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GM Culture Crisis Case Study – A Tragedy and Missed Opportunity
The GM ignition switch recall tragedy led to at least 13 deaths and was the result of 11 years of failure on many levels. It’s a live case study on a sad culture crisis we all can and must learn from since culture is the most powerful force in organizations. Rarely do we have a chance…
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Create Constructive Cultures and Impact the World
Over 30 years of research across thousands of organizations using the Organizational Culture Inventory® has shown positive relationships between Constructive cultural norms (that is, expectations for members to behave constructively in order to “fit in”) and motivation, engagement, teamwork, quality, external adaptability and, ultimately, profitability.
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‘Unbossed Culture’ Takes Performance To New Heights
Leaders now hold each other accountable. Their vulnerability has promoted inclusiveness, built trust and showed commitment to employees. Employees are engaged, their ideas are flowing and they’re taking ownership.
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Leadership Glue Delivers Speed, Agility, & Aligned Action
Hanes’ approach to developing their leaders is distinct in that their leaders are required to experience LSI three times before moving forward to the next level development program.
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How Quantitative and Qualitative Results Lead to Real-Time Change
The leaders at ERDMAN saw an opportunity for the senior leadership team to set the tone and expectations for the entire company and help drive needed business results. While never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly and ERDMAN has already begun to see the results…
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Quantifying and Aligning Workplace Culture Post-Merger
While it’s never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly. With 12 years of experience and the assessment tools that provided quantitative data showing where we are, where we want to go, and how we need to get there – Inclusa’s culture journey seemed attainable.
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Johnsonville Sausage: Ensuring a Culture for Growth
Members and leaders of Wisconsin-based Johnsonville Sausage have a bold vision to “be the best company on earth.” This requires that the leading national sausage brand be culturally prepared and poised for aggressive innovation on its way to growing and becoming a $1 billion company. An important step was determining whether the company’s Research and…
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Culture Shift + Leadership Development = Sustainable Results for Advocate Health Care
As the largest health system in Illinois, Advocate’s challenge was to increase and stabilize engagement, focus on culture change, and strengthen relations within a high-profile, semi-autonomous unit that struggled with negative team dynamics, unproductive work relations, and entrenched passive-aggressive behavior.
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Culture Change at HKS: Resilient and Responsive
Dallas, Texas-based architectural firm HKS Architects creates places that enhance the human experience, like the US Bank Stadium, home of the 2018 Super Bowl. After collecting employee satisfaction data for 10 consecutive years, leadership sought to better understand the current culture and the roadblocks that were inhibiting employees from taking the most successful actions.
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Ultimate Culture Webinar – What are your Blind Spots? with Jim Haudan and Rich Berens
Root Inc Chairman, Jim Haudan, and CEO and Chief Client Fanatic, Rich Berens, reveal the five most common blind spots that thwart leaders and their organizations from attaining higher levels of member engagement and creating real and meaningful strategic and culture change. They outline how to create a thriving organization by focusing on purpose over…
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The Missing C in C-Suite = Culture
Marti Wronski, General Counsel and SVP with the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, shares: “Successful transformation happens when the majority of people in the company have aligned beliefs and when proper leadership mindsets fuel consistent action.”
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A Historic Shift in Expecting Leaders to Understand and Evolve Culture
We are experiencing a historic shift in how people view the importance of culture and culture change. As a result, most CEOs and other top leaders will be expected to understand and deal with culture challenges proactively, or they will be considered both financially and morally negligent. Yes, financially and morally negligent. We are seeing top…
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In Conversation with Edgar Schein: Answering Three Common Questions about Culture
Culture can often be like a wet bar of soap—too slippery to grasp. To harness its force, we first need to understand its nature and dynamics. And there’s no better person to help us get a handle on organizational and team culture than Edgar Schein, one of the world’s most well-known culture pioneers.
