Your company culture, in the broadest strokes, is defined by the shared values of the population of the organization. These values have to be much more than what is plastered in the posters on the walls, but must guide every decision that every worker makes. So if you are unhappy with your culture and wish to change it you will have to examine your values, your REAL values not the ones to which you aspire.
2. The business of sustainability
Introduction
■ Housekeeping
■ Who is this goofball and why
should I listen to him?
3. The business of sustainability
Values
3
“You always have time and
money for the things in life
that you truly value”
—Greg Gerweck
4. The business of sustainability
Values and Leadership
Values are more than slogans on a wall.
Values are our most deep-seated and
cherished beliefs; they are statements of
what is right and what is wrong. Values are
difficult to compromise, they guide our
decision making and are our collective
morality as a company.
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5. The business of sustainability
Philosophic Values Versus Cultural Values
Philosophic Values
• Fit nicely into people’s
world view
• Are what you think people
want to hear
• Often our vague
• Considered in a vacuum
• Often confused with
priorities
Cultural Values
• Tend to be aspirations
• Shape all your decisions
• Are obvious without being
stated
• Deep-seated, a part of
who you are
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6. The business of sustainability
Top Down Leadership
Top
Down
6
• Top down leadership is a
key element for culture
change
• Leaders must embrace
the values and act in
alignment with them both
publically and privately
• Leaders must “walk the
talk”
7. The business of sustainability
Engagement
• Engaged workers do
what is right because it
is the right thing to do.
• When corporate values
conflict with personal
values worker turnover
rises and workers
become more difficult to
manage Bottom
Up
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8. The business of sustainability
Message Filtering
• Too often executives send
mixed messages
• What you do always
sends a stronger
message than what you
say
• Middle managers, often
faced with conflicting
priorities will sometimes
filter the message
inappropriately
Executives
Middle
Managers
Front-
Line
8
9. The business of sustainability
99
T A B
We are mired in the belief that we
have to change the way people think
so that we can change their
behaviors
BehaviorThought Action
=
New Model of Thinking
A Flawed Way of Thinking
10. The business of sustainability
Developing Safer Habits
10
AA B
Habits are formed when we behave
in a repetitive/automatic based on
cues, routines, and rewards
A New Vision
Behavior AssimilationThought
=
11. The business of sustainability
Vales and Culture
A culture consists of…
• Shared values
• Common goals
• Expectations of
behavior
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12. The business of sustainability
Culture Change
12
Culture change comes when
the corporate values are
aligned with people’s
personal values
14. The business of sustainability
For more information
■ Follow Phil @philladuke on
Twitter
■ Read Phil’s blog
www.philladuke.wordpress.com
■ Email Phil @
phil.laduke@erm.com
■ Call Phil @313.244.2525
■ Read Phil’s articles
@https://www.entrepreneur.com
/author/phil-la-duke
■ Order Phil’s book I Know My
Shoelaces Are Untied…Mind
Your Own Business
Notas do Editor
Phil La Duke is an internationally renowned executive consultant, safety expert, speaker, blogger, trainer, and business author. He has over 240 published articles in print. La Duke speaks extensively on organizational change and worker safety. He frequently guest lectures at universities including presentations at Tulane, Loyola, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and Wayne State Universities. Mr. La Duke is the author of a popular weekly blog on performance assurance topics www.philladuke.wordpress.com. He also guest blogs on the popular Australian blog www.safetyrisk.au.com and the prestigious www.monsterTHINKING.com.
Phil La Duke has over 225 published works in print and has contributed content to numerous notable magazines and is published on all inhabited continents. Mr. La Duke’s take-no-prisoners style garnered him positions on Industrial Safety and Hygiene News (ISHN) magazine’s Power 101 (a list of the world’s most influential people working in worker safety) and its list of Up and Comers in Safety Thought Leadership.
Most recently La Duke has focused his attention on business improvement topics. Mr. La Duke’s first book, I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business.
