Culture to Engage

And the Winner Is......Culture!

The Harvard Management Update (1/2008) published a review of Bain & Company'ssurvey of 1900 global executives. The article, Creating and Sustaining a Winning Culture, focused on the relevance of a (strong) business culture to success.

I love finding information that supports what I believe.

Here are some excerpts. I invite you to download the report at my website.

• 91% of the 1,200 senior executives at global companies surveyed agreed that “culture is as important as strategy for business success.”

• In another recent Bain survey, 81% of executives agreed that a company without a winning culture was “doomed to mediocrity.”

• Companies with winning cultures are better able to execute on strategy; their employees maintain a healthy external focus on customers and competitors rather than on internal politics or turf. Employees think and act like owners—they take personal responsibility for overall business performance, not just their slice of it. They also exhibit a clear bias for action, with little patience for bureaucratic debate.

• Instilling a winning culture can be a tough challenge, as it requires changing how people think about the company and altering habitual behaviors. Crises that threaten a company’s very survival can be potent catalysts for cultural change. But any kind of marketplace threat—new competitors, new technologies, new regulations—can present an opportunity to break down old, unproductive habits and instill the elements of a high-performance culture.

I suggest that implicit to any "winning culture" are

1. Values and behaviors with which employees can readily identify,


2. Attitude and work environment that stimulate employees to engage in "living" the culture,


3. Continuous attention to the culture's validity and vitality to the business's current situation.

Feel free to visit Wright Results and download this informative document.

White Paper Squeezed

Business Culture
A business culture starts with the genesis of the business. Business leaders may carefully define, sow and landscape the culture. Employees may cause it to grow rampant and randomly, fertilized by the attitudes and behaviors of the more prominent members.

The culture exists in both formal and informal forms. Formal culture is composed, published, and distributed, usually in such documents of Policy and Procedures, Employee Orientation Guide, Annual Reports, and Communications to Community and Clients. Informal culture is recognized, respected, and followed without ever being printed and rarely being spoken.

Informal culture typically exerts greater influence on factors including, but not limited to, employee motivation and satisfaction, community respect, customer satisfaction and loyalty, candidate recruitment and employee retention, management success, financial success (revenue, expense, profitability)

Values and Value
Culture provides fundamental values from which the business operates. These values—behavioral, operational, interpersonal, and ethical—determine the value the business generates (financial, community, political, commercial, spiritual, etc.)

For example, a hospital may epitomize the values of appreciating the worth of the individual and committing to the continuous well-being of its community. By doing so effectively and throughout its entire employee population, that hospital experiences valuable loyalty and respect among its employees, its patients and their families, and the members of its community.

Similarly, a hospital may operate with attention to the procedures and processes that keep it running but without attention to the culture (and values) from which it makes its decisions and choices. That hospital is more likely to experience indifference (at best) from the several customer bases it seeks to satisfy: patients, physicians, employees, shareholders.

Culture Impact: Typical
Many organizations (hospitals included) ignore their culture. Consequently, it goes unrecognized until a problem arises. It is sensible to pay attention to the needs of the business, yet it is strategically significant to pay attention to the business culture.

Consider how rarely organizations hold conversations among all levels of employees concerning what the business stands for; what values are most critical to fulfilling the business purpose, vision, and mission; what values at the individual level contribute substance to the business values; what daily behaviors exemplify those values.

Such rare attention (or inattention) limits successes the organization can achieve. Such cultural indifference means putting out more fires, solving more problems, dealing with greater dissatisfactions.

Culture Impact: Potential
An organization that keeps its culture—the purpose, the values, the behaviors—clearly in its view gives itself more chances for greater successes. Knowing the culture at the three levels allows all employees to operate with both a macro- and micro-view of living the culture and therefore satisfying the culture’s intentions.

The three levels are

• What does the culture contribute to the business’s overall purpose? How?
• What values support that culture and are expected by that culture?
• What behaviors manifest and implement those values?

A business can experience almost unlimited potential success by attending culture conscientiously.

Management & Culture
A hospital can expect employees to engage fully in their work.

Managers can tell employees they are expected to engage fully in their work.

Employees can hear and comprehend the instruction to engage fully in their work.

The hospital may still garner typical returns on an employee engagement survey (+/- 30% of employees fully engaged; +/- 70% of employees only neutrally engaged and/or actively disengaged).

The significance is that Employee Engagement leads to Performance Improvement and so Desired Results.
The fact, however, is that employees must engage themselves. Engagement is not and cannot be third-party. For the employee to engage s/he must know specifically what engagement is expected and s/he must have the opportunity and the resources allowing engagement.

The hospital organization that successfully defines and continuously refines its culture (top down) increases its chances of engaged employees.

The hospital organization that engages its management team in the concepts and the skills of managing for engagement by the employees (not merely for completion of desired tasks) increases those chances further.

The hospital organization that focuses on strategic plans including communication, opportunities, resources, and encouragements for employee engagement (by leadership and management) increases the chances the furthest yet.

10 Hot-n-Heavy Ways Your Stories Can Serve

I've recently given lots of blogspace to storytelling as communication, engagement, and management tools in the past few weeks. I'm even offering an audio conference next week on the topic.

But where do the stories fit in all the communication that management produces? What are the stories to be about and what purpose do they serve?

Ryan Matthews, founder of Black Monk Consulting, has written What's Your Story? Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands. He also has a related  article in the May issue of Chief Learning Officer, about storytelling as a valuable management tool.

I believe Matthews' list of possible story functions is the most valuable part of the article. It's the list that can stimulate your and your people's thinking of where the stories can come from. Matthews writes:

Stories can be used to establish, renew or promote brands, help position corporations and build and communicate internal corporate culture. They can scale, too, doing everything from helping individuals demonstrate they’re the right person for a job to selling the value proposition of entire industries.

