With many managers and executive leaders far removed from the coalface, how do you know if your company has the culture you want? How can you tell if your getting full engagement, reluctant compliance or mere lip service from staff? And why should the leadership group be concerned with a matter most usually dealt with by the HR department?

Few will doubt the importance of organisational culture in leading companies to success, retaining the best talent, improving productivity and unlocking valuable resources towards collaboration, innovation and growth. 

But even the best of us overestimate the openness of the cultures we create, underestimate the challenges for employees to be forthright within them or underrate how quickly cultural shift occurs. 

Simple things can forge a gap between the culture we think we have (or would like to have) and the one that really exists. Most often, this occurs from genuine misunderstandings rather than disingenuous behaviour, but both have an effect in misdirecting your culture and increasing the gap between what the workforce can deliver and what it does deliver.

Given that alignment to a company’s values and operating environment drops before individual engagement and performance drops, the leadership group has an important role to play in sending a message of transparency and encouraging employees to speak up about where they feel the company could be doing better, where they are losing engagement and where the blockages to productivity really lie. 

It is not the superficial behaviours that dictate whether your workforce fully engages with your objectives – it is their deeper values, which often remain hidden. In Margaret Heffernan’s Dare to Disagree TEDGlobal talk (video below), she noted that 85 per cent of managers avoid conflict when they should be advocating good disagreement as a path to progress. With so much swept under the carpet in every company, the leadership group can step up and make a real difference simply by reassuring the company that it is open to the truth and new ideas.

Here are three insights every company must uncover: 

1. Who’s most important? 
   Is it the customer, the company, the board, the individual, the shareholder, everyone or another group? At a large healthcare organisation, most staff operated with the customer (or patient) as the most important. But one long-serving employee genuinely felt she was the most important because of the professional advice she gave patients. This seemingly innocuous difference in values had a huge (but hidden) negative effect on customer satisfaction because her patients felt their dignity was not being respected. After a short feedback and training session, the employee was then able to align her values with the company’s towards patient needs and began dispensing her professional advice with more empathy and customer focus.
   
   
2. What do your staff members feel? 
   Staff (or customer) reactions include their fears, hopes, emotions, ideals, rights and duties. These feelings dictate their level of engagement with all the company’s strategic objectives, but they remain hidden for lack of an appropriate channel to capture these insights. The healthcare organisation spotted low dignity levels among a group of patients and was able to trace this pattern back to the one employee. For example, staff might fear a new proposal could adversely affect the group they’ve identified as most important, or they may feel they have a duty to act in a certain way, or that a particular right should prevail. All these raise questions they need answered or suggestions they would like to voice, but they will often shy away from sharing their feelings. If nothing is done about it, it is at this point that engagement may become reluctant compliance.
   
   
3. How do your staff members think? 
   For most companies, this is the starting point and they discuss objectives or issues rationally and openly, but resolution is often difficult because people take sides, thoughts become entrenched and silo mentality kicks in. This is because their values and feelings have not been taken into account, and yet these are the very things that create understanding and unity. If nothing is done about them, it is at this point that reluctant compliance may become lip service. Had the healthcare organisation only tried to discuss its patient complaints issue rationally, it may have missed the key determinant creating the problem. Having access to powerful insights (and analytics) into staff values and feelings enabled it to build consensus, align employee values with its organisational objectives and enhance creative teamwork to deliver better solutions to its customers.
   
   The leadership group needs to ensure the next cultural audit takes all three steps into account. It should also make it clear that the ensuing discussion over the results does not become a defensive rationale to justify the present, but rather an open debate about how to improve performance. If the employees know the board, CEO and leadership group are genuinely interested in more than scratching the surface to really get to know what makes their company tick, it may even inspire the 85 per cent of line managers to do the same and open their minds to more forward thinking.
   
   It will allow you to create the culture you need to meet your strategic objectives.

http://www.ted.com/speakers/margaret_heffernan.html

In a culture that sings the praises of individual gold medals and where a person fights for rights instead of focusing on responsibility, people tend to lose sight of the big picture. In fact, some people seem to believe that they are the entire picture: Everything revolves around their own needs, goals, and desires. I once saw this message on a T-shirt that expresses the attitude well: "My idea of a team is a whole lot of people doing what I tell them to do."

