Search results matching tags 'Organizational culture' and 'Change'

"Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail" by John P. Kotter

jstengel — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:26:29 GMT

The author begins the article citing his experience with over 100 companies attempting to remake themselves, from General Motors to Bristol-Meyers Squibb. Successful change within these companies has ranged from very successful to total failure. Because of these experiences, it is recognized that change is in itself a process which contains a series of phases that must all be completed in order to produce satisfying change.

Kotter identifies eight phases or stages a company must successfully complete in order to obtain lasting change:

1. Establish a Sense of Urgency

Examine market and competitive realities for potential crises and untapped opportunities.
Convince at least 75% of company managers that the status quo is more dangerous than the unknown.
Identify and discuss crises, potential crises, or major opportunities.

2. Form a Powerful Guiding Coalition

Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort.
Encourage the group to work together as a team outside of the normal hierarchy.

3. Create a Vision

Create a vision to direct the change effort.
Develop strategies for realizing that vision.

4. Communicate the Vision

Use every vehicle possible to communicate the new vision and strategies for achieving it.
Teach new behaviors by the example of the guiding coalition.

5. Empower Others to Act on the Vision

Remove or alter systems or structures that undermine the vision.
Encourage risk taking and nontraditional ideas, activities, and actions.

6. Plan for and Create Short-Term wins

Define and engineer visible performance improvements.
Recognize and reward employees contributing to those improvements.

7. Consolidate Improvements and Produce More Change

Use increased credibility from early wins to change systems, structures, and policies undermining the vision.
Reinvigorate the change process with new projects and change agents.

8. Institutionalize New Approaches

Articulate connections between new behaviors and corporate success.
Create leadership development and succession plans consistent with the new approach.

In addition to the eight stages necessary for obtaining and maintaining satisfying change, Kotter also identifies corresponding possible pitfalls for each stage that can derail the change project all-together. The following are the eight major errors identified in the article that can halt a change project, or even destroy any positive changes made thus far.

1. Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency

Underestimating the difficulty of driving people from their comfort zones.
Becoming paralyzed by risks.

2. Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition

No prior experience in teamwork at the top.
Relegating team leadership to an HR, quality, or strategic-planning executive rather than a senior line manager.
Companies that fail in phase two usually underestimate the difficulties of producing change and thus the importance of a powerful guiding coalition, groups without strong line leadership never achieve the power that is required.

3. Lacking a Vision

Presenting a vision that’s too complicated or vague to be communicated in five minutes.
Without a sensible vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing and incompatible projects that can take the organization in the wrong direction or nowhere at all.

4. Undercommunicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten

A good transformation vision is developed, but a single form of communication is used.
The head of the organization spends a considerable amount of time making speeches to employee groups, but most people still don’t get it.
Much effort is put into communication, but some very visible senior executives still behave in ways antithetical to the vision.

5. Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision

Failing to remove powerful individuals who resist the change effort.
Communication is never sufficient by itself; renewal also requires the removal of obstacles.

6. Not Systematically Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins

Without short-term wins, too many people give up or actively join the ranks of those people who have been resisting change.
Leaving short-term successes up to chance.
Failing to score successes early enough (12-24 months into the change effort).

7. Declaring Victory too soon

Until changes sink deeply into a companies culture, a process that can take five to ten years, new approaches are fragile and subject to regression.
Declaring victory too soon – with the first performance improvement.
Allowing resistors to convince “troops” that the war has been won.

8. Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture

Not creating new social norms and shared values consistent with changes.
Promoting people into leadership positions who don’t personify the new approach.

The article closes with the disclaimer that there are indeed other mistakes to be made, but these are the big eight when dealing with transformation. This is meant to be a simple guideline for the process, not an answer to any situation that occurs.

Citation

Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. Harvard Business Review OnPoint(March-April), 1-10.

