David Creelman (DC) - Let's start with
your hypothesis that the leadership team is the
core of the culture. A lot of people think the
CEO is the most important element, other people
talk about the importance of middle management,
and still others talk about the front-line
workers. What makes you think that of those
different categories, the top management team is
really the one that drives the culture?
Jim Clemmer (JC) - Those are all important
factors but I think of it as a series of
concentric rings with the leadership team at the
center and the culture rippling out from that
center. Managers often talk about culture—which
is an interesting phrase that needs to be probed
further—but I think of culture as 'the way we do
things.' When you're looking at how to change
the way people do things, whether it's to focus
more on customers or execute better, too often
the management team is trying to get others to
behave in a way that is inconsistent with their
own behavior. That's why you need to focus on
the leadership team if you want to change the
culture.
DC- When you talk about the leadership
team, how big a group are you talking about?
JC- It's usually just the immediate team that
reports to whomever the most senior person is;
that could be the CEO, a division manager or a
plant manager depending on the set-up. It's
generally comprised of six to eight people.
DC- Companies have been working on culture
change for a long time. What kinds of changes
are people looking for these days?
JC- When you ask leaders what their ideal
culture would look like, it generally has some
element of being more outwardly focused, it
usually has some element of being able to move
more quickly, and it generally involves
something around teamwork.
DC- So these are evergreen issues?
JC- Very much so. My last couples of books
have both had subtitles referring to timeless
principles. Having been in the business now for
about 25 years and having lived through quite a
number of fads, I keep seeing the same themes
coming around again and again.
DC- So given that an organization wants to
focus on one or more of these cultural change
issues, you're saying they should begin by
looking at the behavior of the top team?
JC- Typically, they need to start by taking a
look at the dynamic of the teams. The research
shows that somewhere between 50 to 70 per cent
of many change-efforts fail. When you dig down
you see that many management teams are trying to
bolt-on programs, processes, or changes rather
than building them into the way they manage the
organization.
Management teams often give a mandate to HR
to, for example, get into empowerment or do
training. Too often the HR people accept that,
sometimes very gladly, thinking that they have
commitment from the top. What they have is a
very low level of commitment. It's commitment to
try to change everyone else while the leaders
are saying they're already OK.
When I look at the HR groups I've been
working with, the ones who have been successful
push back a little when they get those kinds of
requests and say, "Well that's great; however,
let's take a look at how we are living the
values within our own management team."
DC- Can you take me through the process
you follow to get change in the leadership team?
JC- One recent example involves a large
technical company that is full of engineers and
scientists. The COO had come in from outside and
recognized the need to counterbalance this deep
technical focus with more of a focus on people.
The process we followed started with
interviews and a series of e-mail surveys of the
management team. Actually, until about a year
ago I did all my initial assessment work through
interviews and focus groups, but I've found that
e-mail is just as accurate in most cases. I'm
quite amazed at how open and detailed people
will be in e-mails to someone who is essentially
a stranger.
In this particular case, the survey included
a series of open-ended questions around what the
culture ideally would be like and what the
management team should be doing. We used the
moose-on-the-table analogy, asking what the big
issues were that no one was openly talking
about. In this case one of the things
frustrating the COO was the lack of
accountability and follow-through in the
culture.
I got the responses back from the survey,
extracted the themes and met with half a dozen
core-group members to review what I had found. I
wanted to get their insights and their sense of
the dynamics of decision-making in the
organization. Then I met with the HR executive
and the COO to review all of that data. We
followed that with a two-day retreat. This led
to a whole series of plans and actions that are
going to be put in place.
So what we're doing is blending strategic
planning along with improvement planning, along
with examining the dynamics of the team. Working
on the team is part of the whole process of
deciding what the organization needs to focus
on.
DC- It seems to me that what makes this
different is that they are spending time looking
at their own team, not just the broader company.
What kinds of things are they going to do to
make their team more effective?
JC- One of the key things, and this is a
common, is that their meetings are abysmal. It
is astounding how terribly run many senior
management meetings are. So one of the key
things is simply reintroducing some of the
basics around how to run effective meetings.
Another thing we did was to define a set of
core values. The larger corporation, of which
they are a major subsidiary, has a set of core
values but there were too many. I find anything
more than five is too much. So the leadership
defined the absolute core values and figured out
what that means in terms of their own behavior
and how they call each other on this behavior.
When you look at their top goals for 2004,
one of the imperatives is the effectiveness of
the team and the other goals are connected to
this. For example, one goal is building more
accountability into the organization which has
forced them to look at how the team holds each
other accountable and why commitments aren't
kept.