A team isn't supposed to be a bunch of people being used as a tool by one individual for their own selfish gain. Members of a team must have mutually beneficial shared goals. They must be motivated to work together, not manipulated by someone for individual glory. Anyone who is accustomed to pulling together people and using them to benefit only himself isn't a team builder; he's a dictator.

For sustainability in today's economy we have to change the culture from one in which people simply do their own job in their own function to make their own numbers look good to one in which people are focused horizontally on the customer and on improving value streams that deliver value across functions.

Changing a culture is not as easy as instituting a training or communication program. Culture evolve slowly, and changing them is even slower. 

Without the constant vigilance and dedication of managers and workers alike, without leadership, backsliding is common and rapid. Backsliding is a analogous to the months of discipline, dieting, and self-denial required for a person to lose 10kg, only to gain it all back again in cocktails and desserts during holiday binge.

Like most people who go on diets, most companies that go lean fool themselves into thinking that the change effort is a time-bounded exercise. The company just needs to eat less and exercise more for now. It doesn't understand that if it is to stay lean, a company, like a person, has to live lean.. forever. It is literally about resetting the corporate metabolism, even restructuring its DNA. 

That cannot be done just by shifting a process, implementing a methodology, or running a change program. Real systemic change has to happen at a company's core, with its people. Most critical it needs to be embodied in the company's leaders.

Leaders, and the leadership model that the company cultivates, are the root drivers of a companies successful engagement of team members throughout the company, not the cause. 

Great leaders strive for continuous improvements in every aspect of the business, and achieving that improvement requires everyone, from top executives to the heads of small work groups on the floor, to work together, in every division, and at every managerial position up and down the ladder. In other words, this is the type of leadership that can never be provided by a few stars with extraordinary ability or stunning charisma.

Perhaps the biggest single barrier to building a viable culture of continuous improvement is the ROI mentality. When short term cost reduction becomes the single focus, trumping any investment in the future that does not have an immediate and calculable ROI - Such as training, creating a robust learning system, developing exceptional leaders, and funding long term R&D. Focusing on the ROI for each individual step is like the person who lives for immediate gratification and will not make any investment in his future.

If your worldview involves seeing organizations as machines, then you are likely to view people in terms of the functions that they perform. In practice, this translates into hierarchical structure, in which educated specialists decide how the company should operate and how each process should be designed; managers make sure that those designs are followed to the letter, guided by targets and metrics; and workers do the work, with no room to make suggestions for improvement. Within such world, workers are viewed as mindless automatons and managers bureaucrats who enforce the rules without variation. The specialists, and the specialists only, are encouraged to think.

It has today become so completely the norm within business environments that people dont even see it.

To be successful we need to change our thought process and look at organizations as living organisms. We need to challenge the the traditional assumptions such as the only way for managers to motivate people is to externally control them. Using metrics, along with reward systems based on those metrics, allows you to control workers. Another assumption is that success is based on a set of replicable actions that are transferable one-to-one to another environment. These two assumptions are looking at people as cogs in the organization and not part of the organism. 

We need to avoid tying specific rewards to specific metrics. The problem with this is people will narrow their focus on what is measurable and ignore other parts of the job such as quality and/or customer service. A company should be as concerned about the thinking behind the groups plans for achieving the objective as it is about whether the result is achieved. Metrics-based incentives drive individualistic behavior rather than a team orientation.

In many companies their is a fundamental disconnect between labor and managers. The root cause of this disconnect is that management is trying to maximize workers output by using imposed rules and control systems. Unless labor-management relations are built on trust and cooperation towards common goals, attempts to change are fruitless.

The person who works everyday interacting with the customer adds a huge amount of value to the customers, the manager does not, except indirectly. The leaders mission is to put the right team with the right skills in place to win, that is, to add customer value. The leader does not interact with the customer but coaches and supports the team members. The leader keeps the team focused on the goals and objectives at hand. Only a exceptional leader can channel the combined efforts of the team members and the work groups effectively to achieve larger goals.

