A Welcome Change. Discovering, Developing & Sustaining a Culture of Innovation That Enables ‘The Power of US’
You’ll likely have heard the famous quote “culture eats strategy for breakfast” from Austrian-American management consultant and educator Peter Drucker.
The implication from Drucker is that regardless of your strategy (which is likely codified and widely understood) it’s actually your culture (which is likely not codified and less likely to be widely understood) which determines your overall success. There’s a compelling body of evidence to support the contention Drucker puts forward here.
For most of my life I’ve taken time to seek out extraordinary people doing extraordinary things to ask them about how they do what they do.
It was that approach that first introduced me to the work of Peter Drucker via the wise words of another extraordinary person, namely author and technology leader Sandy Carter.
At the time of our first meeting Sandy was General Manager at IBM and had just released her book ‘Get Bold – Using Social Media to Create a New Type of Social Business’ and that work and Sandy’s insights influenced my thinking greatly (I stole the social business element for my original Twitter ID) so I asked Sandy for a little bit of her time and she generously agreed to meet.
It was obvious from listening to Sandy that she understood culture and its key role in enabling effective change.
The power of organisational culture to transform outcomes
Between then and now I have spent a lot of time researching and practising (in various leadership roles) the art of how change happens and along the way I’ve become more and more convinced about the power of organisational culture to transform outcomes. To put it simply, I believe Drucker was right. It’s all about people, and some organisations are realising this in a way that is deliberate and planned to deliver superior outcomes.
One of the extraordinary people I have stalked over the years who has now become a personal friend is international best selling author, consultant and speaker David Price OBE who has written in my view two of the best books on this subject starting with ‘OPEN How We’ll Work, Live and Learn in the Future’ published back in 2013.
This book led me to seek out David one afternoon in Leeds City Centre where we shared a coffee as I attempted to extract his wisdom. His follow up to OPEN called ‘The Power of US, How We Connect, Act and Innovate Together’ was one of those remarkable books that just seems to be the right thing at the right time. To me it was like reading a codified manual revealing signposts to leaders on how to develop their organisational culture to transform the bottom line.
David’s work had taken a complex area that many can often see as quite abstract and lacking definition and had turned it into something structured, accessible and meaningful. Bringing this journey up to date David and a number of like minded specialists in culture development formed a new culture development agency in 2021 called The Power of US Agency, and these days I’m proud to support their work alongside my wider professional roles. Let’s unpick a little of the Power of US approach to start to understand the foundations of effective culture development.
Why it matters.
Professor Anthony C Klotz of Texas A&M University first used the term ‘The Great Resignation’ now widely adopted as defining a phenomenon triggered by the Covid 19 pandemic. Professor Klotz suggested that people would start to resign in large numbers after the pandemic and in many ways his prediction has proven to be true. Professor Klotz argued that experiencing greater flexibility in working from home, among wider factors, has changed perceptions of identity with people realising ‘I am more than just my job’ triggering a major shift in recruitment and retention. There’s a lot of evidence to support this contention, not least from the US Bureau of Labor (US spelling) Statistics showing that a staggering 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021 alone.
Consulting firm Korn Ferry conducted a survey in April 2021 that looked at recruitment and it found that 32% of US businesses were facing significant challenges with a further 29% facing moderate challenges. Only 6% reported they weren’t facing any challenges. More widely, a survey conducted by Microsoft including over 30,000 staff across 31 countries found that 41% of respondents were considering leaving their current role (not at Microsoft I should point out).
LinkedIn conducted a survey that found that 74% of respondents said that time spent at home during the pandemic has resulted in them reevaluating their roles and current working lifestyles leading to a surge in people looking for better opportunities. This is perhaps not surprising when a report from Gallup called ‘The State of the Global Workforce’ found that only 20% of the workforce considered itself engaged.
Strategic changes happening in how we are choosing to live, work and learn, now happening in real time
These findings point to wider strategic changes happening in how we are choosing to live, work and learn with many of the core themes covered in David Price’s ‘OPEN’ now happening in real time. Reflecting on the themes covered in David’s follow up The Power of US it’s my contention that the fusion of disintermediation enabled by technology combined with community driven activism means that a seismic shift in the relative power of employers and employees (as two examples of communities) is happening now. To attract and retain talent now it’s less about the commercial package and more about personal lifestyle and how the culture of the employer aligns with it.
If your culture isn’t aligned to progressive practice that’s prized by highly talented people and this is combined with a lack of understanding of what a great culture looks like it could cost you dearly. A survey undertaken by Prudential showed that 1 in 3 Americans wouldn’t wish to work for an employer that doesn’t offer at least partial flexible working. There are many variables at play in survey results like this but an interesting one is age.
According to the Workforce Pulse Survey by PwC 47% of millennial employees and 45% of Generation Z staff prize flexible working higher than ‘boomers’ where the figure crashes to just 14%. So to put it bluntly, if you’re over 57 years old you’re more likely to want to work in the way work has always been done, as a sweeping generalisation (albeit one based on data). Taking this point you may find you’re in a leadership position with a lot of people in your team who belong to the Generation Z and/or millennial groups. This can lead to cultural challenges within organisations that in part is leading to the great resignation due to a mismatch between cultural priorities across generations.