“Futures That Work: Using Search Conferences to Revitalize Companies, Communities, and Organizations”

jstengel — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:13:21 GMT

A search conference is a participative planning event that enables people to create a plan for the most desirable future of their community or organization, a plan they carry out themselves. Search conferencing has a long, rich history. The first search conference happened in 1960 in Great Britain when leaders of two aircraft engine manufacturers came together in the first search conference to merge their two companies into one. The inventors of the method and the leaders of that first search were social scientists Fred Emery and Eric Trist. The search conference is a practical way to build communities of people who step up to the challenges of our turbulent times and take responsibility for making change happen in a purposeful way. As the world becomes more and more turbulent, the need is great for people to form communities to search for their desirable futures together. The search conference puts people in the driver’s seat of change, so they can steer together toward the future they want for their system, making adjustments as they go forward.

This book has a detailed description of what happens in a search conference, identifies the many ways it can be used, the principles that it is based on, how to plan for a search conference, and stories from many different organizations, from a Palestinian YMCA to Microsoft. It is a good guide for those who want to bring together a group of people to plan strategically and holistically and, importantly, in an accountable and sustainable way to implement what they plan. It also begins to shift organizations to a more open and participative culture.

Citation

Rehm, R., Cebula, N., Ryan, F., Large, M. (2002), “Futures That Work: Using Search Conferences to Revitalize Companies, Communities, and Organizations”, New Society Publishing and Hawthorn Press.

What Do We Know About Developing and Sustaining a Culture of Innovation

jstengel — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 16:05:25 GMT

This article gives a brief overview of organizational culture including its definition, various models, and both qualitative and quantitative methods of studying an organization’s culture. The author begins by discussing culture in general and sites Hofstede’s early findings from research with IBM. She then talks about management research on specific dimensions of organizational culture (innovation and risk taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, individual and team orientation, and aggressiveness) and about a two dimensional framework of culture which looks at internal focus versus external focus as well as stability and control versus flexibility and discretion. Finally, the article explores both qualitative and quantitative methods of observing an organization’s culture and advocates for a combination of both. The author recommends specific assessment tools, consulting firms, and suggests overall, that outcomes of assessment be tied to an organization’s need for innovation.

Assessment tools:

Survey assessments
Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI)
Organizational Culture Index (OCI)

Citation

Aiman-Smith, L. (2004) What Do We Know About Developing and Sustaining a Culture of Innovation. What Do We Know Journal Review, 1-5 DOI

Building Culture Strategically: A Team Approach for Corrections

jstengel — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:18:28 GMT

The guide, developed under the Strategic Planning, Management and Response project, encompassed six tasks: 1) identify/develop a strategic planning model/process useful to facilities; 2) & 3) develop a strategic management model/methodology and strategic response model/methodology to be used in facilities; 4) prepare a guide to provide and train staff in their implementation; 5) develop a process for measuring the effectiveness of the models; 6) write a literature review encompassing strategic planning, management and response.

Initially, the project team surveyed all 50 states about work related to strategic planning, management and response, conducted site visits to four states, and conducted a literature review on strategic planning, management, and application. Survey highlights are briefly and quantifiably summarized in the preface. The models, developed by Carol Flaherty-Zonis, were pilot-tested in 2003-2004 at the Westville (Indiana) Correctional Facility. “Positive” preliminary findings were reported, although no quantifiable research results are presented in this guide. The literature review did not focus on historical research but briefly summarizes the tenets of 10 schools of thought on strategic planning highlighting the elements of each that factored into the Flaherty-Zonis model, named the Rubik’s Cube® Models of Strategic Planning© and Strategic Management©. A framework to provide facilities a method of implementing strategic change based on the models is provided along with definitions for all key concepts such as organizational culture, strategic planning, strategic response and strategic thinking.

The Rubik’s Cube® model assigns a purpose to each of the six sides of the cube based on both strategic planning (p. 8) and strategic management (p.9). The six “sides” of the cube are the following:

Setting the Stage (Side 1:Green),
Identifying Strategic Issues (Side 2:Red),
Charting the Future (Side 3:Orange),
Crafting Strategies (Side 4:Blue),
Bringing the Strategies to Life (Side 5:White),
Sustaining Change (Side 6:Yellow).

The process of implementing the model is outlined in five stages:

Assessing the facility’s readiness for strategic planning;
laying the groundwork;
planning and holding the kickoff meeting;
holding team meetings to develop responses to the Cube® questions;
drafting and finalizing the strategic plan.

An assessment inventory, termed the Organizational Culture Inventory®, is provided as an appendix (D) in the guide.