Storytelling has 10 essential functions or roles, any or all of which have application in the world of business. It can be used to:

• Explain origins.
• Define individual and group identity.
• Communicate tradition and delineate taboo.
• Simplify complex issues and provide perspective.
• Illustrate the natural order of things.
• Overview complex history in a concise way.
• Demonstrate moral and ethical positions and transfer and preserve core values.
• Illustrate relationships with authority.
• Describe appropriate responses to life or model behavior.
• Define rewards and detail the paths to salvation (or success) and damnation (or failure).

Each one of the 10 "functions" reveals how storytelling contributes to awareness and communication of the organization's culture. Such stories personify and personalize the organization.

Culture gives reason(s) for employee engagement. Employee engagement provides the ABC (attitude-behavior-commitment) for performance that leads to results. Results mark the organization's success.

Ready to start working on some of the story areas above? Don't forget to involve your team. Their insights and experiences may be invaluable.  Feel free to join me for my Manage Magic with Stories audio conference next Thursday, 5/22.

 

 

Story, Story. Who's Got a Story?

Uh, everyone! 

Everyone wants to share their story/stories.

Everyone wants to experience success.

Everyone wants to make a difference.

Those three facts definitely link to one another. The stories reflect successes--even/especially stories about failures that lead to later success. And a strong motive for sharing stories is to provide insights to others, to make a difference for them. Do you sense how engaging in a little story-sharing can unleash engagement among the participants?

All you have to do is provide opportunities for you and your team to unleash those desires.

Here is the first example (of who-knows-how-many) ways you can make sharing of people's stories a key part of your organization's culture. NOTE: Story-sharing is a specific form of engagement.

Introduce Story Power to your organization's culture. Here's a simple summary of the process you can follow:

1. Communicate the reasons for everyone having their own story or stories...and being willing to share them.
2. Provide ample time and resources for your people to develop (and become comfortable with) their stories.
3. Offer non-threatening opportunities for team members to share their stories.
4. Celebrate the infusion of stories and story-sharing in a variety of ways.

So, here's a bit more detail on the how-to of each of those 4 steps:

Communicate

• Review the reasons stories and sharing those stories make a difference in an organization.
• Develop your own story and be willing/eager to share it as a lead-off example.
• Invite informal, open-ended discussion from your team about values they know and have experienced from sharing stories with others.

Resources

• Provide every staff member a copy of the Build a Story tips.
• Make how-is-it-going discussion time available for people to discuss their success/difficulty in developing their stories. (A staff-meeting agenda item?)
• Make books and other information about the art and value of storytelling available. You may check this bibliography.

Opportunities

• The Story Hour: once a month hold a one-hour, informal reception in which just a few of your members share their stories. Refreshments are a good idea.
• The Story Magazine: stories can be written and shared as well. Invite members to write their stories, edit them, and submit them to an office publication.
• The Story Celebration: once story-sharing has become an accepted and practiced element of your organization's culture, build to major story-shares. Volunteers might share a holiday story at the holiday party. Individuals might recall and share stories brought to mind by memorable events such as moving to a new location, a change in leadership, the loss of a loved team member. These are only examples; your team's ideas will be much better.

Celebrate

• Encourage continuing reference to the stories shared. (Paul, thank you for sharing your story with us this morning. I've enjoyed reflecting on it.)
• Express thanks that individuals are willing to share both personal and professional stories.
• Offer encouragement to stimulate more story-sharing. ($5 gift cards are good encouragers.)
• Post recognition on bulletin boards. (If you didn't hear Patsy's story about her childhood victory, ask her to tell it to you.)

And b/t/w...next Thursday, 5/22, 4-5:30 EDT, I'm offering my Manage Magic with Stories audio
conference. We'll cover so much more than is here!

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aprilbmoore/2266391264/

I Can't Find One Anywhere!

Workshop participants tell me they want to tell stories.

Workshop participants tell me they know they have stories to tell.

Workshop participants shrug their shoulders and say, "I just don't know where to find them!"

In quite a few of my recent postings, I've explored these "truths":

1. Organizational culture contributes to success.
2. Leaders (managers included) build cultures by their actions and communications.
3. Stories are pivotal elements of that culture-building communication.

So, WHERE do you go for stories. Three places that add up to...everywhere and anywhere.

• Long Ago and (Not So) Far Away. The longer one's life, the shorter his memory. Situations you experienced a long time ago are hard(er) to recollect. All you need is the method to recall them.

• Just Beneath Your Surface. You have stories just beneath the surface of your memory. How often does a song, a scent, a sight, a taste flicker across your memory. You wonder, "What made me think of that?!" Something surrounds that subconscious memory, something that just may be story-worthy.

• Waiting to Happen. Stories are happening all the time. Stories are waiting to happen. All that's missing are a trained eye to notice the occurrence and a skilled consciousness to see the story-potential.

And so, here's your HOW. As in how do you milk that long-ago memory? How do you tickle the subconscious for what is waiting to be storified? How do you become consciously aware of the possible stories surrounding you?

• Carry a notebook with you all the time. That's all the time. Carry a pen, too.

• Don't wait for the story to appear. Anytime you see or hear or any-other-sense something that catches your attention, make a note of it. Anytime anything crosses your memory and catches even an instant of your attention, make a note of it. No matter how fleeting the sense or the memory, don't wait, write it down.

• Do wait for the story to appear. Be patient with that notebook. Be friendly with that notebook. Don't try to force stories from the notes you've taken, but do keep your eye (and mind) on those notes. Review your notebook every week or so.

So much more will be included in Make Magic with Stories - a 90-minute audio conference, Thursday, 5/22/2008.