It is tough to be a middle manager. On the one hand, you are pulled by the centripetal force of senior management. This is the force that demands seamless and sometimes unquestioning execution of organizational strategy. It requires you to toe the company line, even when you believe the line is flawed. An outlet for those who have unsuccessfully tried to influence organizational direction is to exit the company. A more common but insidious alternative is to remain and become a mindless conveyor of decisions from the top.

On the other hand, you contend with the centrifugal pressures of frontline supervisors and employees who, in addition to typically wanting higher pay and better benefits, are opinionated about how work is performed and often resist unfamiliar systems, technologies, and processes. In the short term, pressures from this group are generally easier to manage as middle managers can assert their authority and use sanctions, or fear of sanctions, to gain compliance.

The dizzying pace of change in corporate entities further complicates the already difficult existence of the middle manager. Innovation, technology, and globalization are forcing companies to take unprecedented steps to stay afloat. As of June 2006 mergers and acquisitions were on track to top the record $3.4 trillion set in 2000.(1) Business strategies are overhauled and thousands of jobs are reshuffled in the process. To ensure the organization that emerges remains nimble, concepts such as “flat organization” and “delayering,” which essentially translate into reducing the size of middle management, are put to work.

Conversely, constant change presents a unique opportunity for middle management to reinforce its value to the organization. Middle managers are extremely instrumental in creating the agility that enables an organization to swiftly respond to its environment. No matter how many times the business plan changes, they are to elicit the support, commitment, and optimal performance of operational supervisors and personnel requisite to maintain a forward momentum.

If middle management distrusts those at the helm, that organization will struggle with trust issues. If it is misaligned with corporate strategy, the lower stratum of the organization will be out of kilter. If it does not communicate effectively, employees will make assumptions and fill in blanks. An organization experiencing any or all of these challenges cannot optimize its resources. It should not expect a highly satisfied workforce or maximum ROI. These consequences are especially acute in industries where speed is critical to success.

Middle managers must recognize that change management is an integral, inescapable part of their role. There are four critical ways that they can assert their role in managing change.

Communicator: Middle managers’ role as communicators increases significantly when change is under way. First, they must seek clarity from the top on the nature and dimension of change. They must break down the communication in a manner that makes sense to the individual units they represent. Next, using multiple media and venues, they communicate the change in a clear, honest, and timely manner. To demonstrate respect and maintain credibility, relevant details, no matter how unappealing, are shared with the employees who will be impacted. Feedback must be collected and relayed to senior management. This exchange of information should occur at the speed of change. For instance, weekly meetings can become daily huddles to ensure effective communication.

Solicitor. It is not enough for middle management to relay information up and down the organization. It must cultivate the habit of soliciting employee opinion on important decisions that affect employees’ work and/or compensation or that significantly impact the organization. Processes should be established for accessing opinions, and input should be articulated and presented to decision makers. Managers must close the loop by relaying decisions to employees.

Intense change, especially when it occurs in quick succession, as being experienced by many organizations, can be particularly excruciating for rank-and-file employees. The employees’ frustration is exacerbated when they are not given an opportunity to participate in decisions that affect them. As stakeholders and people who execute the mission of the organization, they feel disenfranchised and devalued.

Workers need to be especially on top of their game in times of change. They must be prepared to sharpen existing skills and acquire new ones. They juggle old and new ways of doing business while maintaining productivity expectations. When management forges ahead with change implementation without their input, it typically educes compliance, which is a focus by workers on meeting the minimum requirement to get by. Management should aim for commitment; that is, the sincere devotion and resolve of workers to do whatever it takes to ensure their organization is successful. Inclusion is a viable path to eliciting commitment.

This role is designated “solicitor” to underscore the fervor and sincerity that should characterize each request for input. When management appears obligated or insincere, or when it ignores input, it sends the message that employee opinion is not valued.

Builder. Business decisions are not always favorable to employee opinion. Market forces and government regulations, for instance, can force an organization to change the way it conducts business. In such circumstances, support from the workforce can be critical to successfully implementing change and attaining new heights.

To build broad support, management should first build a form of a guiding coalition.(2) This is a group of employees who have differentiated themselves as top performers and respected members of their teams. Through extensive dialogue on rationale and details of impending change, the coalition is given an opportunity to clarify objectives and identify potential flaws. Once convinced, it engages in a process of educating other employees to embrace change.

Management can choose not to spend the time and effort to educate employees on the rationale behind change initiatives. It can rely on formal authority to enforce decisions. However, experts agree that managers who tap into moral authority-that is, those who earn the trust and confidence of others by building and nurturing honest relationships-achieve better results.(3)

Executor. Execution is performing work to achieve set goals. Vital to the survival of the organization, it is management’s classic responsibility. The unrelenting storm of change has brought the discipline of execution into sharp focus. Status quo intervals (periods where strategy is on course and work flows in an established manner) have become shorter and organizations have become more flexible to cope.

In their critically acclaimed work “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done”, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan identify several actions and behaviors that enable managers to excel at execution. Two of their recommendations are particularly relevant to effectively managing change.

Deep personal involvement. Bossidy and Charan make the point that setting strategy from the mountaintop is inadequate for getting things done in the most productivity way.(4) Managers who feel exempt from the details of execution are reminiscent of the piano teacher who holds a music degree from a prestigious college and eloquently communicates the historical origin and theoretical underpinning of music but does not know how to play the piano. Thorough understanding of the mechanics of execution enables managers to ask the right questions, establish efficient processes, and make intelligent decisions, thereby building credibility with staff and ultimately achieving desired results.

Alignment. People, strategy, and operation must be aligned to accomplish goals. This entails positioning people where they can maximize their strengths, establishing a clear line of sight from the strategic plan to specific tasks and educating people on the strategy, and designing operational processes to enable people to successfully operationalize strategy. Depending on the pace of change, alignment can be an ongoing process with each assignment requiring a fine-tuning of strategy, resources, and/or processes.