If their was a formula for success, it is a deep, time-consuming investment in developing everyone in the organization, and truly believing that your employees are the most precious resource. The role of the leader in this context is to be open to the kind of self-development needed to cultivate her own leadership skills, develop subordinates so that they grow and improve, remove obstacles and set challenges and goals so that teams at all levels of the organization can contribute to the companies continuous improvement and attainment of its long-term goals.

In a culture that sings the praises of individual gold medals and where a person fights for rights instead of focusing on responsibility, people tend to lose sight of the big picture. In fact, some people seem to believe that they are the entire picture: Everything revolves around their own needs, goals, and desires. I once saw this message on a T-shirt that expresses the attitude well: "My idea of a team is a whole lot of people doing what I tell them to do."

A team isn't supposed to be a bunch of people being used as a tool by one individual for their own selfish gain. Members of a team must have mutually beneficial shared goals. They must be motivated to work together, not manipulated by someone for individual glory. Anyone who is accustomed to pulling together people and using them to benefit only himself/herself isn't a team builder; they are a dictator, they boss people about.

Coaching has been and still is a passion I hold close to me. Traditional management of "command and control" has serious limitations in a world that is changing rapidly. Organizational "culture" is becoming a central concern for leaders and managers and recognized it as the phenomenon that could either impede or facilitate the kinds of changes that are necessary to maintain progress and effectiveness in what is a global economy.

The term "coaching" has become a catchall buzzword encompassing all kinds of consulting, counseling and management concepts and activities. Coaching is in fashion!

Unfortunately, as with any idea that becomes popular, the underlying potential of "coaching" as a new paradigm of management and leadership can be diluted and become a distinction without a difference. Specifically, the word is often now used as a metaphor or sometimes synonymous with supervision, counseling, mentoring, and the traditional role of manager.

Most of us know from personal experience that a relationship with a coach is not the same as a relationship with a traditional manager. We know from experience that we listen and respond differently to a coach and we are often empowered to accomplish more with a coach than we accomplish when relating to a traditional manager. It is not surprising that historically in virtually every field of human endeavor where performance is the objective, "coaching" has been an integral aspect of the design of the game and the more professional the players, the greater the demand for coaching.

The need to create "coaching cultures" in our organizations is more pressing than ever. This is because a coaching culture is based on distinguishing, empowering and coordinating individual commitment and action.

The need to clarify and integrate coaching competencies into our existing roles as leaders and managers is essential. The reason for this is that in most organizations today, leaders no longer have the luxury of time or the capability to maintain the illusion that they "control" the decision-making and actions of the people who work in the enterprise.

Coaching is not a replacement for solid management skills, but a new context, a new way of observing and relating to people and action --- a different way of being.

From a perspective of action, coaching and leadership are virtually synonymous. Both the coach and the leader are always engaged with other people, they work exclusively in a medium of relationship and conversations, and they are both working to create through others a "future" that is unpredictable and unprecedented. For coaches and leaders, the future isn't a goal, it is a reality NOW and their job is to bring forth what is missing or what needs to be eliminated so that their vision can be manifested in the world.

Learning to "be a coach" or "be a leader" requires more than appropriating new techniques or understanding a new model. It requires a fundamental shift in how one observes their world, themselves and other human beings. This shift begins when we consider that all human beings normally behave and act based on how our world "occurs" for us, not because of the "way it is". For example, we can all find situations in our own experience where our actions were inconsistent with what we "knew' to be the case such as in continuing to smoke, running away from something because we were afraid even though no real threat existed or making a decision which we knew to be wrong at the time, but rationalized or justified making it anyway.

As a premise, we could say that coaching enables people to change the way the world "occurs" for them. When this happens, there are possibilities and actions available that are not available otherwise. We often hear organizational leaders speaking about the need to change people's "mindsets", to get "buy-in" to some radical new approach or to overcome historical ways of working. We can also see myriad examples of frustration and costs associated with trying to explain, justify, or rationally argue for change only to find that people are more often than not acting and behaving in the same ways they did previously.

The key to creating a "coaching culture" or any new culture is in exploring the phenomenon of commitment. If our reality is a function of our actions and our actions are a function of our commitments and we only commit to what is reasonable and feasible, then we will obviously be generating more of the same.

It is not possible to coach someone or for that matter to be coached in the absence of authentic commitment. I distinguish commitment here from wanting, wishing, trying, hoping or any other notion such as "what is realistic" that we sometimes substitute for commitment.

