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6 DEFINING VALUES OF A LEADERSHIP CULTURE
Twelve years after launching culture change consulting services, I am finally sitting down to write about six defining values of a leadership culture. These are factors I’ve learned that define whether an organization can improve their Culture or not. No surprise that all six values rise and fall on leadership.
Before I unpack the six values, let me paint the backdrop of how it all began. In 2006, one of my CEO clients in Sarasota, FL shared with me his annual employee engagement survey. Most Type A leaders are charming, demanding, and unlovable, but not Steve. He had a caring heart just below the surface of his Type A layer. Even in his frustration, he oozed care and concern for people. We sat in his office while he shared his most recent employee engagement survey, and because he cared so much, he was frustrated. He didn’t like the pre-formulated questions, and he didn’t know what to do with the report results. He was delivered a canned report with no clear direction. “David,” he asked, “can you build me an employee engagement survey that we can customize around the kind of culture I want to create?” Like all good consultants, I said, “probably, let me do a little research and get back to you.” After I flew home from my monthly trip to sunny Sarasota, I did as I said and began to research and evaluate his request. As I dug around the internet, three data points came to light.
The first data point revealed that most employee engagement surveys were un-customizable. Surveys were built for mass production, not carefully and strategically customized for unique cultures. Why should the 8-year old, first generation, 88-person software development company in San Diego expect to have the same desired culture as the 48-year old, 3rd generation, 268-person manufacturing company in Rochester, NY? To me, that made no sense for the client, but all the sense to the vendors who mass-produced their expertise to increase profit over quality. Their research determined that one of the most important questions that define a good corporate culture is “Do you have a best friend at work.” Really? How does that define one’s culture? I am quite blessed to have had many best friends over the years, but none of them worked with me. Whether my best friend worked in Chicago or with me in Allentown never impacted my like or dislike of corporate culture.
The second data point was that most employee engagement surveys and the firms that employed them were extremely heavy on reporting data overload, but weak on meaningful implementation. Before starting Walton Consulting, Inc. in 2001, I worked for a boutique strategy consulting firm out of Princeton, NJ that developed and delivered high-cost elaborate strategic plans. The client would outwardly applaud the mountain-sized strategic planning document full of analysis, logic, and recommendations. However, inside I am sure they were asking themselves, “what the hell do I do now, and why did I pay so much for something I don’t know what to do with…maybe I should hide it on the bookshelf and refer to it in ‘name’ whenever I want to drive a random point home to my employees.” It is the same way with employee engagement surveys. The client gets a pretty report, but without the creator of the report, the expert on the topic to help with implementation, the report becomes an article of affection or dissatisfaction (depending on the results of course). As with many consultants, the implementation phase becomes an afterthought, a monumental chore that gets swept under the carpet and ignored.
The third data point was an epiphany that corporate culture was the missing cog. At this juncture of Walton, I had been focused on delivering consulting services to CEOs and business owners to help them grow healthy organizations. I was already delivering strategic planning, sales and marketing strategy and leadership recruiting services, all of which helped grow organizations, but the culture cog was missing. As I pondered on the importance of corporate culture, I intuitively understood that the culture cog acted as a fuel valve that could either spur on growth or squelch it. I reflected on how much corporate culture was really the vineyard soil that determined the environment’s capability and capacity for growing good fruit and producing a rich yield.
Wow, I must build this tool for my client I thought. It is not only critical as a foundation for successful organizational growth, but it also fits neatly into my core service offerings focused on “healthy” growth. In 2006 I launched the Culture offering. Now, 13 years later, with over 3,000 employees surveyed, and a marketplace foaming at the mouth about culture with quotes like Peter Drucker’s, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast,” I am ready to share six values that leadership needs to employ if they plan on truly Changing Culture. Check back next issue where I will reveal what they are and why they are so important to growing a healthy organization.
Here are six leadership values that impact culture:
- Leadership Cares
- Leadership Alignment
- Leadership Listens
- Leadership Commitment
- Leadership Implementation
- Leadership Flexibility
For the purposes of this article, leadership is defined as the CEO and his or her executive team. Let’s deep dive into each factor…
LEADERSHIP CARES
There are different reasons why leaders care. I had one client who cared because he was experiencing an employee revolt. He was truly concerned that if he did not get his arms wrapped around his dysfunctional corporate culture that he would have a mass exodus on his hands. Some leaders care because they understand that improved culture leads to improved profitability. Other leaders care because they want to enrich the lives of their employees. Bottom line, the leadership needs to care. A friend and colleague of mine who was the President of a mid-market global firm told me flat out; he just didn’t care. The employees to him were a means to an end. Another human resource colleague of mine cares deeply about changing their culture, but she isn’t the CEO, and without the CEO caring, it will never get the attention it needs.