For example, according to HR consultancy Robert Half 92% of CEOs report that their organisation is empathetic yet only 50% of employees say the same. There is a noticeable difference. Employees are also not feeling engaged through recognition. The 2020 Global Culture Report from the Tanner Institute highlights that only one in three US employees report receiving recognition for their work. Employees that don’t feel recognised are far more likely to leave. In addition the cost of an unhealthy culture can be dramatic. In the US more than $190 billion is estimated to be spent on healthcare attributed to workplace burnout. In the UK according to the Centre for Mental Health the equivalent figure last year was £34.9 billion.
For those in leadership positions who play a critical role in shaping the culture of the organisation understanding how to create a great culture is essential to success. This is where culture development specialists like The Power of US Agency play a role. I’m proud to be on the Board of this agency as it’s a group of experts in people, purpose and culture, three things that have been the focus of my career. The agency works with people who are serious about discovering, developing and sustaining a culture that’s people-powered, innovative and meaningful. Let’s take a little of their approach and apply it here.
Discovering
It was American executive Jack Welch who said “change before you have to” and on that point the challenge for most leaders thinking about culture is knowing what to change, and how to go about it. You don’t know what you don’t know as the saying goes. Most organisations don’t really know how to quantify and codify their culture other than a flimsy staff survey that often lacks credibility and rigour. Most of the staff surveys I’ve seen presented to Boardrooms have been saturated by a lack of construct validity and unconscious bias leading to results like ‘99% of our clients would recommend us’ leaving me to ask “so how come they don’t?”. There is a better way.
For culture development to be positively impactful the research shows that your environment must harness the collective intelligence of your people, recognise it, empower equity and diversity and nurture people powered innovation. Top down command and control structures only work, in my view, in recovery situations. They will kill an organisation seeking to move from good to great not least because as American systems scientist Peter Senge has said “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed”. This is because culture isn’t mandated, it’s owned, as the Power of US (PoU) Agency recognises.
The PoU team deploy an online diagnostic tool that captures the current challenges and how the culture of your organisation is affected by those challenges. As part of a discovery process, leaders are able to identify pressure points and what needs to be leveraged to execute an impactful cultural development solution. The cultural diagnostic tool provides a powerful accessible dashboard revealing unprecedented insights into organisational culture, and a solid defined ‘as is’ position on which to build a preferred future ‘to be’ culture. A range of wider diagnostic tools can be deployed also but it’s worth noting that culture development is not about revolution, it’s about evolution in the direction of a great culture.
Developing
Culture isn’t about trendy couches and gimmicks, and it doesn’t change just because it’s written in a strategy document. As leadership guru Frances Hesselbein puts it “Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organisation is transformed. The culture reflects the realities of people working together everyday”. As Hesselbein points out, culture happens in your organisation whether you like it or not as people work together each day. If you’re in a leadership role you have a vested interest in defining and shaping the culture to achieve your strategic objectives, and you can’t do it through a business plan alone. Often I see senior executives spending huge resources on their strategies whilst neglecting to put their own people at the core of it. When that happens the danger of what Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu meant when he said “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading” becomes a more likely outcome.
By applying the emerging insights of a cultural discovery programme senior leaders can then explore themes of vision, distribution of leadership and external and internal constraints to identify what change is credible and by when, taking into account structures, processes, engagement and impact measures to determine success. This is a structured process that includes change readiness assessment, learning capability, mass ingenuity lab sessions, team coaching and workshops aligned to 8 core elements of culture.
In most organisations professional development, that could be a key enabler of developing a preferred culture, isn’t. It becomes the opposite. I often listen to people who tell me that CPD is ‘done to them’ and even worse it’s a sheep dip approach. A common theme in such instances is that this is observed in organisations that are struggling with their performance. In such organisations there is a very real danger they might end up where they are heading unless a structured people powered approach is adopted. A change of course is needed. Once enabled, the focus must be on sustaining it.
Sustaining
Too often the excitement of new interventions or approaches is followed by a gradual slip back into business as usual. A key way to address this is to empower people to solve challenges themselves so they own the solution. As part of this process hidden talents emerge in any organisation and as a consequence the organisation becomes stronger than it thought it was, and people powered also in the process.
The Power of US team refer to this process as enabling mass ingenuity because that’s what it does, and it’s not style over substance, the team have worked with leading companies and education institutions to test, refine and measure the impact of each approach over time combining decades of experience. CEO of the Watergrove Trust, Mark Moorhouse said “The impact of The Power of US survey has been immediate, with leaders evaluating and evolving their practice to a remarkable degree. We are now commissioning annually to ensure that this level of continuous improvement becomes an entrenched habit. Brilliant. Do it and watch all the lights go on.”
The digital platform developed by the Power of US team provides a set of dashboards that form a consistent measurable basis on which to assess development over time. This is reinforced through coaching, momentum sessions, pulse surveys, cross pollination of great culture in other organisations, building self managed decision making systems and more as part of a highly structured process.
Dave Coplin, the author of ‘The Rise of the Humans’ has said “The Power of US is the closest thing we’re going to get to a single handbook or guidebook of all the things that we need to do and consider as organisations and leaders if we are going to be successful in navigating the ambiguity that lies ahead”. The tools and proven approach are there and as the leadership team of the Watergrove Trust has demonstrated, culture is as important to the education sector as it is in any other sector.
For schools, colleges and universities seeking to transform for the better and navigate to a preferred future position as part of their strategy, the only way to that destination is through the power of their people. As former President Barack Obama said “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
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