It isn't practical or logical to coach someone who isn't committed to accomplishing something "unprecedented" in his or her experience. Coaching is inherently about achieving breakthroughs and a breakthrough is something that hasn't occurred before - a new level of competency or new action or unprecedented result.

Commitment is a phenomenon that while clear in almost everyone's direct experience when it is present, is generally unexamined and somewhat mysterious in everyday living. Two basic premises in our work is the view that:
a) everyone is always committed to something whether they are aware of it or not and
b) often our commitments are cultural in nature, that is we've become committed to interpretations and practices given us from the past and relate to them as "truths" without rigorous examination or choice.

In a coaching culture, the commitments to the future come first and then the planning is about how to accomplish or deliver on those commitments. One must be willing to authentically commit to a breakthrough BEFORE there is evidence that it can be accomplished or it can never be accomplished except as a consequence of "good luck" or some other circumstantial explanation.

Specifically, we might summarize the competencies of coaches (or leaders) as involving the following elements. A coach:

• Commits to and builds powerful, committed and trusting relationships
• Is grounded in an awareness of and responsibility for their own "blind spots"
• Grants total freedom, choice and power to those they coach --- is vulnerable
• Is more committed to the others commitments and results than the person being coached is --- an unreasonable stand FOR the other person
• Generates bigger possibilities for breakthroughs and accomplishment
• Is focused on listening for commitment and action
• Observes the others behavior and conversations for inconsistencies with the stated commitment or possibility, often revealing unexamined commitments and beliefs
• Formulates and offers interpretations and practices to align actions and commitment in a context of the organization's vision and values
• Manages conversations and moods of people involved in the game is able to "generate" new conversations to displace old ones and doesn't fix people, but allows them to be responsible for their own moods and interpretations.
• Uses breakdowns, constraints, adversity, mistakes or undesirable results as "positive" information and as "assets" for improving performance or as raw material for creative inquiry and design of new processes and practices
• "Comes from" the point of view that the results have already been accomplished and has a creative relationship with the future --- does not play the game to cope with circumstance or find out what will happen --- is inventing the future
• Operates with clarity and consistency of his or her own commitments and "walks the talk" at all times --- speaks and listens commitment
• Maintains an active relationship and dialogue with his or her own coach --- "pushes the envelope" of their own thinking, actions and accomplishment

These practices aren't unique or limited to only a context of coaching. They tend to occur naturally in highly responsible leaders and people broadly in times of crisis. I believe they are present in many instances of great accomplishment and leadership.

These are "contextual competencies" in that they all relate to distinguishing what is missing or what is occurring in the background of a situation. One question that has particular relevance to organizations, however, is "can they be systematically learned or are they simply natural qualities that one must be 'born with', acquire through fortuitous circumstances of life, or appear only when there is an organizational crisis?"

The answer is clearly "yes". These competencies can be systematically learned and mastered. Qualities and abilities such as committed listening, having compassion, living as one's word, being responsible, generating trust, creating possibilities and so forth are obviously desirable and often attributable to others --- however, they can be elusive when we try to learn them ourselves or teach them to others.

These kinds of qualities and abilities all have to do with our way of being, with who we are as committed human beings. Normally, when attempting to develop these qualities in others, we are often perceived as "preaching" them as virtues.

Knowledge and pre-existing processes can be taught. Ways of Being or "contextual competencies" can be coached. Learning to be a coach is primarily to learn a different way of Being. When this occurs, the above competencies are obviously appropriate and with practice tend to develop quickly and naturally.

If the focus shifts to "what are people's commitments" and "how are they 'seeing' their situation", it becomes obvious that many other interpretations are possible such as, "success depends on satisfying customers and other stakeholders including our families". In this context there isn't a problem, just a commitment and other questions such as "how do I satisfy all my stakeholders in the time I am committed to working. This in turn will often reveal new strategies, missing competencies and networks of people who might help. A new context or cultural "opening" doesn't proscribe action or solve problems, but leads to new thinking and actions depending upon the commitments of those involved.

Creating a "coaching culture" involves a multi-faceted strategy.

