Page 122 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Getting Great People on Board 111

high-performing business leader who was out of step with Welch’s goals for
the culture. This incident sent reverberations throughout GE that cultural
behaviors mattered and would be factored into promotions, rewards, and
advancement. Years later, many people still feel that that moment was the
turning point for changing GE’s culture.
As you manage how all your teams work together, ask them to think a
few minutes about their own cultures and how they are working, and what
they can do differently going forward to move toward the cultural goals
you have set.

Harness performance feedback
Performance feedback is a more obvious way of shifting culture-related
behavior. To use it this way, however, you need to be very clear in your
feedback about the desired cultural behaviors and the gaps that might
exist, and you need to do this without pulling punches. In most organiza-
tions that have shifted their cultures, this kind of brutal honesty is criti-
cal. You should also include questions about a person’s cultural fit in their
360-degree evaluations.

Foster career development
While you create opportunities for people to grow and develop, and ad-
vance in their careers, you can simultaneously help them understand, in-
ternalize, and act on the cultural goals that will enable your strategy. For
example, in the high-potential leadership development sessions at Merck,
Ken Frazier not only talked about his vision and strategy for the company,
but also about how having a culture of prioritize, align, and simplify would
help make it happen. During the sessions, Frazier and the faculty (includ-
ing other Merck executives) also facilitated specific discussions about how
these leaders could apply the cultural principles to their day-to-day work,
and each made specific commitments to do so. You can also make job rota-
tions and stretch assignments with the explicit expectation that these will
be opportunities for the leader to learn new behaviors, not just get exposed
to a different business or geography.