Page 117 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 107

the increasing pace of competitive and technological innovation, however,
many organizations are trying to create cultures that are specifically more
agile, open to change, and quick to align themselves with new ideas. If
that’s the case for you, then your cultural goals should reflect these shifts
and/or others that are important.
To make your cultural goals explicit, work with your direct reports.
First, discuss the key cultural characteristics that currently exist in your
organization or group. You can use an assessment like the one in figure 3-1,
which defines some basic areas of organizational culture, to prompt your
discussion. You may want to add some other areas that pertain specifically
to the strategy you are pursuing, such as digital savvy (as in the Ford Foun-
dation example) or openness to partnerships.
Next, consider how you might need your team’s culture to be different
in order to support and drive your particular strategic goals. Where are the
biggest score gaps? As you work, continue to iterate this dialogue with
other groups and ask your direct reports to hold similar sessions with their
teams. Since culture is the accumulation of behaviors across an organi-
zation, you can’t just dictate it from the top down. You also have to en- gage
people at other levels so that they buy into and help shape the cultural shifts
and make them come alive.
For example, the head of a small factory within a large corporation
became frustrated when he learned that most of the plant’s productivity-
improvement projects, all of which his team had ratified, were delayed. As
he dug into the situation, he realized that the problem was not lack of
skills, know-how, or resources, but an inability of his direct reports to
make decisions (at all stages of the projects) without him. Since he was too
busy to attend every project meeting, many decisions were simply not
made. In talking with his team about this pattern, he realized that this was
a cultural issue: his team members were hesitant to take risks, and he had
not truly empowered them to do so, which made him the decision-making
bottleneck. As this pattern became clear, the plant manager began to pull
himself out of each decision, and as issues came up, he repeatedly told his
direct reports to use their best judgment and do what they thought best.
At first, his people hesitated (or didn’t believe him) and kept going back to