Being Responsible for the "Box". This involves various methods for displaying or "showing" the existing culture. This is the "box" often referred to when challenging people to "get out of their box". This is more than simple description and is the result of questioning conventional wisdom and revealing AS CULTURE many of the hallway conversations and points of view that are widely shared within the organization but rarely addressed.

For example, if we ask, "what does everybody know about the way things get done around here", people will begin to articulate this conventional wisdom such as "you must get the boss's permission before you do something or you will be punished". This kind of generalized belief can persist even when the boss has encouraged risk-taking and independent action.

The result of this step is the recognition that our culture is not a problem but is the phenomenon that blinds us to possibilities and actions that would allow us to create an "unpredictable" future.

Creating a bigger Game. It is important for the leadership of the organization to undertake a serious learning process and open themselves to being coached with respect to "what is the future we are committed to creating?". This usually is in the form of an organizational vision, but not one created as a "picture of the future" but as a ground of being from which to organize and align actions on a day-to-day basis.

The result of this step is the alignment of the top team on the "game we are playing" and an authentic commitment to learning and changing themselves as appropriate. They are committed to "walking the talk" and demonstrating new ways of being as models for the rest of the organization.

Walking the Talk. To anchor the foundation and sustain "new ways of being" requires a company solidify its new culture through design of processes and practices consistent with this new worldview.

Coaching isn't a onetime relationship or intervention. In most fields, the more competent and more professional a player, the more their demand for and reliance on coaching. In a coaching culture, coaching isn't a role, but the practicing of coaching competencies in every situation. Everyone is open to both giving and receiving coaching as appropriate to their abilities and concerns. My partner Karen is my coach in some domains and I am her coach in others.

Coaching is a partnership between human beings in which one person can empower another to accomplish more than is possible on their own. When commitment and actions are aligned, the coach is able to assist in creating larger and larger possibilities and learning becomes an "upward creative spiral".

Continuous Learning. Creating culture is to continuously transfer coaching capabilities and responsibilities through continuous learning and through the organization's practices for recruiting and for moving people between jobs, including transferring accountability when people retire.

In a coaching culture, everything that everyone is doing comes down to:
a) What am I committed to accomplishing.
b) With whom am I coordinating commitments.
c) What do I see is missing or in the way to fulfilling our commitments.
d) What possibilities and actions am I committed to now?

In a coaching culture the organization is seen as a network of people coordinating commitments for the sake of accomplishing a common future.

The "coaching approach" allows an organization to get at what is beneath all the things that are traditionally in the way of becoming the organization that they want to be. It goes beyond addressing symptoms or problems or putting a band-aid on what is wrong.

Coaching creates sustainable positive changes in "the way things are". The ontological underpinnings of this approach, which deals with the nature of being, allow people to experience themselves and their world more directly and have a more responsible relationship with whatever they see is limiting them.

In a coaching culture an environment is created in which context is just as important as content and becomes the main lever for creating a future that is not already constrained by the past. Coaches accomplish this by distinguishing all the background "conversations" that usually stop people and keep them trapped in their reasons for not having what they say they want.

"Coaching competencies" are the practices that allow a person to be effective in the domain of context or culture. Coaching an organization's members to learn them in practice and move toward mastery in these areas leads to having an organizational culture where commitment to clarity and results in more important than the historical and unexamined attachment to reasons, justifications, control and predictable outcomes.

Creating a coaching culture is the fastest and most sustainable strategy for an organization committed to continuously reinventing itself and for being successful in a complex and globally interconnected world characterized by constant and unpredictable change.

Respect is one of the values that we hear talked about a lot. Respect is a word that always evokes a positive conversation. The problem has been that almost no one really thinks about or understands what it means to respect someone, create a culture of respect among people or for that matter what it means to be respected.

Most of us believe that respect is an important value and that it is good. We do not normally think of respect as an action but as a feeling or judgment about other people.

To understand and distinguish respect it is important to recognize that language is fundamental to how we see the world. Language both opens possibilities and empowers us, or it closes possibilities and limits us.

If we say we respect someone, we are “looking" at the other person in a particular way — usually suggesting we are open to listen and honor each other’s views even if we disagree. If we say we don’t respect someone, we are generally closed to certain possibilities and conversations with them.