Tools: The above tool, Organizational Culture Inventory can be found at the following websites: http://www.leadershipassessments.net/assessment.htm & http://www.humansynergistics.com/products/documents/OCI_Sample_Standard_Report.pdf.

Citation

Flaherty-Zonis, C. (2007). Building Culture Strategically: A Team Approach for Corrections. J. McNaughton, National Institute of Corrections

"Cognitive-Behavior Modification and Organizational Culture."

jstengel — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:59:59 GMT

This article discusses the application of Cognitive-Behavior Modification (CBM) to organizational culture in order to influence organizational behavior. The author sites the work of Karl Weick and constructivist theory which states that individuals create the organizations they are apart of, while in turn they are impacted by those organizations.

The article explores the cognitive-behavioral framework for interventions including constructivist narratives that can be analyzed and reconstructed to assist with behavioral change. The integration of functional analysis into CBM is then introduced whereby a subject’s interaction with the setting is observed in order to produce a complete picture of the subject in the environment.

The author then ties together the commonalities between constructivist theory of organization with CBM: personal reality and organizational reality are constructed by the individual, that organizational culture and personal reality alike do not exist apart from perception and that efforts to modify both personal life and organizational life must build on these basic facts. Finally, the specific CBM methods of co-construction, re-framing, functional assessment, skill development, leveraging key relationships, and reducing complexity are applied to organizational interventions and specific examples are given from the author’s pilot team development program.

Citation

Boan, D. M. (2006). "Cognitive-Behavior Modification and Organizational Culture." Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research 58(1): 51-61.

An Introduction to Changing Organizational Culture

jstengel — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 22:55:16 GMT

Cameron and Quinn’s first chapter (An Introduction to Changing Organizational Culture) sets a radically assertive tone. Their arguments and claim that organizational culture separates all other previous researcher attempts to explain sustained organizational success, both public and private, are at once compelling and doubt-evoking.

Later in Chapter 1 the authors conclude that former initiatives attempted on a global scale, such as TQM, downsizing, and organizational reengineering, all have a common ingredient that determined individual organizational success or failure: the culture; i.e., whether the strategy of choice had adequately addressed what the current culture was and where it needed to go.

The authors cite an example using the famous Chevy Nova/Toyota Corolla joint venture (Fremont Plant) where all other factors remained more/less constant except for the installment of Japanese management. What ensued was a 180-degree turnaround from various assorted negative practices, work performance, and outcomes to across-the-board high visibility positives—all attributed to a monumental shift away from a prevailing crippled culture. These authors offer cultural definition, classification, and diagnosis [Chapters 2-5] of organizational culture, offer prescriptions on how to go about changing it [Chapter 6]; with the final Chapter [Chapter 7]; supplying reliability and validity information on their organizational culture assessment instrument.

Citation

Cameron, K. S. and R. E. Quinn (1999). An Introduction to Changing Organizational Culture. Diagnosing And Changing Organizational Culture. Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall 161.

Cultural Transformation in a Health Care Organization....by Barriere, et al.

Donna Cooper — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:08:00 GMT

Innovative leadership is the driving force behind cultural transformation. Organizational change is fostered in an atmosphere of trust and realized over time. Essential to successful, innovative structural change are interpersonal leadership skills which are flexible yet consistent. Change operates from the "bottom-up," as well as from the "top- down." These are the conclusions of Barriere, Anson, Ording and Rogers in their case study of an 1,800-employee, cardiac hospital in metropolitan New York, which transitioned from a stable, bureaucratic institution to a "highly-adaptive, world-class" cardiac center.

[Barriere, M. T., Anson, B. R., Ording, R. S., & Rogers, E. (2002). Culture Transformation in a Health Care Organization: A Process for Building Adaptive Capabilities Through Leadership Development. Consulting Psychology Joural: Practice and Research, 54(2), 116-130.]

The authors, who were the external agents (consultants) for change at the hospital, noted that details of the transformation process are often lacking in the literature. Thus, their purpose was to provide details of the change process, which involved "designing, implementing and evaluating a leadership development intervention" to set the hospital on a more adaptive, innovative course. The hospital's challenge during this four-year initiative was to stay competitive and maintain patient-care and regulatory compliance standards.

