A tale of two cultures

Achieving BUSINESS EXCELLENCE is sofundamentally linked to the CULTURE of the organization. It always amazes mewhen I interview companies around the world how leadership of organizationseither seem to get it right or get it horribly wrong. There is almost no middleground.

Interviewing a manger of an engineering and construction business who had recently changed employer, I was fascinated by the completely different cultures of the two organizations.

Inclusive and knowledge sharing

He described the current employer as “inclusive and knowledge sharing”. He said that they have an attitude of “There you go, we’ve employed you because you’re good enough, here are the tools, go and do what you need to do. Come back to me when you’ve got a problem.”

Sink or swim

At first this sounded like the swim schools of many years ago who took kids and threw them in the deep end to prove that they instinctively could float. Then they taught them how to swim.  But that was clarified as you were selected because you could swim. “Obviously, I need to give and receive feedback and give updates on where things are at and what my strategies are for the deliverable. I have you to inform people so that the wider business knows what we’re doing so they tie into my plan and agree with my plan. But fundamentally, I’m left to get on delivering on the objectives.”

Micromanagement

Thenext obvious question was to explain how that differed from the previousemployer.  His explanation was that he was at the same level in theprevious company but they micromanaged him to the point of “check what time Icame to work, check what time I left work, check what I was doing, check what Iwas doing on a minute by minute basis”.

The culture seemed to be quite toxic as he continued – “you work for them because you need to. They under pay you. They work you to the bone. For me to do a 12-hour day was not abnormal. That was almost a normality. I used to have to travel many hours to and from work. I brought in significant new orders and not one person in the company thanked me.”

Treat the team with respect

The question of what drives the culture,particularly in the new company was intriguing.  The explanation wassimple and telling as he described the primary driver as “The CEO gives peoplethat freedom. He believes in work-life balance”. This CEO told most of theworkforce that in the period heading to the Xmas holidays that he trusted themtake time off to attend their children’s concerts and sports days and were notexpected to take leave for a few hours off.

In your organizations do you have specificdrivers of culture (good or bad) ?

Would you like your organization to be part of the GLOBAL research into CULTURE ? If so, please contact us and we can arrange this !

RaelBricker is a speaker and consultant on achieving BUSINESS EXCELLENCE.  The primary driver of that is creating robustand rich workplace cultures. These encompass presentations and consulting onbusiness excellence, culture, ethics, inspiration, simplifying systems and harnessinggrowth potential. 

Rael has conducted unprecedented GLOBAL research into CULTURE by interviewing 70+ companies in more than 25 countries.

If youwould like more information, please contact Rael on rael@raelbricker.com or+61408600330