LEADERSHIP ALIGNMENT
When beginning a culture change endeavor, the likelihood that the CEO and all of the executive team really cares, views culture impact with the same gravity, and has the same cultural values is rare. For successful culture change to occur, leadership needs to be aligned. This is not an easy task, but my pill for the cure is training. With each culture change engagement I deliver, I interview and train the leadership team together. We review how it impacts their business, and we talk about what kind of culture they have and want. We even design the employee engagement survey together for aligned executive level buy-in. People own what they help to create, so in this manner, the leadership team owns their culture and shifts into alignment.
LEADERSHIP LISTENS
One of the most important messages you can send to people that follow you is that you listen. That means you ask for opinions and give others an opportunity to influence. When you incorporate a strong feedback mechanism in your employee engagement survey, you create a pathway for communication that fuels employees’ personal value. The key though is to listen. The biggest mistake to corporate culture change is to ask and not act. Essentially communicating that you are not listening. I encourage my clients to respond to culture change feedback even if the ideas cannot be adopted—this reinforces that you have listened.
LEADERSHIP COMMITMENT
As a leader of your organization, if you are not ready to commit to the adventure of change, then don’t get off the porch. I mean that—do not start unless you are committed to finish! I have seen firsthand companies that have turned culture change into an organizational minefield. The CEO will tell me it didn’t work, and unfortunately, I have to remind them that they weren’t committed to change and that the entire initiative turned into a hollow promise. Yes, it will backfire if there is a lack of commitment.
LEADERSHIP IMPLEMENTATION
As a 20-year consultant veteran, I differentiate myself by emphasizing implementation. When an organization begins culture change, the transformation will only occur through implementation. I do not stop with a report and recommendations. I help my clients build actionable implementation plans. I work with the leadership team to identify and select employees who can play a role in helping the execution of those plans. This spreads the implementation buy-in throughout the company and ensures greater success of implementation. Leadership’s role is to coach and facilitate implementation.
LEADERSHIP FLEXIBILITY
When a company embarks on transforming their corporate culture, they are embarking on a journey into the unknown. Culture is fluid, ever-changing, impacted by the daily weather, disruptive, moody and explosive. During culture change implementation, leaders need to be flexible, understanding that the environment will shift actions and initiative throughout the process. Leaders need to use their corporate values as the compass, to ensure they are going in the right direction, yet be flexible to allow deviations.
The bottom line is simple. Culture change rises and falls on leadership, but a strong culture can make the difference between winning and losing, so I encourage leaders to embrace the challenge and lead their organizations toward a healthy corporate culture.
The Critical Role of Trust In Avoiding a “Charge of the Light Brigade”
The importance of leadership trust increases as the pace of change accelerates. Leaders in hyper-competitive and turbulent business environments need employees to support decisions without a lot of extensive explanation and back and forth discussion. It is not that change management topics like “what’s in it for me” are not important. It is simply a matter that when you need quick action, you may not have time to fully explain why this action is critical.
The need for fast action creates a dilemma for leaders. To move quickly, leaders need employees to accept and believe in their decisions without demanding a lot of discussion and justification. On the other hand, leaders do not want employees to blindly accept leadership decisions if they know these decisions could be leading the company down a path of failure. This issue was famously captured in Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” where he described soldiers responding to a questionable order with the stanza “theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do & die.” While this phrase summons up notions of courage and duty, the story it describes is a tragic example of people following leadership orders they knew were foolish. In the case of the Light Brigade, the unwillingness to question the wisdom of their leaders led to 278 needless casualties of which 156 were killed.
Leadership in fast moving world requires asking employees to trust your decisions while ensuring employees are willing to criticize your decisions. To quote General Colin Powell, “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.” How can leaders create the sort of trust that strikes this balance between employees accepting decisions but also questioning them? The following are some suggestions based on psychological research studying trust in organizations.
If you do not trust your employees, they will not trust you.