DC- To me one of the toughest issues is
getting them to call one another when they step
out of line with the espoused values. How do you
help them develop procedures so that they
actually call each other on them?
JC- It depends very much on the team. One
team I worked with had a problem with conflict
in the team that was often wrapped up in
so-called humor—but it was below-the-line humor.
Of course we are all in favor of humor and it
can diffuse lots of situations, but when it
starts to be sniping it's very destructive. In
their case, we first talked about it and
everyone agreed that it was an issue. So I
explained the snowball story, which is that if
it's a snowy day and there's fresh, fluffy snow
on the ground and the whole team is goofing
around throwing snowballs at each other, that's
a lot of fun. But, if you bury a rock in the
snowball, throw it at someone's head and when
they get hurt, say, "I was only kidding, can't
you take a joke?"—that's when you've gone below
the line.
Now, how do you call people on that? In this
case, the minute that someone looked like they
were taking a shot at someone else, everyone
taps their pen on the table to give instant
feedback. They found this to be a very effective
way to instantly call that kind of behavior.
In other cases, we've actually instituted
formal reviews, either at the end of the meeting
or periodically throughout meetings, to step
back and review how the process of the meeting
is going.
I was just working with a group in Ottawa and
they have individuals who each champion one of
their values. The champions act as the guardians
of their respective values and identify at the
end of the meeting, or even during the meeting,
what's crossing over the line.
DC- We've now talked about the importance
of the leadership team and the mechanisms for
making sure that they live up to the values.
What else do top management teams need to do?
JC- I disagree with many team-building
exercises because the notion is that building
the team is some kind of isolated exercise,
whether it's outdoor stuff or simulations or
games. You can put the teams through these kinds
of warm and fuzzy exercises and everyone comes
out feeling nice but they haven't necessarily
addressed the real issues of the team.
We find there are three interrelated areas:
team development, individual coaching, and
organization development. I don't think you can
separate those but too often experts and coaches
do. That does a disservice to the organization,
it disintegrates what has got to be deeply
integrated. All the successes we have had are
because we pull those together, we don't coach
someone as an individual somehow separate from
the team or the organizational changes that are
happening.
I'll go back to the first example that I
started with; one of their four imperatives was
leadership. Originally it started off as
leadership development or training, and then
they said that's too narrow. It's not just
training: it's how we do succession planning,
it's how we hire, how we make promotion
decisions, it's the formal and informal
mentoring—all of these things. We can't do any
of that in isolation. It's got to be deeply
linked to our values as a team, to how we're
working as a team, and to how we're trying to
change the organization to the culture.
DC- Do you have some closing advice for
the HR manager who has the mandate to change the
culture but the top management team hasn't
recognized that it's got to start with them?
JC- The generic advice is to look at what's
keeping the executive team up at night and link
whatever mandates you've been given to that
bigger, more integrated issue. If it's training
and you've been told to go sheep-dip everyone
through a series of training exercises to fix
them up, you need to understand what's really on
senior management's agenda and see if there is a
way to connect this training effort to a bigger
strategic issue. Then you can show how they need
to play a central role in exemplifying the
training and supporting it with more than just
lip service and dollars.
I can think of one large, petrochemical
company that was trying to improve safety. The
HR and safety people, who were part of the same
team, found the way to get senior management
involved was to start with a division that was
led by a very enlightened and well-respected
leader. They used that group as the pilot for
rolling out training the way it needed to be
rolled out with the executive team front and
center. With the success that came from that
they were able to find the next division that
was ready to go, and build their success from
there.
DC- Is there anything else we ought to
cover?
JC- I would summarize by saying that HR has
got to be much more strategic than it often is.
It needs to look for building in the change or
training initiatives rather than bolting them on
to the side of the organization. And while this
sounds self-serving, I do think there are lots
of instances where true partnering with outside
providers of consulting or training can help. It
amazes me how seldom HR people truly partner
with their training vendors to ensure that the
training is used to its maximum effectiveness.
Too often HR people hold their training vendors
at arm's length and treat them as vendors rather
than partners, even though they may be spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
David Creelman is Senior Contributing Editor
for
HR.com. He has also embarked on several new
ventures including:
- Helping companies value intangible human
capital
- (Un)consulting to companies who have got
bogged down in scorecard implementations
- A magazine to help managers lead more
meaningful, ethical lives
Prior to working in HR, David worked in
Finance and IT. He has an MBA and an Hons B.Sc.
in Biochemistry and Chemistry. David loves
email. Write him at
dcreelman@hr.com.