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The Fourth Step To Great Management
By Ron | December 20, 2009
Shaping the Culture is the 4th Step to Great Management. Great leaders are aware of the culture of their organizations and work hard at shaping it to ensure that it optimizes the processes needed to produce great results. The best definition I ever heard was, “Aroundhereisms”….as in, “Around here, we never take coffee breaks.”
In the hayday of Silicon Valley, all you had to do was go into the nearest bar after work to find out what the culture was at AMD, Intel or the other electronic companies. The employees were very open about the “aroundherisms.”
Culture can be more formally defined as: the values, norms and rituals that characterize the organization.
It is hard for people in authority to change the culture. It is what it is. Words do very little. Even single events don’t do much. We have all worked in companies which talk the good talk and nothing changes. Many of these same companies promote people who don’t demonstrate the company values. Policies, procedures and systems are often contrary to the good words published on the company web site.
However, culture shaping is possible by implementing 6 actions:
1. Model the behavior that you expect your people to have.
2. Remove fear from the organization.
3. Hire and promote only people who are passionate about the company values, vision and mission.
4. Train all supervisory personnel on how to walk the values, vision and mission daily.
5. Eliminate dumb policies and procedures which do not support the culture you want.
6. Use recognition, reward and corrective action carefully, making sure, that they are used appropriately to the values of the culture you want to stress.
Topics: HR | 1 Comment »
December 20th, 2009 at 9:42 am
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