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Post #200 on CultureU – 7 Essential Insights Normally Missed in Culture Change Efforts
This milestone post is a salute to passionate and experienced culture and performance change agents. You understand the power of culture in organizations and the challenge, frustration, restlessness, and exhilaration inevitably linked to intentional culture-related action. We’re living in the absolute best time in history to be involved in meaningful culture change. Culture is finally…
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Closing the Massive Gaps Between Culture Awareness, Education, and Action
It’s time to turn the culture world upside down and explode many incorrect notions that are preventing meaningful culture change for organizations and society. We’ve reached a critical point where most leaders are aware culture is important, but they range from being confused to intentionally uninformed about what culture change is all about. This culture…
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8 Culture Change Secrets Most Leaders Don’t Understand
I spent 15 years learning and applying culture insights as a senior executive and consultant across multiple organizations before I started to proactively reach out to top culture pioneers and experts to learn about their culture facts and fundamentals. We can’t learn much about culture from the popular press and most social media is dominated…
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20 Organizational Culture Change Insights from Edgar Schein
Grâce cette publication, vous pourrez accélérer le changement de votre culture organisationnelle. Chaque leader comprendra ici les bénéfices des réflexions critiques sur la culture ainsi que la résolution de problèmes, le changement, l’engagement, la stratégie, le recrutement et le consulting avec Edgar Schein, Professeur Émérite au MIT Sloan School of Management et personnalité la plus…
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The Common Ground of Qualitative and Quantitative Culture Development Approaches (Part Two)
This is the second post from a discussion between Professor Edgar Schein, arguably the #1 workplace culture expert in the world and a strong critic of culture surveys, and Dr. Robert A. Cooke, creator of the most widely used organizational culture assessment in the world. The discussion resulted in 12 key areas of common ground…
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The Common Ground of Qualitative and Quantitative Culture Development Approaches (Part One)
What happens when you have a discussion with Professor Edgar Schein, arguably the #1 workplace culture expert in the world and a strong critic of culture surveys, and Dr. Robert A. Cooke, creator of the most widely used organizational culture assessment in the world? It was exciting to see this discussion unfold to a point…
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Workplace Culture vs. Climate – why most focus on climate and may suffer for it
Culture is a hot topic. It was the Merriam-Webster “word of the year” for 2014. Leaders and experts across the world are talking about how to develop an agile culture, implement a lean culture, overcome the culture clash in acquisitions, and many other areas of culture change. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of these…
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The Four Roots of Employee Engagement
Haven’t we talked about employee engagement enough? Nope! Because despite the amount of time, energy and effort that organizations around the globe are investing in helping engage people in work, things aren’t improving much. Weekly pizza socials, guest speakers and telecommuting options are certainly appealing. I like pizza as much as the next guy. And,…
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The first principle of successful culture shaping – The Shadow of the Leader
I wrote about the four reasons culture-shaping efforts fail in my previous post (Organizational culture has reached a tipping point, yet many culture change initiatives fail for four key reasons). But what makes them succeed? What makes some culture-change efforts successful where others become simply another ‘flavor of the week’ training session that never translates…
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A bold vision to truly evolve your culture
CEOs continue to publicly proclaim their efforts to manage significant and meaningful culture change. Some miss the mark and show their lack of understanding this critical topic. Others, like Satya Nadella of Microsoft, share a much clearer vision and appear like they truly “get it.” What separates the visionary and capable culture champions from the…
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Organizational culture has reached a tipping point, yet many culture change initiatives fail for four key reasons
My fascination with culture began more than 40 years ago when another young industrial engineer named Jim Delaney and I started a process improvement consulting firm not long after graduating from UCLA. I quickly discovered that it was easier to decide on change than to get people to change. I observed that companies, like people,…
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Creating the “WE” Organization
Years ago, NASA ran a series of experiments on the best way to make decisions. They used a series of survival scenarios, and asked individuals in a large group to solve the challenge and rate themselves. Then they asked small groups to solve the problems and rate their performance. About 98% of the time, the…
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Lessons from the VA…leaders get your houses in order
New information about the inadequacies of leadership at the U.S. Veterans Affairs (VA) medical centers continues to be revealed daily. The headlines astound, “Bad VA care may have killed more than 1,000 veterans, senator’s report says.” In summary, for years the wait times reported by many medical centers in the management system for measuring effectiveness…
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10 Clear Principles for the 96% that Need Culture Change
I wrote a popular TLNT.com article about how 96% of respondents from a Strategy& / Katzenbach Center survey on culture and change management highlighted that culture change was needed in their organization in some form. I criticized some of the over-simplified recommendations that accompanied the survey release but The Katzenbach Center came through with their recent…
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Values: Practice Makes More Perfect
Practice is about applying an idea, belief or method rather than the theories related to it. Practice is also about repeatedly performing an activity to become skilled in it. The value and benefit of practice is taken for granted for performers at the highest level in fields such as sport, music, and art. Can you…
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How a Culture of “Giving Back” Benefits Your Business
“Giving back to the community” is usually code for tax deductible donations or canned food drives. It’s not something that’s expected to be part of business culture. In fact, it is an important aspect of a healthy culture.
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Inspiring Passion and Purpose for a Happier World
Is happiness a driver of business results? How do you go about improving happiness in an organization? We discussed these and other subjects as part of a CultureUniversity.com interview with Jenn Lim, CEO of Delivering Happiness. She started Delivering Happiness with Tony Hsieh of Zappos after he wrote the best-selling book by the same name…
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Overcome Fear – It’s a Disease and the Ultimate Culture Killer
Most of us experience fear in some form in the workplace nearly every day. Some is completely natural due to uncertainty about raising a problem, idea or opinion. In other cases, fear leads to tragic consequences as employees resist speaking up or “acting on what they know.” Fear is the ultimate culture killer and was…