Co-founders of Partners In Leadership, Inc., Roger Connors and Tom Smith, were kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions about their landmark and organization renewing book Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results.
Roger Connors and Tom Smith describe how creating a culture of accountability results in a game-changing transformation of the entire organization.
Thanks to Roger Connors and Tom Smith for their time, and for their very comprehensive and informative responses to the questions. They are greatly appreciated.
What was the background to writing this book Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: Change the Culture, Change the Game is totally revised and re-written from our previous bestselling book on culture change, Journey to the Emerald City. Over the last decade, we have learned a great deal about how to speed up the culture change process through integrating the use of the key culture management tools that are used in the everyday work of people throughout the organization. The methodology we present is simple, straight-forward, practical and it works.
Managing organizational culture is a leadership competency every management team must master. To not manage culture is to leave the low-hanging fruit of optimizing organizational performance on the table. We have seen our clients achieve remarkable game-changing “wow” kind of results through managing their culture, like a stock price increase from .31/share to $22.35 in just three years.
One of the main focuses of your work is that of accountability. What do you mean by accountability, and why is it so important?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: How you do accountability defines the working relationships fundamental to every activity that occurs within your organization. Accountability is the guiding principle that defines how we make commitments to one another, how we measure and report our progress, how we interact when things go wrong, how much ownership we take to get things done… It is, in essence, the nerve center that runs throughout every part of the organization, through every working relationship to every member of every team.
In many organizations, accountability is often done in a way that can actually sabotage your ability to get results. When we start working with a client, we often hear people describe accountability as something that happens to them when things go wrong, rather than something they do to themselves to ensure results and success. How you go about creating accountability matters. Often, it leads to what we call the Accountability Paradox: the harder you try to create accountability, the less accountable people actual become. This happens because people are reacting to the manner in which accountability is approached.
Accountability, done effectively, is a skill you can develop just like any other skill, and while it is not a difficult skill to acquire and hone, it does require a high degree of conscious effort. When you do it right, you’ll also find it the fastest way to improve morale. A Conference Board survey of American workers revealed that over half the American workforce does not feel engaged at all. The results of this survey reported job satisfaction at 45 percent, its lowest level since 1987. In addition, 64 percent of employees under age twenty-five express dissatisfaction with their jobs. Getting people engaged in their work so that they invest in and take personal ownership of the results of the organization can turn these numbers around. That’s what accountability is all about. And that’s why getting people to take personal ownership is the most important cultural shift an organization intent on culture change can make.
Roger Connors (photo left)
Is it possible to create a culture of accountability as a strategy for strengthening an organization?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: We like to say, “Either you will manage your culture, or it will manage you.” Every company has a culture that is working full time sending cues to people on how to think and act in that organization. Culture never takes a holiday or vacation; never calls in sick. It’s always working, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. The question isn’t, do we have a culture? The question is, does our current culture supercharge our efforts to achieve the results we are held accountable to get? Is our culture helping or hindering? Culture produces results. The results you currently get are produced by your current culture. A Culture of Accountability is a workplace culture where people are accountable to think and act in the manner necessary to achieve desired results. If you need to get different results, then you probably need a shift in your culture.
You build your culture around the results you need to achieve. If a key result is growth, then there are certain workplace beliefs you need people to hold about what is important, how to get work done, how to resolve conflicting priorities, etc… Those beliefs are cultural beliefs and should be well defined and fostered. Unfortunately, we often see culture as the last place managers and leaders go to work, usually when everything else is not working. It ought to be the first place we focus on. A recent 50-store pilot of the culture change effort with a large retail client demonstrated an 8-point gain in same-store sales in just 30 days, where 10 other initiatives had failed. Why? You can change the structure of the organization, you can change the processes people use, you can even change the people, but if you don’t change the way they think, then you probably will fall short of the true ownership and individual initiative that is necessary to achieve results.
We think the reason that Change the Culture, Change the Game hit all the bestselling lists as the No. 1 leadership book in the last few weeks (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, etc…) is that it strikes a chord with leaders. They know their culture is not working for them and they want to fix it. We think they also fundamentally believe that they can fix it with the right approach. They are dead-on correct.
Your work describes the methodology you call the Results Pyramid. Briefly, What is this strategy all about?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: The Results Pyramid presents how the three essential components of organizational culture—experiences, beliefs, and actions—work in harmony with each other to achieve results. They pyramid not only tells you why the culture is the way it is, but also how you can accelerate a shift in that culture to create competitive advantage. At the top of the pyramid are results. Those results come from the Actions people take, the next level down on the pyramid. Those actions stem from the beliefs people hold. Those beliefs are born from the experiences they have, both in and out of the organization or team. These experiences form the base of the pyramid. In sum: experiences foster beliefs, beliefs influence actions, and actions produce results. The experiences, beliefs, and actions of the people in your organization constitute your culture, and as the Results Pyramid demonstrates, your culture produces your results.
Most leaders work with just the top of the pyramid and focus on the actions they need people to take. This tends to create a tell-me-what-to-do, command-control style of accountability that people resist and, ultimately, resent. How many times have you personally been involved in a restructure that did not work? You can change where people sit, but that does not necessarily change the way they think. Learning to work with the bottom of the pyramid, the beliefs and experiences people have, helps leaders speed up culture change. It also helps leaders create lasting change in a way that has positive impact on morale. You can either tell people what to do or you can help people understand how to think about getting results. The latter approach engages people at every level in the process of asking, “what else can I do?” to overcome obstacles and achieve results.