Clearly, middle management plays a key role in enabling the organization to benefit from change. However, an unsupportive culture or senior management can inhibit its effectiveness. In addition, a few unwholesome tendencies come with being in the middle. Invisibility or passiveness is one of them. Punting blame or hiding behind tops or bottoms is another. Feeling powerless is yet another. To the degree that middle managers want to maximize their effectiveness, they will have to overcome inertia and challenge these obstacles.

Endnotes
1. CNNmoney.com. Mergers to Keep on Coming. June 27, 2006. Retrieved July 18, 2006.
2. John P. Kotter. Leading Change. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996.
3. Stephen R. Covey. The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness. New York, NY: Free Press, 2004.
4. Larry Bossidy, et al. Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. New York, NY: Crown Business, 2002.

About the Author: This article was written by Peter Adebi.

The key to world class performance is found in a simple but effective program called 5S. 5S is all about creating a more effective workplace that is well organized, free of clutter, and organized so that you can easily find things. It is also incredibly clean.

This program is known as the 5S program, it is called this because the basic elements begin with the letter “S”. These elements are:

1. Sort
2. Set In Order
3. Shine
4. Standardize
5. Sustain

The 5S methodology is simple but effective. It works in companies of sizes. It also provides the foundation of many other continuous improvement programs.

People practice the five pillars in their everyday lives. When we keep things like our toiletries, wash cloths and towels in convenient and familiar place, we are practicing the first two pillars – Sort and Set In Order. If our home environment become cluttered and disorganized we tend to function a lot less efficiently.

It is unfortunate that few companies are as standardized with 5S routines as is the daily life of a well organized person. In the workplace it is just as important as in the daily life of a person that effective routines for orderliness be maintained to ensure the smooth and effective flow of operational activities. Sort and Set In Order are the foundation for improving throughput, decreasing inventory and reducing operating costs.

Keep in mind that:

* A neat and clean workplace has higher Quality
* A neat and clean workplace has higher productivity and less Cost
* A neat and clean workplace meets Delivery requirements better
* A neat and clean workplace is a Safer place to work
* A neat and clean workplace has higher Moral

SORT
The purpose of Sort is to remove all items from the workplace that are not needed for current production or clerical operations. When you are first getting started, this can be a difficult task as it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is needed and what is not.

People have a tendency to hang on to parts, materials, tools, etc thinking that they may need them later on. Often times extra inventory and inappropriate tools and equipment are left in the work place, this has a tendency to accumulate over time and gets in the way of production activities. This leads to a gradual build up of waste over time. The key to this is a process for evaluating the necessity of an item using a process called “Red Tagging”. This process will greatly reduce the risk of disposing of items that may be needed later.

Set In Order
Set In Order is defined as “arranging needed items so that they are easy to use and labeling them so that they are easy to locate and put away. You should always implement Set In Order with Sort.

Once you have thoroughly Sorted everything, all that you will have left will be the items necessary to support production. Your next step will be to make it obvious where these items belong and in what quantity so that people can quickly find them and or return them.

SHINE
The third element is Shine. This wiping down machinery and equipment, sweeping floors and making sure that everything is clean. It is also about inspecting machines and equipment for proper operation and possible damage or needed repair.

Shine has a definite impact on producing defect-free product, by preventing dust, dirt, and debris form accumulating in the workplace.

STANDARDIZE
Standardize differs from the first three pillars which can be thought of as activities. It is the method that you use to carry out Sort, Set In Order, and Shine. Standardize is related to these three activities, however it is most closely related to Shine. It occurs when you keep machines and their surrounding areas free of dirt, debris, and oil. In other words it is the condition that exists when shine is appropriately practiced for some time.

SUSTAIN
Sustain means making the first four pillars a habit by maintaining correct procedures and processes. You will find that the first for pillars are relatively easy to implement if you and your fellow employees will commit to sustaining the desired 5S conditions. If you do, you will find that your workplace will enjoy high productivity and quality while reducing unnecessary waste and high cost of operation.

BENEFITS OF 5S
Your organization will experience many benefits from implementing 5S. These benefits include:

* Improved quality zero defects
* Decreased cost through reduced waste
* Improved delivery through less production delays and downtime
* Increased morale because of a cleaner, healthier workplace
* Increase safety because of reduced hazards.

Program Implementation
The key to an effective 5S program is proper planning and implementation. This can only occur if you employ the use of a 5S implementation team. This team must be properly trained and given sufficient resources and management support. The most effective planning and implementation comes about when the team is coached or guided through the process in a workshop environment. Another key is selecting a small target area to start with and get the program running properly before rolling it out to the entire company.

About the Author: Brice Alvord has over thirty years experience as an internal and external performance improvement consultant and business coach. Mr. Alvord has extensive experience in designing and developing performance based training programs that get results. He holds a BA in Sociology/Psychology from Central Washington University and an MBA degree from City University of Seattle. He is the author of over two dozen books on continuous improvement and training.

For more information about our programs, visit our website at: http://www.5S.aleragroup.com

A strong consensus based on good values builds a foundation upon which to implement and innovate with business models. Values encourage taking the right kind of innovative actions in a cooperative and effective way. Values also shape the direction that business model innovation takes. The best companies find that values help them identify potential employees and future leaders. Finally, broadly inclusive values help to stimulate innovation and support from partners, suppliers, customers, end users, distributors, and the communities you serve.

The more you talk about your values the more opportunities you will have to act on them, because you will draw positive attention from those who are looking to link with companies that have your values.

Here’s an example of that observation in practice at Timberland: The footwear and apparel company’s leaders see its role as serving its stakeholders, and shares that perspective visibly and persuasively. Jeff Swartz, the company’s third CEO drawn from the founding family, puts it this way. “Doing good and doing well are linked.”

He sees customers and consumers not as passive recipients of what the company provides but as “citizens” with a stake in the company who should be given every opportunity to tell what they want. Employees are not “hired hands” to be ordered around, but “paid volunteers” who come to work because they believe in what the company is doing. As part of this ethic, the company provides 40 paid hours of time a year for employees to do volunteer work. They apply this time to projects they care about.

Suppliers are required to meet standards of quality on the products, and how they produce them. For example, Timberland wants to be sure that its products are not produced by child labor.