We play a lot of games with values. We tend to express values that don’t really exist? We say we believe one thing but we act in a very different way. We see this in church, we see it in the community, and we see it in the workplace. A friend of mine, Greg Gerweck said it best. He was a manager whose one brief respite during the workday, was going to a fast food restaurant where he would eat a value meal. He would be harangued by the sarcastic mumblings of his staff. “I wish I could afford to go out to eat every day.” One day he pointed out that if the two-pack a day chain-smoker quit smoking he could easily afford to got out for lunch every day. To the other who sucked down 80 ounces of Mountain Dew and polished it off with a bag of chips before 9:00 a.m. every day that he would also have plenty of money. As he related the story to me, he finished by saying “You always have time and money for the things in life that you truly value”. How do you feel about that? If you SAY you value safety, but you’re willing to risk safety in pursuit of anything else than how can you defend that value.
Many management system certification require a Quality and Vision Statements, Values, and sundry other cultural elements and that has resulted with a cornucopia of poetic statements developed by marketing and put on the lobby walls. These items are designed to comply with a regulation but have little connection to the shared beliefs, or operating principles of the company. They might as well be plaid wallpaper.
Sometimes we have leaders who believe in safety from a philosophical standpoint, but haven’t really thought about how that looks operationally. Your values and your culture define you, and that has to define you in a way that drives how you do business. Recently I was in a Panda Express. The food was mostly gone and looked like garbage. When I spoke with the manager she said that food quality was a value. What do you think? What values were they exhibiting?
Top down leadership is essential for most culture changes. They have to have values that embody how they think, what they say, what they reward and what they punish. We know what the leaders’ values are by the way they behave, by what they tolerate as acceptable behavior. When they walk the talk, it is the single greatest indicator that they truly possess the values they express.
Motivated workers will work for a reward, but when that reward is received its power to motivate the worker diminishes and the worker will work less and less hard to receive the reward. An engaged worker do things because they align with their values and their personal values align with the company values. When corporate values conflict with personal values worker turnover rises and workers become more difficult to manage. Moral goes down and people may even deliberately sabotage the company’s goals through malicious disobedience. Engaged workers are essential for achieving a values-driven culture.
So you have senior leaders who want safety and say and do all the right things. You have a highly engaged front-line workforce and yet things fall apart. That’s because the MOST critical group in a culture change is middle managers. Executives see the value in a high performance workplace, engaged workers just want to get the job done and go home unharmed. So why do we end up with such a mess? Because middle management filter the messages both coming down and going up the org chart. Sometimes they don’t even realize they are doing it.
Part of the problem is a flawed way of thinking about why people behave. It has been taught in many management classes that people think about something, act on those thoughts and the result is a behavior. Under this mode of thinking all one has to do is to change the way people think (through awareness campaigns, children’s poster contests, behavioral observations and feedback) or act (through disciplinary action or feedback) and you will change people’s behaviors. I feel sorry for the many people who have ascribed to this thinking for many years only to be frustrated because those idiots would behave the way they are supposed to…
Instead consider a slightly different model. The actions and behaviors are linked to values. I once worked for a faith based healthcare system with a very strong values system. It included a list of guiding principles and behaviors that were non-negotiable. Something like 25% of new hires quit before the first year because the values were so oppressive. While all of them were extremely positive and life affirming being called out for not behaving in a certain way was very difficult and demanding. Ultimately, however, even I became assimilated to these expectations of my behavior. Thinking and behaving in a way that was demanded---even if I didn’t believe in the specific behaviors---eventually cause me to adopt these values and my behavioral change took root and became part of who I am as a person. Even five years later I am still practicing these values, although it was easier to do so in an environment where so many people reinforced my behaviors and supported me when I struggled.
A culture consists of…
Shared values
Common goals
Expectations of behavior
And the stronger those three elements are the stronger the culture, and unless you are able to build a foundation on true values you can’t change a culture, in fact, more likely than not, the culture will change you.
So how do you change a culture. It takes surprisingly small percentage of people to change the culture or an organization if it is built on a foundation of strong values. It starts by looking at the values on your walls and challenging leaders to provide evidence that those values are real. Do you value safety? If I were to walk through your facilities how would I know that you truly value safety.
Would it be because of all the posters? Or would it be because I was walking with my nose in my phone and a stranger came up to me and assertively intervened, telling me that “we don’t do that here because it puts you at risk of a serious injury. Let me take you to someplace where you can do that in safety?
You have to BE the change. Starting your meeting with a safety moment doesn’t mean beans if you then skip critical safety steps. When you change your own actions---the only things you really have any control over---then you can change the culture. It takes work, and every molecule in your body will scream and rage against the change, but eventually the change will take hold.