked the use of PMIs in 202 teams across time periods ranging from three months to twenty-nine years.10 His research indicates that regular PMIs can significantly decrease, and even prevent, regression to previous levels of team performance for as long as twenty-nine years with no additional interventions after the original team-building sessions. Certainly the evidence is compelling enough to indicate that this is an effective way to follow up on decisions made during a team-building session.

Boss’s research does not discuss any further team sessions. Some units that have used the PMI have also reported having regular team meetings to deal with issues common to all, as well as additional team development sessions every three to six months. These later sessions identify any current problems or concerns and establish new goals for change and plans for improvement. And as we noted in chapter 3, Bain & Company has been successful by critiquing team performance monthly.


In the past, many teams have followed up a team-building session with additional team meetings to review progress. The advantage of the PMI is that it allows time to talk with each person on individually. If this were done in the presence of the whole team, it could be both inhibiting and extremely time-consuming.

Follow-up Team Sessions

We have known for many years, since the early research of Rensis Likert, that follow-up team sessions can also help to sustain high performance.11 In his research on sales teams in sales offices from a national sales organization, Likert described the elements of follow-up team meetings that make a significant difference in the performance of members on the team. The top twenty sales units were compared with the bottom twenty to see what made the difference in their performance. Likert found the following to be the most important factors:

• The team leader (the sales manager) had high personal performance goals and a plan for achieving those goals. Team members saw an example of high performance as they watched the team leader.

• The team leader displayed highly supportive behavior toward team members and encouraged them to support one another.

• The team leader used participative methods in supervision. That is, all team members were involved in helping the team and the members achieve their goals.

The major process for achieving high performance was holding regular, well-planned meetings of the sales team for review of each person’s performance. In contrast to Boss’s PMI, a one-on-one follow-up, the units in the Likert research used team meetings as the follow-up process. Those team meetings had the following major features:


• The team met regularly every two weeks or every month.• The size of the team varied but was usually between twelve

and fifteen members. (Note that this is larger than the ideal team size discussed in chapter 3.)

• The sales manager presided over the meeting but allowed wide participation in the group. The main function of the manager was to keep the team focused on the task; push the team to set high performance goals; and discourage negative, nonsupportive, ego-deflating actions of team members.

• Each salesperson presented a report of his or her activities during the previous period, including a description of the approach used, closings attempted, sales achieved, and volume and quality of total sales.

• All of the other team members analyzed the person’s efforts and offered suggestions for improvement. Coaching was given by team members to one another.

• Each salesperson announced his or her goals and procedures to be used, which would be reviewed at the next team meeting.

The researchers concluded that this form of team meeting results in four benefits:

1. Team members set higher goals.

2. They are more motivated to achieve their goals.

3. They receive more assistance, coaching, and help from their boss and peers.

4. The team gets more new ideas on how to improve performance as people share, not keep secret, their successful new methods.

It seems possible, then, to have either one-on-one follow-up meetings or a series of follow-up team meetings as a way of main-


taining the high performance of team members. The key issue is that team building requires a continuous effort to monitor the team’s ability to improve team performance. The key person is the team leader, who must build a follow-up procedure into the process.

The two most common follow-up methods are one-on-one interviews and follow-up team meetings. However, other follow-up procedures are available, depending on the nature of the team’s problems and plans. For example, a follow-up data-gathering process can use a survey or questionnaire to see if the unit members feel the activities of the team have improved. Another approach is to have an outsider interview members to check on what has improved and what actions are still needed. Alternatively, an outside observer could be invited to watch the team in action and give a process review at the end of the meeting.

If a team has poor interaction at meetings, it is possible to follow up with a procedure to get reactions of people after each meeting or after some meetings. The team leaders could use a short paper-and-pencil survey or ask for a critique of the meeting verbally, posing questions such as the following:

• How satisfied were you with the team meeting today?• Are there any actions we keep doing that restrict our

effectiveness?• What do we need to stop doing, start doing, or continue

doing that would improve our team performance?• Do we really function as a team, or are there indications

that teamwork is lacking?• Are we achieving our goals and using each person’s

resources effectively?

If your team discusses these questions, be sure to allot suffi-cient time for an adequate critique. If you use a written form,


summarize the results and begin the next team meeting by reviewing the summary and discussing what should be done in the current meeting to make the team more effective.

In Summary

In this chapter we have described the basic elements of a team-building program:

• The purposes of the team-building program are described and any concerns or fears of team members are addressed. If a consultant is used, his or her role should be explained to the team.

• Data regarding the performance of the team are generated by examining archival data, observing the team as it performs a particular task, interviewing team members, or surveying members of the team. A variety of alternatives are available to generate such data.

• The team engages in a problem-solving process to come up with solutions to the problems that have been identified. An appreciative inquiry approach is an alternative to the traditional problem-solving model.

• The team develops and implements the action plans. Commitments generally are written down and assignments clearly communicated to team members.

• To ensure that changes in the team persist over time, team leaders should engage in regular personal management interviews with members of their team or conduct regular team meetings to review commitments made in the team-building sessions and to make changes as needed.

The next chapters explore some specific problems found in teams and some new team dynamics that often require the use of team building. We will outline some specific strategies for over-coming these problems to help a team be more effective.

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