Shareholders should get good financial results and the satisfaction of owning a stake in a company whose values they can be proud of. Mr. Swartz also sees his responsibility as bringing the community into the company. As two examples, Timberland provides day care on premises and also is a national supporter of City Year, a national youth service organization located in 13 cities around the United States.

Many Timberland employees also work on City Year projects. Company-sponsored volunteerism goes in so many directions, that Mr. Swartz doesn’t even try to keep track of all the activities it supports. While many other companies publicly espouse these kinds of positive values, Timberland makes sure there is no mistake about its intent in order to be sure that resources its fine business model creates are shared fairly.

While no one can prescribe values for anyone else, some values seem to be present in almost all of the companies with the best business models. These values include:

- paying attention to every stakeholder as an individual

- respecting each person’s views and interests

- being honest

- keeping promises

- seeking to “do good while doing well”

- creating innovative solutions to important, unmet human needs

- looking for validation of one’s ideas in successful customer acceptance

- putting the interests of all stakeholders on a par with each other

- pursuing one’s work in ways that instills pride in doing that work.

If these values aren’t where they should be in your organization, you need to actively involve all stakeholders in establishing what they should be as a first step in creating the right kind of mutual commitments.

How do you know of your values aren’t there? A good “gut” test is to ask yourself if you feel inspired to do what you do for a living because of what your company stands for. If you don’t feel that inspiration, what would have to change about the company and its relationships in order for you to feel that way? Ask others in your company the same two questions in private, and listen carefully to what they tell you.

Copyright 2008 Donald W. Mitchell, All Rights Reserved

About the Author: Donald Mitchell is chairman of Mitchell and Company, a strategy and financial consulting firm in Weston, MA. He is coauthor of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Solution, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. You can find free tips for accomplishing 20 times more by registering at: http://www.fastforward400.com

You might ask yourself, “Do my employees need development training?”

Well, if they didn’t, you would not be reading this article – you would be cruising around on your 100-foot yacht off the coast of your own private island, because it would mean you have the best, most profitable company ever known to man! Unfortunately, this is not a reality for any of us, and neither is the thought that your company would not significantly benefit from providing additional training and development for your workforce.

Read any recent study or survey on what it is employees look for in an employer, and they will all produce very common answers such as the ability to develop their skills, a chance to do meaningful work, to be empowered, to be part of a team, to have great trust and communication with their manager, and to be compensated and rewarded for a good job. So how do we accomplish this? Simple! Give our employees what they want!

But you might decide that training “is not in the budget” or “is not a good financial investment for us right now”. Well, according to a recent Business Week survey, among employees who worked for a company offering poor training, 41% expected to leave their job within the next year, versus only 12% who expected to leave while working for a company who offers great training- that is a 29% difference in turnover. Let’s say for example that you turn over an average of 10 employees a year who make an average of $50,000/yr. Now, lets assume all things considered (recruiting costs, lost production, time away from work spent interviewing replacements, lowered morale, etc…) your turnover cost is a moderate 150% of each person’s salary. If you do the math that is a difference of $217,500 a year of savings, simply because you offered a better employee development program that might have cost you $15,000 to implement and execute. That’s an ROI of a mere 1,350%! So, do you still feel the same way about training?

Now that we are all in agreement that developing our employees is something we absolutely must do, not only to make our employees happier and more competent, but because it will impact our bottom line, let’s look at the most important things to consider when designing a program.

Create a process, not an event
The problem with 3-4 day seminars is that attendees get overloaded with information. Your employees end up leaving the seminar having already forgotten a large percentage of what was talked about, and they have not even made it back to the office yet! Then, after being gone for almost a week, they have to play catch-up at work, and it is usually weeks before they can even try to apply what they learned. Well, by then, almost all has been forgotten, so things just resort back to exactly how they were, resulting in a huge waste of time and money. You can combat this by spacing out the learning process. Your employees will be able to take in small doses of what is being taught, and before too long, they will become accustomed to going to training every month (or however long you decide to space out the workshops) and consistently developing their skills will become a habit for them. Plus, by breaking up the program over time, they don’t have to take multiple days off at once from work – usually they can be away from their desk for just hours at a time, so they won’t fall behind! Remember, you can’t create a long-term, positive behavior change in a once-a-year, 3-day seminar!

Offer a complete program
In order to get into great shape, you can’t just focus on one thing like dieting. You must diet, but combine that with things that contribute to the success of the diet like taking vitamins, running or jogging, lifting weights, and getting enough sleep. The same thing goes for providing training for your people. Putting your employees through a “sales program” might help you see immediate results on the surface, but those results won’t last unless the individual has the proper knowledge and skills in other areas that contribute to the end goal. In this instance, some of the other important skills that contribute to success in sales are things like positive attitude, time management, communication, listening and change management just to list a few. Remember, if your goal is to improve the long-term performance of your employees, give them all the necessary tools to do so.

Identify the real need
So you say your customer service reps are not meeting their goals and are sometimes rude to customers on the phone, huh? That doesn’t always mean you need to put your department through a customer service workshop (actually, that is rarely the right decision). More times than not, the issues you see on the surface are not the root causes of the problems, and addressing only these issues might provide a quick fix, but sooner than later, things will resort back to how they were. In this scenario, the problem might be that the department managers have poor communication skills and give poor and inconsistent feedback to their employees, which results in the reps becoming disengaged. So, if you want better results out of your customer service team, the right choice might be to train the department heads on how to be better leaders and managers, which would result in better performance out of the reps! To be sure you are training the right people on the right skills, take the time to assess your company and find out what’s really going on (a formal assessment is a great tool to use).

Size matters
Think back to college when you had a class in a big lecture hall. You knew you were not going to be asked to participate in the discussion, and you were never going to be called on to answer a question. How many hours of sleep did you catch up on during that class every week? The point here is that for your employees to be engaged in the workshop, make sure the workshop has two key characteristics: a low participant-to-trainer ratio, and an environment that encourages participation. Adults learn by “doing” much better than by “being told,” so make sure they have a chance to interact and work directly with the trainer.