Likewise, if we have “self-respect” we are generally in a healthy internal conversation with ourselves. If we don’t respect ourselves, we will typically be stuck in all sorts of unproductive and unsatisfying "self-talk". If we say that something is possible to someone we respect, we will more than likely have a productive and satisfying dialogue. If we don’t respect them then we will more than likely be closed, not listen or in some cases disregard and dismiss them and their views outright.

‘Respect’ is just a word, but what it means and what it distinguishes for us can make all the difference in how we observe ourselves and others.

If we can create a culture in which respect is universal and an expression of our commitment to each other as human beings and how we choose to "look at each other", then we have a foundation for designing ways for collaboration and mutual empowerment that are simply not possible in the absence of authentic respect.

I believe that respect is the foundation for any serious discourse on coaching, leadership or building satisfying relationships with others. Without respect there are no possibilities for trust, sharing a vision, for empowerment or for creating powerful teams and organizations.

Respect (or lack of it) is a core aspect of any recurring conflict situation as well as an integral factor in most labour-management disputes. Many times, we use the term and our feelings about respect to in effect say, “You should agree with me and behave the way I want you to or it means you don’t respect me (or justifies my not respecting you) and therefore I can rationalize doing just about anything I want without concern for you”.

In an organizational or social context our judgments and level of respect become the basis for how we relate to other people on a day-to-day basis.

Respect is fundamental to human relationships (and relationship with self) is not a new idea. What is new is the inquiry into whether it is possible to respect people with whom we strongly disagree and whose actions and behaviour are inconsistent with what we value. We all use respect (or lack of respect) to determine how open we are, how trusting we are and how we choose to relate to others.

When we have negative judgments, our assessments become the justification to give or not give respect. In our everyday way of relating, we rarely notice that the judgments and assessments are one thing, and the conclusions and actions that follow are something else.

Respect can be seen as an action and that it is possible to create a culture in which people naturally and authentically respect each other. To do this, however, we need to consider how we are looking at people already. That is, we need to observe that we are normally judging others in terms of our own values and practices. Our baseline for assessing others is essentially what we happen to believe at a given moment. The implication of this has to do with whether we can take someone seriously if they don’t meet or match our standards and beliefs.

If we can’t take someone seriously then we never have the conversations which could make a difference in how we relate or what is or isn’t possible for us in the future. When this occurs we become trapped in a vicious cycle of judgment-lack of respect-reaction, and more judgment that justifies more lack of respect.

It is of course possible to partially finesse the issue by trying to separate the "human being" from his or her behavior… “I respect YOU, but don’t respect your behavior”.

I am suggesting that we must respect everyone if the idea of respect is to make any sense other than as a tool for judging and manipulating behavior. The reason for this is that the simple act of judging whether someone (including ourselves) is worthy of our respect is to separate us from the other person as a human being and assume a "superior" relationship to them.

As a coach, I am always relating to a person in two domains….one is who I say they are as a possibility, the other is who they are in a context of my judgments and their history. My choice is in which context I will relate to them. If I relate to another in a context of possibility then our work together is about their commitments, creating breakthroughs and producing unprecedented results. If I relate to them in a context of their past and my assessments then the game typically becomes about me analyzing their behavior and attempting to "fix" or control them.

Creating a culture of respect begins with a commitment to seeing everyone as worthy of respect. In a culture of respect there will be more straight talk (especially of negative assessments) because we respect each other. In a culture of respect — all sorts of relationship issues, differences and lack of alignment become positive forces for change, not justifications for the status quo.

Human beings will always have judgments about themselves and others. It doesn’t matter whether our judgments are positive or negative since no judgment is ever true or false anyway, no matter how many may agree or disagree with it.

Respect is one of many values we seek to "enculturate" in our organizations. Like all values it cannot be legislated or regulated into existence. It can be learned, it can be coached and leaders everywhere can demonstrate it.

Creating a culture of respect doesn’t solve problems or predict any particular behavior. It does, however, shift the context, our consciousness and the organizational paradigm in such a way as that we need not sacrifice our relationships in moments of conflict and fear. Moreover, when we respect others, we are able to consider our own responsibility for our disagreements and differences and most of all we can engage in dialogues to create a future in which everyone is included without perpetuating reactive cycles of distrust, resentment and acrimony….a future based on respect.