Every organization should have values of integrity and respect in one form or another. And it should have a third value of either innovation, accountability, collaboration, or customer-centricity. Of course, all of those possible third values matter. It’s just that one of them matters more given your core focus and can serve as the backbone of your culture. Choose that priority and then alter the balance of consequences to instill appropriate values-driven behaviors.
Core Focus Bradt
Balance of Consequences
Michael Brown suggested modifying Behavior by changing prompts or Antecedents and the balance of Consequences. Two parts:
- Increase desired behaviors by increasing the positive consequences and decreasing the negative consequences of those desired behaviors.
- Decrease undesired behaviors by decreasing the positive consequences and increasing the negative consequences of those undesired behaviors.
It’s frightening how often we punch people in the face for doing what we ask them to do.
This gets us to how to leverage your third value of innovation, accountability, collaboration, or customer-centricity in a “BRAVE” approach to culture.
Innovation
Environment: Encourage ideas from anywhere, looking broadly for different stimuli and sparks.
Attitude: Encourage what Amy Edmondson describes as intelligent failures.
Relationships: Encourage people to meet as broad and diverse a group of people as possible to cultivate ideas from anyone. And protect your various specialists.
Behaviors: Drive experiments and trying new things. You must must must remove the negative consequences of intelligent failures.
Accountability
Environment: Seek out the most predictable suppliers who hold themselves accountable for quality.
Attitude: Encourage compliance with policies to minimize Amy Edmondson’s basic failures.
Relations: Encourage the hierarchy and standard work.
Behaviors: Drive actions that minimize variability and risk.
Collaboration
Environment: Encourage people to watch out for changes in the VUCA variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment.
Attitude: Build what Stanley McChrystal calls a “shared consciousness” to mitigate the risks of Amy Edmondson’s complex failures.
Relationships: Encourage various teams with team charters and shared responsibilities across the matrix.
Behaviors: Drive things that pull people together to adjust and adapt.
Customer-centricity
Environment: Encourage people to spend as much time with customers and clients as possible.
Attitude: Encourage people to think about their customers first with as long a view of the lifetime value of customers as possible and no transactional thinking.
Relationships: Get everyone to view everyone else as intermediate customers stepping through to your ultimate clients, customers and consumers.
Behaviors: Drive actions that, wait for it, create value for customers and inspire, enable, and empower others to create value for customers.
Cultural Leadership
Cultural leadership (who we are and what we stand for) is the purview of the CEO. Strategic leadership (arranging resources before deployment) and tactical leadership (deploying and adjusting resources at points of action) nest within that.
As a CEO, everything you do and say and don’t do and don’t say communicates and drives the culture. Be deliberate in your choices across public accolades for the outstanding, individual appreciation for the good, letting the unremarkable go by, individual critique of the poor, and public hangings for the unacceptable across integrity, respect, and your priority third value.
They’re always watching you and will follow what you do more than what you say.
- Integrity is about who you are and gets at components of incorruptibility, soundness, and completeness. Make sure your own integrity is beyond reproach.
- Respect is about how you treat others with consideration, esteem, and deference. Make sure you act with consideration of others, protect and strengthen others’ self-esteem, and defer to others’ knowledge, skills, expertise, and craft-level caring and sensibilities.
- Innovation, Accountability, Collaboration, Customer-centricity. Act as the chief enabler of innovation, chief enforcer of production policies, chief enroller in distribution/delivery, or chief customer experience officer in service as appropriate.
Finally, make sure your words and actions match your underlying beliefs. If they don’t, eventually the discrepancy will discredit you. Be. Do. Say.
John Hall
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