Before and after is important
Is simply having light bulbs turn on in the minds of your employees during the workshop going to change their performance, or increase company profits? Of course not! If the information discussed is not properly applied at work, then nothing was really learned – ideas were simply presented. In this unfortunate case, the training session was a waste, no matter how great the material might have been. That is why it is vital to do two things:

1. Take the proper time before the first workshop is even held to make sure employees understand why this program is being put into place, they fully understand what the end goal and desired result of this program is, and most important, they have the proper tools and knowledge to be able to apply what they will learn. Getting the best results from the program takes a serious effort from management to make sure all of the above happens first, or else the participants will leave the workshop with a number of great ideas, but not know what to do next!

2. Give proper support and encouragement after each workshop. Not only does the employee desire to know how he/she is doing in relation to their goal, but continuous monitoring and feedback will keep them motivated to keep working hard.

Facilitator involvement
Finally, having the facilitator be involved in the application of the ideas and material in the weeks and months after the workshop has concluded is huge. Making sure the facilitator makes him or herself accessible to all participants between and after workshops will allow the participant to address even more obstacles and discuss things about their personal situation they might not have felt comfortable talking about in the workshop with others around. Doing this will also help each participant form a better relationship with the facilitator so that the participant feels better about opening up during future workshops.

Hopefully these tips are helpful in putting together a development program for your employees that will help take your organization to the next level and achieve High Performance. Remember, for 2008 and beyond, if you are not investing in your employees, be prepared to invest in a good staffing firm!

About the Author: This article was written by Jeff Rosset, President of Compass Coaching & Development, LLC. Compass C&D is an organizational training & development firm located in Hoffman Estates, IL. For more information about Compass Coaching & Development, please visit http://www.Compass-CD.com

Corporate culture at its most basic is how a company does what it does. A business’s culture is made up of shared values, beliefs, habits and goals. A business’s location, its employees and even customers all have a hand in forming a culture. Most corporate cultures are created organically, which is a nice way of saying that they are left to chance. Sometimes though, the leadership of a company realizes that their culture is one of the best selling points of the company; sometimes they see that their culture is dooming them.

Your business’s culture is as important as your business plan and should be included in your thoughts as such. On a superficial level, a culture is how you’re seen and what you do. This includes your building’s layout, your equipment, the dress code, the organizational structure, your company policies, how you treat employees, and how you treat customers. Beneath all of this at the core, your culture is made up of the shared beliefs and values of the majority in the company.

Not all businesses are created equal or the same, but they all have a corporate culture of some sort. Identifying which culture they have isn’t as easy as looking at the size of the building or how many employees there are. A small business could have the same culture as a multi-national corporation; it all depends on the mindset. When it comes to understanding the best way to run your business, there are two important things you must do: identify what kind of culture it has and know the best way to communicate within that culture.

To better understand the differences, we look at the culture studies of Fons Trompenaars who identifies four main culture types and how to navigate within them.

Guided Missile
A guided missile culture is objective based and organized to accomplish specific projects or goals. Managers feel a higher sense of ownership and are able to move their projects forward easily. Results come faster, the company is more agile, and there is plenty of flexibility for the employees. While this can be effective for getting things done, it isn’t as beneficial for communication to the company as a whole. Communicating in this environment is more tactical than anything else, but you should hold on to the big picture to help keep these dynamic, but separate projects all heading in the same direction. Keep your global message based on the top priority project to get your audience’s attention.

Eiffel Tower
This culture focuses on the relationship employees have with their immediate boss. Someone’s position in the hierarchy vastly dictates what information they are receiving or able to give. While this is a strong culture, it is very slow to change. To communicate well, you need to have bottom-up and side-to-side communication channels in addition to the top-down information trickle. Make sure you have a solid and objective feedback process. A top managerial communications champion will be essential to make sure your information flows smoothly.

Familial
Like the name suggests, this kind of culture is similar to a family atmosphere. Loyalty, collaboration, and communication flow through relationships that are between people at any level. These relationships are driven through honor and respect. How much one can get done is dictated by who you know, how well you are liked, and how much of a fit in the company you are. Communicating in this culture is a more indirect process. Use celebrations and events to speak to the company as a whole. Direct criticism and confrontation will most likely backfire, so use stories, anecdotes, and non-personal examples to get your point across.

Incubator
Incubator cultures are a byproduct of the dot.com era and generations x and y. With the technology at hand, they get their information from almost every source except top-down communications. Once they have it, information billows out around them as they post on message boards, IM, and blogs. The best way to make an impression is to break them out of their normal, day-to-day atmosphere. Get them out from in front of their computers and into an auditorium. Make sure to include some moving around and good food. You’ll make them pay attention when you go through the senses they don’t normally use for work.

The culture of your business dictates how well your people will try to do the things that will make your business succeed. If you know what kind of culture you have, you can better understand how your employees think, how to communicate with them, and how best to use your culture to improve your company.

About the Author: David Byrd is the conference call expert at TalkPath LLC.
Read more from David or find out about video conferencing services at TalkPathConferencing.com.

Countless change agents and other organizational interventionists fail to achieve desired results because they ignore or are unaware of the need to closely align change strategy with organizational personality. Durk I. Jager, former CEO of Procter & Gamble Co., was clear about his goals when he took office in 1999: shore up overseas operation and grow top brands. These measures would remedy sagging sales and redeem P&G’s image as the leading global marketer of consumer products. However, Jager’s strategy for achieving these goals was perceived as being so abrasive, so discordant with P&G’s personality, that his management team rebelled against him. He was forced to resign in less than two years. Alan G. Lafley, a longtime executive who understood and respected the company’s culture, took office in 2000. Through a combination of wisdom, humility, personal engagement, and a careful alignment of change strategy to corporate personality, Lafley has turned P&G into one of the great corporate success stories of the twenty-first century.