People are good at picking up subtle cues that show whether their co-workers trust their commitment and abilities. If a leader lacks trust and confidence in their employees, then employees will soon lack trust and confidence in that leader. This is a major issue when companies restructure. It is common to assign leaders to “fix” struggling divisions of a company. If these leaders believe existing employees are to blame for the previous problems, then they are almost certain to fail in gaining the trust of those employees when they most need it.
Trust depends on sharing bad news.
Some leaders believe the best way to build employee confidence is to hide bad results and downplay challenges the company is facing. This behavior damages leadership trust. Employees put more trust in leaders who openly share information with them, both good and bad. This goes back to employees trusting leaders who trust them. Leaders who trust employees with sensitive information about company performance are both educating employees on the realities the company is facing and building leadership trust in return. There is a right way to share bad news to avoid undermining confidence. But not sharing bad news at all undermines trust.
Trust comes from you knowing your employees (not just them knowing you).
One often hears leaders attempt to build trust by saying things like, “Anyone who knows me will tell you I am a person of my word.” What these leaders fail to understand is trust, particularly when it comes to providing critical upward feedback, is often more dependent on leaders knowing their employees then employees knowing their leaders. Employees put themselves at risk when they say things that might be viewed as critical of leadership decisions and behaviors. And employees do not want their only interactions with leaders to be centered on them sharing problems. This is captured by something a colleague once told me, “Why would I tell our division president what he is doing wrong if he doesn’t even know what I do. He’d just think of me as that person who complains.”
Building trust with employees depends on getting to know employees. The only way to know your employees is to spend time with them. Short personal interactions have big effects on trust. One way to see the difference between effective and ineffective leadership in this area is to observe executives at company conferences. The ones employees trust are the ones who spend time with employees two or three levels below them. These leaders intentionally start conversations with employees they do not know. Executives employees often mistrust are ones who spend their time in closed conference rooms or fancy dinners talking with other senior executives and people they already know.
Leadership trust comes through manager trust.
Managers play a critical role in building leadership trust. Managers have more time to spend getting to know employees, and as a result they can build far stronger relationships. What is interesting is that how much employees trust their managers depends in part on how much managers trust their own leaders. There is as a “trickle down” effect associated with trust. When leaders build trusting relationships with their managers, their managers are more likely to build trusting relationships with their employees. This is good news for leaders because it means that they can delegate the role of building trust to managers. But the only way to do this is to spend time with their own direct reports. And increasingly companies are adopting organizational structures where executives will have 15 or more people reporting to them. This increases the risk that executives may not spend enough time building trusting relationship with their own reports, which in turn will undermine leadership trust lower within the company.
It is often said that “trust takes years to build but seconds to destroy.” The first part of this statement is not necessarily true. Trust can be built fairly quickly. This is good news for leaders in a fast-moving world where trust needs to be established in a matter of days or weeks. But leadership trust will not come from leaders simply saying, “Trust me.” The only way to build leadership trust is for executives to demonstrate that they trust the employees, communicate with employees in a transparent manner, make time to get to know employees at all levels, and focus on building strong relationship with the people who actually manage the employees. Building leadership trust may not take years, but it does take active time and attention.
Trump’s health care focus puts GOP on edge
Efforts to save new moms clash with GOP’s Medicaid cuts
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/14/new-moms-clash-gop-medicaid-cuts-1364564
The push to address the soaring U.S. maternal morality rate is colliding with a broader, more ideological public health imperative: Republican-led efforts to scale back Medicaid.
The safety net program pays for half of all births in the nation. Democrats and many public health experts see it as a natural vessel for slowing the death toll of pregnant women and new mothers, by extending care in the crucial year following childbirth.
But concern over the potentially staggering cost has already quashed efforts in states such as Texas and left liberals in Congress glum over the prospects for a nationwide legislative fix.
“Medicaid represents the best of America and the administration’s effort to gut it would be a massive step backwards on confronting America’s maternal mortality crisis,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote in an email.
The dynamic mirrors the federal response to the opioid epidemic, in which Republicans and the Trump administration support making addiction services more available while simultaneously working to shrink Medicaid, the largest single payer of behavioral and maternal health care.
Research has shown the risk of death after childbirth persists for a full year, from such factors as heart disease, stroke, infections and severe bleeding. Black and Native American women are about three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause as white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Warren, along with fellow 2020 Democratic presidential contenders Sens. Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar, back extending Medicaid’s current requirement to cover new mothers from 60 days to one year after childbirth. Democratic proposals in the Senate from Dick Durbin of Illinois, and in the House, from Reps. Robin Kelly of Illinois and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts would do that along with provide states grants to improve hospital deliver practices, among other things.