Change Shift

The change mandate came from the hospital's chief executive officer (CEO) and human resources vice president, who realized that to maintain the hospital's leadership position in an increasingly competitive environment, would take more involvement and innovation by the lower-levels of the workforce. This shift to leading change from down-up was a dramatic departure in the hospital culture, the authors noted.

Three key steps were determined necessary to foster a workable cultural transformation:

delineating organizational priorities in a changing health care industry;
assessing the existing hospital culture;
designing, implementing and evaluating interventions aligned with priorities that create and continue "an innovative and adaptive culture."

Senior-level focus groups facilitated by the outside consultants were formed initially to establish organizational priorities. Through the focus groups, senior executives determined that mid-level management help would be key in driving innovation and communicating with subordinates. This led to one of the highest hospital priorities: ensuring that management possessed the leadership skills to acquire an adaptive culture. Once this priority was established, the hospital developed and implemented a two-part leadership training program: Leadership I, which focused on individual leadership skill development and performance; and Leadership II, which was designed to encourage and foster cross-department communication and support.

Prior to the leadership training programs, Barriere et al utilized the Litwin Stringer Climate Inventory (Litwin & Stringer, 1968) and other less formal input to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the existing work culture and to gather suggestions for improvement. Feedback was received from about 20% of the hospital's employees, who were divided into four tiers for the inventory:

Tier 1 - - senior management (VP through CEO);
Tier 2 - - management reporting to senior management (assistant VPs through division heads);
Tier 3 - - line managers;
Tier 4 - - all other non-managerial staff.

These tiers were randomly sampled and asked to evaluate six organizational categories: structure; standards; responsibility; recognition; support; and commitment.

The overall Litwin inventory results showed that:

employees across all tiers rated organizational commitment and structure most positively (82% and 76% respectively);
considerable deviance was noted between Tier 1 and other Tiers in the responsibility category (more than 60% positive responses from Tier 1 vs. less than 25% positive responses from Tiers 2,3 and 4);
low scores for recognition (41%) were reported by Tier 4;
discrepancies between the tiers were noted with regard to support from and standards being exhibited by supervisors.

The lower scores with regard to responsibility dealt with employees feeling they had little autonomy to act/think independently, or encouragement to assume responsibility. The low recognition scores were interpreted as insufficient recognition for accomplishments. An additional, open-ended response survey supported the conclusion that while organizational structure and staff commitment were highly rated, improvement was needed in areas of communication, teamwork, individual initiative and innovation. These employee climate survey results provided the baseline data for the Leadership I and II's program development, structure and goals.

Three questions, derived from the hospital-wide, employee climate surveys, guided the structure of the Leadership I program. The first asked which aspects of leadership culture most needed to be improved. The second question involved an investigation of the practices currently used by the hospital's "best" leaders. And third, what behaviors would the best future leaders need to exhibit. Five leadership themes emerged from these guiding questions:

communication skills
motivation and feedback
staff participation in goal setting
individual challenges
Teamwork

Using the questions, leadership themes, and the climate surveys, the consultants devised a "leadership placemat" or rubric which consolidated "33 critical leadership practices" into six categories:

communicating organizational values
encouraging initiative by individuals
constructive coaching and feedback
the creation of a climate of trust
personal leadership
"leveraging the entire hospital team" (community building)