Lauded as the most innovative change agent for corporate culture, Carly Fiorina could not achieve her desired result at Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina had the right idea – turn HP into a more nimble market driver. By many accounts, she did just about everything right except for one thing: she underestimated the power of the HP Way. Even as criticism mounted about her imperial style, intolerance for dissent, finger pointing, swift and harsh measures, and alienation of rank-and-file employees, she proceeded seemingly contumeliously. Consequently, HP’s bottom line worsened under her leadership. Ironically, Mark Hurd, a relatively obscure figure who replaced Fiorina after she was sacked in 2005, managed to accomplish much of what Fiorina dreamed of – replace some of the old guard, increase response time to the market, improve financial performance – without encountering the same level of resistance and backlash. Like Lafley, Hurd demonstrates that any degree of change can be achieved by working through existing culture even if the ultimate goal is to replace that culture.

The above high-profile examples illustrate what can happen when there is misalignment at the highest level of an organization. The focus here, however, is on how to address this issue at all levels of the organization, with emphasis on the role of human resource, organization development, and training leaders.

What is organizational personality?
Personality is composed of a person’s innate tendencies, such as left-handedness or introversion, and external influence such as upbringing and experiences. Both influences, natural and learned, shape assumptions, beliefs, interests, and behavior.

Just as every person has a unique personality, the vision, mission, values, beliefs, assumptions, experiences, and attitude of every organization constitute its distinct personality.

Additional information on how organizations learn, act, grow, and ultimately die like living organisms is well documented in the works of such respected business scholars as Arie de Geus, Peter Senge, and William Bridges.

Why is knowing your organization’s personality important?
Strategy and organizational personality alignment has implications for every aspect of business. No culture change, strategic shift, growth plan, or marketing or brand campaign will be optimally successful without it. Leaders at Disney, Southwest Airlines, and Nordstrom, to name a few remarkably successful entities, have a distinct record of being able to leverage their cultures to achieve desired results. They understand that culture enables their success. They therefore spend as much time improving culture as they do ensuring that business strategy remains in sync with it. They know it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve and sustain results that their culture cannot support.

What is your organization’s personality?
One of the mistakes that change leaders make is to assume they understand their organization’s culture. Fekete and Company, an Ohio-based marketing firm, profiled fifty-five companies over a two-year period to determine their personalities. As part of the study, each CEO and his or her management team were asked to individually describe the personality of their organization. In 78 percent of the cases, the CEO saw the organization differently than did his or her management team. The study goes on to show significant differences between perceptions by senior management and the rest of the employees (Discovering and Living a Company’s True Personality, 16types.com).

Hopefully, the gaps in perceptions are not as wide in your organization. The more removed you are from the social milieu of frontline employees and from where tactical assignments are executed, the less you should assume about your organization’s culture.

Change agents will do well to gain a thorough understanding of their organization’s personality. They should invest in a proven approach for gathering this information. Although there are many off-the-shelf corporate personality assessment tools, working with an organization that specializes in collecting and analyzing this information is recommended. These organizations include the aforementioned Fekete & Company, PersonalityTM, Parker LePla, Gartner Consulting, and The Pacific Institute.

Other common mistakes change agents make:

One size fits all. Smart organizations learn from the experimentations and errors of other companies. If another company develops an idea that drastically improves employee or customer satisfaction, why reinvent the wheel?

Change leaders routinely borrow a process or an idea that has been validated elsewhere. They implement it in their organization hook, line, and sinker. The inherent danger in this approach is that it neglects, suppresses, or upsets elements of their culture that are incongruent with the new scheme.

Scantily dressed waitresses are icons of the Hooters brand. They are key to customer satisfaction and have resulted in significant growth for the company. Borrowing this idea, a hospital could serve up scantily dressed nurses. They could have their male counterparts rip off their coats like Chippendale dancers before delivering care. If the suggestions gave you pause, consider the various ideas you might have adamantly pursued in your organization. How many of them caused your employees to recoil? Could you have adapted the idea to your culture?

Strait and narrow. Every trade has its bag of tricks, and the field of organization development is not an exception. Most OD professionals favor experiential learning or learning through action. This promotes self-discovery, enabling learners to acquire skills that will help them elicit from themselves and others solutions to problems. Some HR and OD professionals favor this approach to the exclusion of didactic teaching. On the flip side, traditional trainers might prefer a structured, often lecturesque, method.

Learning is the lifeline of change, and your organization will not change if the learning process is inhibited. If the only way medical students learned about anatomy was to sit in circles and exchange ideas about body parts, they would probably have major limitations as physicians.

Depending on an organization’s personality, one approach or a hybrid of approaches might be the effective way to learn. Change agents must be flexible enough to create or adopt the style necessary to facilitate organizational learning. The catch is that they have to understand their culture well enough to come up with the right style.

Improper tenor. While it might be acceptable to have employees gyrate to some of Aerosmith’s hardest-hitting songs at the beginning of corporate learning sessions at Google, and while most learning activities at the company might end with Zen-like adventures, the same delivery strategy might attract dire consequences at Cerberus Capital.

Google takes great pride in its friendly and egalitarian culture. Influential subcultures – pop, nerd, geek cultures – share the convivial atmosphere. Dress code is as casual as can be, and some employees’ offices are as eccentric and personalized as their former college dorm rooms. Yet the company is remarkably innovative and continues to enjoy high investor, employee, and customer satisfaction. Google’s distinct personality enables it to attract and retain the kind of employee who shares its vision.

On the other hand, Cerberus, a private equity firm, is feared and revered on Wall Street. The company, which recently purchased Chrysler, buys ailing businesses, strips them of excess fat, and turns them into profitable ventures. It currently owns a group of companies that employ more than 250,000 people.

CEO and founder Stephen Feinberg is an intense, hard-driving, but elusive and self-effacing person. Directly employing about three hundred people, his intensity and conservative disposition extend throughout his organization. Some of his senior executives have quit as a result of his labor-intensive do-it-yourself approach. “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper,” Feinberg joked at a recent business meeting, “we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it” (Conde Nast Portfolio, September 2007). Never mind that the name Cerberus was borrowed from the mythologic three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Unlike Google, dress code is formal and office décor is unusually bare bones. Yet many of Cerberus’s employees thrive in this environment and the company has consistently outperformed the competition.