But the efforts aren’t yielding GOP buy-in across the country, as conservative lawmakers keen on shrinking the program press for narrower fixes, such as increased data collection on deaths and a national standard of best medical practices. Proposals to enhance Medicaid coverage to address maternal mortality haven’t attracted a single Republican co-sponsor in Congress, with both sides at loggerheads on whether to grow or shrink the entitlement program.
“All mothers must have access to adequate care before and after delivery, and we should provide states with the tools and flexibility they need to ensure coverage of their most vulnerable populations,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) told POLITICO.
A Republican aide said GOP lawmakers are focused on getting a better picture of how many pregnant and postpartum women actually need coverage before exploring how to expand access to care. “That is a laborious process to undertake as we have to talk to both the states, stakeholders, and CMS to discern what coverage gaps exist. And we need to know the role other sources of coverage play as well,” the aide said.
Democrats say the prospect of expanding Medicaid benefits scares Republicans in an era of pitched partisan battles over health policy.
“Following the ACA and repeal Obamacare debates, health care, especially Medicaid experience, has become a hot issue — not quite a third rail but definitely hot and our GOP counterparts are a little squeamish,” a Democratic aide working on the issue said.
President Donald Trump last year signed a maternal care measure that directed millions of dollars in new spending to help states collect data on maternal mortality, but has been mum on extending Medicaid coverage to new mothers. His administration will weigh whether to allow Missouri to use its Medicaid programs to offer extended coverage to mothers struggling with addiction — but not the broader Medicaid population.
Meanwhile, the administration is aggressively pursuing an overhaul of Medicaid, finalizing proposals to allow states to apply for block grants that cap program spending and approving requests to condition benefits on work. The administration’s separate efforts to overturn Obamacare would also jeopardize federal subsidies that low-income mothers use to purchase coverage.
The focus on maternal mortality is driven by rising trend lines showing about 700 women die each year due to pregnancy related conditions a rate that’s more than doubled over the last three decades. About a third of the fatalities occur between one week and one year postpartum, according to a recent CDC report, putting the U.S. behind other developed countries for maternal health. And 60 percent of maternal deaths are preventable, with African American women and other minorities disproportionately affected.
Researchers studying the pattern say that extending Medicaid coverage would provide comprehensive benefits for chronic health conditions like heart disease, which accounts for a quarter of maternal deaths.
“The postpartum period is such a period of vulnerability,” said Houston physician Lisa Hollier, immediate past president of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and chair of Texas’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity task force. “The transition time [from pregnancy to full recovery] is one when we see unmet health needs.”
Obamacare helped boost coverage for new mothers. The uninsured rate for women who reported giving birth in the past year fell to 11.3 percent in 2016 from 19.2 percent in 2013 according to a study in Health Affairs.
The gains in states that expanded their Medicaid programs under Obamacare were especially pronounced, with the uninsured rate among new mothers falling 56 percent compared with 29 percent in non-expansion states.
But the Republican-led push to dial back Medicaid expansion has put a spotlight on controlling spending across the entire program.
Some states are exploring alternatives. Missouri’s Department of Social Services this month intends to ask the Trump administration for a waiver that would allow it to offer Medicaid coverage to postpartum women struggling with substance abuse for one year after they give birth. The move would cover about 1,500 of the 24,000 women in the state whose benefits lapse 60 days after childbirth.
The state’s Republican-controlled legislature endorsed the idea last year after killing a broader expansion of Medicaid benefits to postpartum women.
In Texas, where 382 women died within a year of giving birth between 2012 and 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott this week downplayed the state’s maternal mortality rate on Twitter and said that the state was already doing enough to deal with the issue.
Last month, legislators opted to develop postpartum care services within an existing state program geared towards family planning, which will cost about $56 million over five years, instead of extending Medicaid for 12 months, which carried a five-year price tag of nearly $1 billion in state and federal funds.
Kay Ghahremani, the state’s Medicaid director disputes the cost analysis, saying it would actually save money in the long run by promoting wellness and averting potential emergencies.
“It’s the most important thing we can do for maternal health in this state,” said Ghahremani, now president of the Texas Association of Community Health Plans. “We don’t want to see a single mom die from things that are avoidable.”
HENRY KOTULA 