Righttrack Whispers:

Organisational Excellence - The Soft Stuff is Harder Than the Hard Stuff

Righttrack's Larry Shulman looks at how to achieve organisational excellence and take your business to the next level.

A senior manager in a large client organisation of ours turned to me recently and said, “We’ve worked really hard to get good at what we do, and we have fantastic quality systems in place, but we’re struggling to move to the next level. What else can we do?”

The excitement of the challenge grew within me. What could I share with him which would really help him – and create the organisational shifts that they needed?

In his book The Four Obsessions of An Extraordinary Executive, one of my favourite management researchers and authors, Patrick Lencioni, provides us with a simple formula which – from positive experience of using it with my clients – really works. Lencioni outlines four key stages to achieve organisational excellence. Don’t be fooled by their seeming simplicity!
1. Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team
2. Create organisational clarity
3. Over-communicate that clarity
4. Reinforce that clarity through your human systems

Similar to Jim Collins’ philosophy in “Good to Great” (where he talks about getting the right people on the bus before deciding the destination), Lencioni believes that an excellent senior team needs to be created before the creation of an organisational strategy. Embarking upon a major change programme with a client, this is exactly where we started – working with the senior team to create an internal team dialogue around a common appreciation of the organisation’s challenges, team members’ common aspiration to make things better and their commitment to work together to do so.

Once this is achieved, it is about the senior team – in conversation with the wider organisation – creating real organisational clarity. This means creating
a) a clear and inspiring organisational mission (where we’re heading),
b) clear and distinct strategic objectives (how we’ll get there),
c) a tight set of success measures (how we’ll know if we’re getting there) and
d) a clear understanding of the required organisational culture and employee behaviours (how we’ll need to be to deliver the mission).

Many organisations (though not enough) manage to do the first three of these quite well, but few consider the fourth around culture and behaviours. It’s all very well saying “What do we need to do to become excellent?”, but we also need to ask “And how do we need to be?”. This is why many highly disciplined organisations which introduce great quality systems fail to realise their strategic aims. Successful organisations have developed something special that supersedes corporate strategy, market presence, or technological advantage—a distinctive culture. Organisation culture needs to be managed.

In the words of Professors Cameron and Quinn from the University of Michigan Business School, “Failure to change an organisation’s culture dooms other organisational changes that are initiated”. Now, those of us who know organisations know that “the soft stuff is harder than the hard stuff” – culture and leadership and behaviour can’t be easily measured in the way that hard aims and objectives and targets can. But that shouldn’t make us shy away from the fact that our current organisational culture is vital to understand – and then ask game-changing questions such as “What kind of culture will we need here to achieve our mission and strategic objectives?”, and “What do we need to do to create it?”

Management writer Marcus Buckingham says that the number one job of a leader is to “be clear”. If we can create organisational clarity around both “the what” and “the how”, we then need to keep reinforcing that clarity (Lencioni recommends at least 7 times) and integrating the what and the how into our day to day human systems – recruitment, induction, performance management and reward and recognition.

So, what culture does your organisation have now – and need for the future? Professors Cameron and Quinn help us diagnose our current and required culture via their Competing Values framework.

When studying the effectiveness of organisations more than two decades ago, Cameron and Quinn noticed that some organisations were effective if they demonstrated flexibility and adaptability, but other organisations were effective if they demonstrated stability and control. Similarly, they discovered that some organisations were effective if they maintained efficient internal processes whereas others were effective if they maintained competitive external positioning relative to customers and clients. These are the tensions (or competing values) that most modern organisations face. How does your organisation manage the tensions? Where would you put your organisation currently on the framework? Do you have more of a Clan Culture, with a focus on people development and internal nurturing? Or a Market culture, where it’s all about driving for achievement? Perhaps you have more of a Hierarchy Culture, where the focus is on processes and procedures, discipline and stability? Or are you more of an Adhocracy Culture, where it feels dynamic, entrepreneurial and exciting?

We worked with one of our major clients to define their current position – and then where they needed to be. They needed to make a major shift towards becoming more entrepreneurial and commercial (towards the Adhocracy and Market cultures) if they were going to survive and thrive in the coming years. We then discussed what that meant in practical terms – what would they need to start doing and stop doing in each of the four culture spaces to make that happen? They are now on that journey. What would your journey look like?