For all the organizations in between, an overly eccentric or radical activity can be a distraction. It can erode the integrity of the leader as it smacks of personal knowledge deficit or a lack of understanding of or disregard for the culture.

Aggressiveness. In the movie The Mask of Zorro, a drunk and angry Antonio Banderas charged toward his archenemy, a trained and heartless soldier, to avenge his brother’s death. His mentor, Anthony Hopkins, managed to restrain him. In the intervening conversation, Hopkins gave him these words of wisdom: “You would have fought very bravely and died very quickly.”

Unrelenting resolve, energy, passion, patience, and focus are critical strengths for change leaders. However, when combined with an aggressive, abrasive, or dismissive attitude, particularly in the pursuit of an initiative that clashes with existing culture, spectacular failure often results. Even when behavior is not abrasive, “irrational exuberance” (apologies to Alan Greenspan) or ungrounded optimism will produce a similar outcome.

Change does not always have to produce alienation, and massive change does not have to equal massive alienation.

Asphyxiation. This refers to a change strategy that lacks input from the employee population that will be impacted. Typically, an individual or a small group of leaders, sort of an oligarchy, initiates change, determines the critical aspects, and plans the execution. Throughout the implementation phase, they stay true to their original plan, making adjustments usually only when there are adverse financial implications. Such cocooned leaders breathe their own air and, if the change process lasts long enough, will run out of oxygen.

Maintaining the alignment between change strategy and corporate personality is a dynamic process. Change leaders who wish to succeed will seek input from the appropriate constituents before decisions about change are finalized. They will constantly monitor feedback and results from ongoing change and adjust strategy accordingly.

Babel. This is what happens when organizational interventionists try a series of approaches in quick succession or blitz an organization with multiple interventions without achieving the desired culture change. This creates a state of perpetual, confusing motion that inhibits deep commitment and fosters adaptations that detract from strategy.

Often, Babel is evidence of poor planning in the initial phase of a change process. Instead of fishing for solutions to salvage a failed strategy, acknowledge your reality and return to the drawing board.

A dreadful consequence
Perhaps the most insidious and, ironically, oft-ignored consequence of a misaligned change strategy is the feeling of disrespect it creates among rank-and-file employees.

When employees who have firsthand information are not asked for input, or when their input is neglected, when their past efforts are abruptly discarded, when new imperatives contradict existing norms without adequate preparatory explanation, when implementation methods violate common practice without warning, when change leaders exhibit a lack of understanding of existing culture, when they display insensitivity in the amount of change being demanded of workers, and when calls for reevaluation are rejected and dissenters are chastised, an organization sets itself up to experience the consequences of disrespecting its workforce.

Disrespect for workers engenders apathy, resistance, burnout, low productivity, and high turnover. A study conducted by Sigal Barsade, Wharton management professor, concluded that “organizational respect influences burn out above and beyond the effects of job demands and negative affectivity.” Stated differently, when employees feel disrespected, they tend to experience higher levels of burnout. The study also found that productivity decreased and turnover increased when employees felt their complaints about “negative” change were met with inertia. (More Than Job Demands or Personality, Lack of Organizational Respect Fuels Employee Burnout, Wharton School Publishing, December 8, 2006.) These findings are consistent with the experiences at P&G and HP under the reigns of Jager and Fiorina respectively.

How do you create alignment?
Before you create a change strategy, first understand your organization’s personality. Instead of going with your hunch, assumption, personal experience, or aspirations for your company, conduct an objective culture assessment. This information is worth its weight in gold.

Relentless innovation and improvement are indispensable prerequisites for success in today’s business climate. This translates into rapid and continuous change. Thus, organizations must find ways to accelerate corporate metabolism. To achieve this goal, locate and tackle aspects of your culture that inhibit the desired pace and magnitude of change.

With the exception of situations posing immediate or significant risks, change, no matter how massive, does not have to occur in a draconian or disrespectful manner. Even when they cannot alter the outcome, speak with impacted employees about your idea for change and the rationale behind it. This dialogue should occur before the decision for change is finalized. This action demonstrates that you care for your workers as human beings, respect their intelligence, and value their membership in your organization. A patient who is diagnosed with a malignancy might not have a choice about removing the tumor if he wants to live. However, he should have the opportunity to consider several options – surgical and non-surgical – for eliminating the disease. If the patient settled for a non-surgical option, he could evaluate a range of drugs for side effects and choose the most suitable one. By rubbing minds with your workers, you stand a better chance of picking the most effective approach for achieving your goal.

Even when you are confident you understand your organization’s tolerance level, keep your hand on its pulse throughout the change process. Just as you would observe emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness in a person, look for similar signs in the organization’s climate once the change process begins. Addressing these symptoms early can prevent them from degenerating into more pernicious maladies such as distrust, apathy, and disloyalty.

Properly timing the introduction of your initiatives or interventions demonstrates your attentiveness to the stress level of your workforce. No matter how industrious and committed your employees might be, you will be doing your organization a disservice by pushing them beyond their breaking point.

Conclusion
As a physician friend once remarked, all blood is red, but not all blood is good for everyone. Not every change strategy, design, delivery method, or activity is right for your organization. Your ability to partner with your coworkers to discern the best approach is the essence of your role as a change agent.

About the Author: Peter Adebi is a seasoned HR/Organizational Development consultant and leadership coach. He is founder of Star Leadership® and author of many human resource articles. Contact: padebi@starprinciple.com or 856-228-9022.

We have had coaching behaviors as long as we’ve had people in organizations, but it is only recently that they have been given that label. In the last few years the term coaching has entered the management lexicon and become seen as an integral part of the successful deployment of people at work. Perhaps the obvious analogies with the world of sport where the coaching relationship has always been valued by even the highest performers helps to encourage managers and leaders today to look towards coaching as a means of encouraging and sustaining performance in these most turbulent times.

But let’s be clear, coaching is not a panacea for all organizational ills and ought not be introduced to the organization on the basis of a leap of faith. Here I’ll seek to set out in stark terms the obvious advantages which I hope imply compelling benefits without the need for complex, and often spurious, Return on Investment calculations.