Tom Smith (photo left)
You begin the process by defining the desired results first. While this would seem obvious to many people, why do so few organizations do that?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: In our research, surprisingly 9 out of 10 leadership teams cannot give a consistently aligned answer between team members as to the top three key results they need to achieve. They always have a general idea, but are unable to provide the details. Accountability begins by clearly defining results. You build a Culture of Accountability around the results you need to achieve. A clear definition of results, one that everyone throughout the entire organization can understand and repeat, are essential to getting your accountability system to work.
In a leadership workshop, we asked the European management team of a large pharmaceutical company we worked what the top result was that they needed to achieve. They told us it was “BUC,” which stood for Business Unit Contribution. We asked the team, “what’s the number?” Everyone went silent. No one wanted to say. We asked them to write down the number on a piece of paper and pass it to the CFO in the back of the room. There was a $300 million dollar variance between the high number and the low number.
Why don’t leaders get clear about results? We think leaders make a lot of assumptions that people already know, don’t need to know or will come to know at some point what the results should be. They tend to focus on actions, as we said before, and what people need to do, as opposed to focusing on how people should think. Accountability begins by clearly defining results and that always yields alignment, engagement and achievement.
You talk about the leadership competency of working with the bottom of the pyramid, how do you do that?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: The real power of the Results Pyramid is when leaders learn to work with the bottom of the pyramid. That is, establishing the beliefs you need people to hold so that they think and act in a way that produces the new results you want to achieve and then providing the needed experiences that will foster those beliefs.
Leaders do this by first developing a set of Cultural Beliefs. A Cultural Belief is a needed belief that is prioritized as being essential to how people need to think and act in the desired culture in order to achieve the desired results. For example, a Cultural Belief would sound like this: “Lets Talk: I seek, listen, and share to foster an open and honest exchange.” These Cultural Beliefs become a roadmap for everyone in the organization and act as a guide to the shifts that need to occur in the culture and will be the basis of the leaders efforts to work at the bottom of the pyramid. Now, the focus becomes creating experiences for people that foster the formation and creation of these beliefs in the organization.
You describe three culture management tools. What are they, and why are these so important?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: We know leaders who have grown quite frustrated over their inability to change the cultures of their organizations. That disappointment stems directly from working with just the top of the pyramid. It is compounded by the fact that they lack the essential tools for working with the bottom of the pyramid and creating the desired change. Without the proper tools, leaders will struggle to accomplish meaningful change. With them, leaders speed up the change process and promote results in game-changing ways. The culture management tools help to shape the right experiences that foster the adoption of the desired Cultural Beliefs. These tools are Focused Feedback, Focused Storytelling and Focused Recognition.
Focused Feedback is feedback focused around the Cultural Beliefs. It is a candid exchange of where you see the person demonstrating the Cultural Belief and where you feel they could do it better. And then they do the same for you. This has to happen everywhere with everyone in the organization. Focused Storytelling is looking for examples of people living the Cultural Beliefs and then telling that story. In every meeting, the first few minutes is devoted to telling stories about where we see people living the Cultural Beliefs. The third tool is Focused Recognition. This is where people, regardless of department, job rank or anything else, publicly recognize others for living the beliefs. One client instituted what they called, “Caught in the ACT,” (The acronym “ACT” stood for the Alaris Cultural Transition), on their manufacturing floor. They took Polaroid’s of people and wrote the Cultural Belief they demonstrated on the bottom of the picture and the story on the reverse side. They taped them on a wall in the plant. In their morning safety meetings, they would tell the stories. These tools, properly applied, accelerate culture change.
With culture change in mind, how can the entire process be accelerated to prevent inertia and the previous culture reasserting itself?
Roger Connors and Tom Smith: Accountability is key to acceleration. When people externalize the need for change, they focus on what everyone else should be doing differently. However, when they internalize the change process, they focus on what they personally can do differently. This improves morale during the change process because people are focused on what they can do. It’s also more effective, as you are engaging the hearts and minds of people everywhere in the organization. Introducing a correct understanding of what it means to be accountable helps to lay this foundation where people are asking, “what else can I do?” to live the Cultural Beliefs and demonstrate that way of thinking and acting in my own daily work. Getting people to buy-in, invest and engage in the cultural transition is key to sustainability. They live it because they want to live it, because they believe it is essential to succeeding, both personally and for the entire organization.
With that foundation, your focus has to be on integration. Integration means integrate. That is, you have to build a focus on the Cultural Beliefs and the use of the Culture Management Tools into everything you currently do. Existing meetings, one-on-ones, performance review systems, etc… all of these activities and processes provide the opportunity to reinforce the culture. More importantly, they are things we are already doing. If the culture change effort becomes an “extra” initiative, it will likely fail. It needs to be integrated into the things we are already doing on a daily basis. Of course, we outline all of this in our book, Change the Culture, Change the Game.
Whether managers and leaders realize it or not, they are creating experiences every day that help shape their organizational culture. From promoting someone or implementing new policies to interacting in meetings or reacting to feedback, these experiences foster beliefs about “how we do things around here,” and those beliefs, in turn, drive the actions people take. Collectively, their actions, with few exceptions, produce their results. It’s really that simple, and it happens every minute of every day. Whether your organization is a robust and healthy one or one that needs to change, learning how to make sure the culture is working for you will result in creating greater competitive advantage and will help you ensure that you achieve your desired results.
Change the Culture, Change the Game®; Cultural Beliefs®; Culture of Accountability®; Focused Feedback®; and Results Pyramid® are trademarks of Partners In Leadership.
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My book review of Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results by Roger Connors and Tom Smith.
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