*Table 1: LEADERSHIP PRACTICES PLACEMAT*
I. Hospital Values Communication	II. Encouraging Individual Initiative	III. Constructive Feedback & Coaching	IV. Creating Atmosphere of Openness & Trust	V. Demonstrating Effective Leadership	VI. Leveraging the Entire Team
l. Effectively balancing the hospital's business and patient case priorities	7. Clarifying responsibilies within the group	12. Giving feedback on job performance	18. Conducting meetings in ways that build trust and respect	23. Selecting and promoting the best people	28. Putting hospital objectives ahead of personal, unit, or departmental ones
2. Communicating high personal standards of compassionate care	8. Encouraging people to initiate tasks or projects thought important	13. Providing fair and even-handed feedback	19. Behaving in a way that encourages trust	24. Managing change in thoughtful and well-planned ways rather than reactive	29. Collaborating effectively with others
3. Setting challenging performance goals and standards	9. Encouraging people to find and correct their own mistakes	14. Recognizing good performance more than criticizing mistakes	20. Encouraging an open exchange of ideas and different points of view	25. Focusing time and energy on most important priorities	30. Encouraging shared ideas and information with others
4. Treating employees fairly	10. Encouraging and rewarding innovation and new approaches	15. Being supportive and helpful on a daily basis	21. Listening to others	26. Being a person who delivers what is promised	31. Understanding which decisions can be made alone and which need to involve others
5. Demonstrating personal concern for success of employees	11. Empowering people to deliver high quality care	16. Going to bat for people with your manager when you feel they are right	22. Responding in a nondefensive way when others disagree with you	27. Acknowledging one's own mistakes and limitations	32. Recognizing value of diverse per-spectives and opinions
6. Pushing people to look for new ways of saving money, increasing productivity and improving quality		17. Spending time to coach effectively			33. "Reaching out" to help people in other departments

The Leadership 1 program used the 33 leadership practices identified in the leadership placemat as their change agenda for management, and encouraged management to use the collected data to determine which leadership practices needed improvement and which leadership skills needed to be developed. To support which leadership practices needed improvement, feedback was solicited from a representative sample from each manager's subordinates. Following stringent collection and interpretation guidelines for these feedback results, a two-day workshop was provided by consultants to:

help managers interpret the feedback results and determine development needs and action plans;
provide training and coaching to management in the identified leadership skills that needed improvement.

Following the completion of Leadership I training, management provided feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the organizational structure pre- and post-training. Two new priorities to facilitate cultural and organizational change emerged:

the need to develop models for constructive feedback and coaching, and;
the need to facilitate teamwork and a sense of community across departments.

With these guiding priorities, the Leadership II program was developed and implemented. Leadership II provided additional coaching and the setting of goals and action plans by the individual managers. The rubric developed in Leadership I was again employed and progress on the six leadership categories was monitored over time. Overall, there was statistically significant progress made in all 33 subsets over the two year time frame measured.

Results

Overall, there was statistically significant progress made in the 33 subsets. Over a two year time frame measured between the beginning of each leadership program there ws improvement noted in all leadership skills including a 10% increase in percentile rank in 22 of the 33 practices. All areas noted as weaknesses in Leadership 1 showed a 10% increase or better in percentile rank.

The approach taken by the hospital was influenced by and consistent with Harvard Professor John Kotter's change model, which involves relying on leaders from all levels of an organization to inspire cultural transformation. The same population of managers participated in both leadership programs in a similar top-down approach. The leadership development handbook For Your Improvement by M. Lombardo and R. W. Eichinger, was supplied to all managers as part of the Leadership II program. The consultants coached management in developing action plans for their leadership development based on the recommendations outlined in the handbook. The authors contend that it is those sorts of "soft science" leadership skills, which when transferred across the employment tiers that are the essence of effective, adaptive and innovative cultural change.

The consultants, through their expertise and the use of objective data from the climate surveys, focused on building trust and support for change across management tiers, which was vital to the success of this culture transformation.

In conclusion, when managers were given the opportunity to develop and practice exemplary leadership behaviors, these "best practices" became the underpinnings for cultural transformation. At the conclusion of this four-year project, the Leadership Practices Placemat was incorporated into each employees' yearly evaluation and training. Managers solicited input from their subordinates in developing goals and action plans, and a new performance assessment tool was developed for both managers and subordinates to receive objective, meaningful feedback. Essential to meaningful organizational change, the authors note, are the necessity of results being measured over time, the clear communication of the organizational vision to all stake-holders, and the roles individuals, both "at the top" and "on the bottom," play in promoting and propagating cultural change within organizations.

Tools/Knowledge Objects/Resources/Contacts/Etc:

Resources:

Kotter, J. (1996). Leading change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Lombardo, M. M., & Eichinger, R. W. (1996). For Your Improvement : A development and coaching guide. New York: Lominger Limited.
Litwin, G. H., & Stringer, R. A. (1968) Motivation & Organizational Climate. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Dalton, M. (1996). Multirater feedback and conditions for change. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 48, 12-16.
Michael T. Barriere last found email address: psymthb@hofstra.edu.