Greater Leadership Effectiveness
The prime function of leadership is surely to generate the next generation of leaders. With coaching as a regularly encountered management style, talent in any organization will be allowed and encouraged to shine through. Such people, as well as being identified for succession purposes, can be encouraged to take more responsibility for operational tasks, freeing the leadership to concentrate on more strategic matters.

Increased Employee Productivity
Employees are more productive when they’re focused. In coaching parlance, being focused refers to a state of mind where one feels aware and responsible within a climate of trust. Coaching helps promote focus by making employees aware of the critical variables in their tasks and jobs. When employees more accurately identify the things that change when they’re successful and when they’re not, they find it easier to do the right things.

More Effective Performance Management
Recent years have seen organizations of all kinds clamor for effective Performance Management (PM). Most PM frameworks emphasize reviewing past performance against set targets and objectives, but this is akin to rowing a boat; trying to move forwards while facing backwards. Coaching fosters an emphasis on learning and development within a PM approach. Once the basis of an effective system is in place, coaching presents an opportunity to develop the management skills that can harness a system to best effect.

More Effective Communication
Coaching is employee centred yet performance focused. Day to day discussions and 1 to 1s in particular will be more effective when the focus of these exchanges in on promoting performance, but with the employee’s needs duly considered.

Increased Retention and Loyalty of Staff
Coaching promotes Performance, Learning and Enjoyment. Staff who finish the working week having learned something, achieved something and enjoyed themselves in the process will be happy productive employees for years to come. At the very least, these prime motivators help dilute an obsession with financial and other external rewards.

Better Alignment of Organizational Goals Throughout
Coaching encourages the articulation and ownership of challenging goals. Where such goals can be developed against a backdrop of clear organizational aims, the chances of alignment and consequently successful achievement are much increased.

Why Now?
Increasingly, the benefits described above can be underpinned by a Senior Management Team’s exposure to external coaching where this is the case. The business case for having these skills in house in the management population are obvious but the logistics of getting them sometimes more complex.

To train a managers and leaders as coaches requires an investment of money and, even more crucially, time, when almost all available landing slots are likely to have been assigned to other projects.

Nevertheless, the time is right as the challenges facing organizations will not be met without an employee base that is skilled, motivated and coached to perform at its best.

About the Author: Matt Somers is the author of Coaching at Work (John Wiley & Sons, 2006) and Instant Manager: Coaching (Hodder & Stoughton, 2008). His consultancy practice is obsessed with helping managers become coaches and achieve the results that coaching promises. His popular guide “Coaching for an Easier Life” is available FREE at http://www.mattsomers.com

Introduction
How do you get feedback? If you have a boss, chances are you get periodic performance reviews. They’re focused on the numbers, as they should be, and might include your boss’s perception of your people skills, client skills, teamwork, etc.

If you’re the top dog, you may have a board of directors who again will be focused on the numbers. Hopefully you also talk to clients and partners, and other advisors to get some sense of how to improve your performance.

But What About My Leadership Skills?
If you’re in charge of more than a handful of people, it’s hard to know how they perceive you. (But you do want to know, don’t you?) Quite a few years ago I was for the first time leading a large organization (more than 100 people). The company was very large, meaning I was in middle management. Things were going reasonably well, projects were getting done, and I thought I was doing a pretty good job. The company that year got excited about a new practice called upward feedback, so they instituted a formal program for all management above a certain level. We would all collect upward feedback from our people, share it with our own bosses, and it would be part of our appraisals. OK, I’m pretty confident. Bring it on.

The feedback took me down like a punch in the gut. I had some good points, but I got some awfully low scores in areas that basically labeled me as intimidating and unapproachable. Now I have my faults, but these would not have made the list on my own self appraisal. The score is the score, but I didn’t understand. There were some verbatims that came with the numbers, but they were way too general. I needed more information. No way was this going to continue.

Look Out, I’m Wired
Fortunately, I went about this the right way. I brought together a couple of skip level small groups, and I opened up to them. I showed them the data (i.e. the feedback scores), and the limited verbatim feedback. I made it clear that they were in the safest environment possible; they could tell me I was worse than Attila the Hun and I would thank them and never hold it against them.

They were great people, and they responded to my plea for help. While there were several ideas they gave me to improve my approachability, the number one issue they cited was my office!
Now I had a great office. The building had glass bubble towers, and my office was in a bubble. All glass, floor to ceiling, great view. I had a great desk too. It was big, old and solid. When we had to knock on wood in my office, we had real wood for knocking.

We held lots of informal meetings in my office, and it seems that was where the problem started. People would pull up chairs, to my big, old, solid, imposing desk. And I would be sitting behind that big old desk in a big, comfortable leather chair. I wasn’t trying to be intimidating, just comfortable.

It wasn’t the only change I made, but I quickly rearranged that office. No, I didn’t get rid of the desk. After all, it was a beauty. What I did was push it up against a wall. Now when I sat at the desk, I faced the wall. When someone came into the office, I had to turn away from the big desk and face people in an open area. I also worked on smiling more.

Did It Work?
Yes, and my later upward feedback results proved it. But the company soon moved past “upward feedback”. Today they and many other companies have a 360 feedback program involving bosses, subordinates, clients and partners. They don’t focus much on the subordinate part. As a leader, you need upward feedback. You need it for yourself, so you can continually improve your leadership effectiveness. You need it so you know how people are responding to the ideas, direction and support you provide them.

Ask for it formally, at regular intervals. Six months is good, but even if it’s only once a year, do it. Share the results with your people, so they know they were heard. Act on it when you can, and when you decide not to take action on their input, tell them what you’ve decided and why.
Confident leaders go out of their way to seek critical feedback. Be a confident leader.

About the Author: The organization that isn’t changing is probably dying. For more information about managing change and developing leaders, please visit http://www.thomasjodea.com.

Tom O’Dea has more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in companies ranging from startups to multi billion dollar corporations.

You want your employees to consistently and continuously perform at high levels but they are not. You find that performance issues vary. Some employees do a great job of communicating with customers while other employees do better at managing time. In other instances, the same employees perform well in one area and not so well in another. As for inconsistency, that happens as well. You cannot always depend on the same employees to deliver the same level of performance on a continuous basis.

Unfortunately, your performance discussions are not effective. When you talk about performance improvement, employees become defensive. You even find yourself on the defensive as you try to explain the changes you want. So what do you do? You identify mutually positive reasons for improving performance by linking performance improvement to: results that are important to employees and to results that are important to the organization. Follow these three steps:

Step 1: Identify the Performance you Want
Start by identifying the areas where you want each employee to improve his or her performance. You may want some employees to stop doing certain things, while you may want others to start doing certain things. Or perhaps a small change is necessary. Consider the behaviors that are important to you and your organization.

For example, if your focus is communication, then determine specific communication behaviors. If your focus is teamwork, then determine specific teamwork behaviors. The operative word is specific. Employees cannot deliver the kind of performance you want if you are not clear about what you want.

Step 2: Identify Results of Performance
Once you have identified the performance you want, determine what happens if the employee performs satisfactorily or does not perform satisfactorily. For example, if an employee completes all assignments timely: he or she could receive an improved performance rating; other employees might be able to complete their assignments more timely; or the office might receive fewer complaints about product deliveries.

Go beyond the traditional results by thinking about who and/or what is impacted by employee performance. For instance, a change in performance could impact the organization mission, external customers, workplace accidents, team profits, internal departments, community groups, and others. Do not just consider what could happen to the employee or to his or her workload. Consider what could happen to other employees and to the organization as well.

Step 3: Link Performance to Results
Here, you want to link the performance you want to the results that will be achieved if employees deliver the performance you want. For instance, improved time management could affect customer service, individual productivity, or office goals. The more results you can link to performance the better. Just make sure the results are meaningful to employees. That means if you link performance to goals in the organization strategic plan, employees need to know about the goals in the strategic plan. On a personal level, if employees are interested in more time off, offering opportunities to do more exciting work may not be very motivating.

Go For It!
You have identified areas for performance improvement, you have identified workplace results, and you have made meaningful links between performance improvement and workplace results. Now, you are ready to talk to your employee. This approach gives you a whole new way to handle that performance discussion. You have multiple ways to explain the importance of cooperation and contributions. So the discussion is not just about the performance you want. The discussion is about how the performance you want can lead to positive results for the employee and for the organization where the employee works. Go for it!

About the Author: Barbara Brown, PhD shows managers how to improve employee performance by linking performance to results. She publishes handbooks that contain phrases for discussing performance. Handbook topics include Linking Time Management To Results, Linking Customer Service To Results, and others. Dr. Brown also offers E-Courses and E-Consulting as well as onsite training and consulting. Website: http://www.LinkToResults.net Email: Barbara@LinkToResults.net

“Mountaintops inspire leaders but valleys mature them.” — Winston Churchill

Introduction
Your reputation as a leader is formed not only by the results you achieve, but by the behaviors you display along the way. Nothing will contribute more to that reputation than your actions and effectiveness when things go wrong. How do you perform under pressure?

TV Leadership
In an episode of “CSI Miami” a year or so ago, Eric (one of the investigators) gets himself into trouble by bending (ok, breaking) some rules while working a case. He decides to try and work himself out of the problem, and his boss (the ever confident Lt. Horatio Caine) is in the dark until Internal Affairs comes around.

In the end, of course, the problem gets worked out. Horatio takes his charge aside and calmly but firmly tells him to never let this happen again. And after he’s sure the message has been received, he adds “and if you ever do, tell me right away so I can watch your back”.

What do you do when one of your projects is in trouble? Maybe you’re having quality problems, or you’re behind schedule. Perhaps you’ve lost a key resource, or you’re headed toward a budget overrun. How will you behave?

Evaluate Your Leadership Behavior
There are (at least) four areas where you have the opportunity to demonstrate situational leadership and good (or bad) judgment. In each of these areas, you are going to be making choices as to how to behave, whether you make them consciously or unconsciously.

Urgency vs. Panic — The level of urgency you demonstrate will affect everyone. Act too casual and you can expect continuing problems. Treat every problem as a severity 1 crisis and you’ll eventually be ignored like Chicken Little. Show your maturity; evaluate the situation and act accordingly. Showing disappointment is often more effective than flashing your anger.

Accountability vs. Blame — You have multiple roles here; you must be accountable, and you must hold others accountable.

* Your customers want to see you take ownership and responsibility for the breakdown, and clearly demonstrate corrective action.
* For your people, it’s essential that you correctly assess what caused the breakdown, and hold the appropriate people accountable, even while you limit public criticism and provide individual feedback in private. If someone can’t be trusted to perform, get them out. Otherwise, be ready to back your people up even while you’re giving them tough love behind closed doors.
* And for your own management, you need to take the same personal responsibility you take with customers, while clearly demonstrating that you’ve gotten to the bottom of the issues.

Increased Involvement vs. Taking Over – Again, you have multiple audiences to satisfy. Step in and take over the failed project, and your customers might be pleased. But you’ve completely undercut your own people, and your management may or may not be happy. Your bias here should be to increase your visibility (more status reports, quicker problem escalation) but avoid taking over unless there is truly no alternative.

What Actions to Take – Something’s got to give. If you’re going to recover lost schedule time, there may be added costs or heavy demands on people’s capabilities. If you’re going to slip the schedule, what’s the business impact? Quality problems need to be assessed and can call an entire project into question.

Everyone will be looking for you to be decisive. But you want to solve the problems, not compound them. Be quick if you can, but be honest if the appropriate action is to take a few days for reassessment of the project.

Examine your leadership actions in each of these categories. Make sure your actions and decisions in each are consistent with the needs of the situation.

About the Author: The organization that isn’t changing is probably dying. For more information about managing change and developing leaders, please visit http://www.thomasjodea.com.

Tom O’Dea has more than 20 years of senior leadership experience in companies ranging from startups to multi billion dollar corporations.