LEADING BY EXAMPLE


Leading by example is perhaps the biggest challenge that confronts business leaders today. It is personally risky. While many leaders can mouth the platitudes of cultural attributes, they cannot hide how they act. Talking about "walking the talk" is much easier than actually walking the talk. We have a colleague who says he is going to title his next book This Stuff Is a Whole Lot Harder to Do Than It Looks! How leaders act reverberates profoundly throughout an organization. Throw a pebble into a tranquil pond and watch the ripples move out over the water, eventually reaching the outer shores. It is amazing how this one little intrusive act on the serene surface sets a whole body of water into motion. And, not just once—when the ripples reach the outer shores, they reverse themselves and start to move back toward the epicenter.

Much like the pebble disturbing the surface of the pond, contradictory leadership behaviors stir movement in ways that unsettle the organization from one end to the other, and then unsettle it again and again as the ripples bounce around in all directions. When a leader's personal actions undercut his or her public words, the discord it creates in the organization reverberates in ways that are difficult to predict.

The CEO of a company says he wants to establish a culture of openness and trust. He talks about it whenever he brings his executive team together. He believes he believes it. He believes he is passionate about it. But when sales begin to fall, he summons the vice president of marketing and sales to his office and berates her, warning her that she is not doing enough. "I don't want to hear excuses, just get those damn sales up! I don't care what you have to do!" A ripple in the pond has begun to spread out in every direction. She does her best to shield her team members from the abuse she has taken. She does not share with her people the details of her conversation with the CEO. She reports to them that the meeting was "OK," but somehow the nonverbal, unconscious signals are being relayed to her team with every breath she takes. In response to being dressed down, she changes her day-to-day behaviors—without realizing it. She thinks she is continuing to behave with executive deportment. But before long, people sense that something is wrong. The level of anxiety rises. All across the pond the water becomes more and more agitated, murky, unpredictable.

Suddenly, all the flowery talk of openness and trust vanishes as people hunker down and do what they need to do to protect themselves. Fear will motivate action. But the movement will be without soul, without creativity, and without passion as folks recoil into a state of compliance. Spending valuable energy on protecting themselves, they have less oomph available for thinking of the creative, new strategies needed to meet sales quotas. Groups acting out of fear may accomplish a short-term objective, but the organization pays a high price in other ways. Cultures that run on fear typically have high turnover rates, low retention, excessive recruiting and staffing costs, and a high degree of burnout among executives and employees alike. That's the cost of "poor culture."

Critics, for example, have pointed out that GE, often lauded as one of the best-managed companies in the world, has this anxiety syndrome. Based on certain financial indicators, GE looks great on paper. But, say critics, the dark side is the culture of stress and fear that dictates that unless you are number one, or getting there fast, you will be replaced. An in-depth analysis of the organization would show that much of its growth has been accomplished by acquisition and that many of its core products are in fact not market leaders in quality, design, or desirability. The appliance division, for example, is a fast follower at best. By using a strategy of bulk purchasing and subsidizing customers in the form of low-interest rates using GE Financial Services prowess, GE is able to force product into new housing units and mass-market retailers with the slimmest of margins. Yet, when consumers upgrade their major appliances, they look to Sweden's Asko, Germany's Bosch, or America's Sub-Zero for high-end design and quality. GE will copy what you see on these high-end manufacturers' showroom floors—a couple years later. In due course, inability to think creatively, take risks, and move beyond the boundaries set by the cultural straitjacket will stifle their potential. Without a profound cultural shift, the existing win-or-go-home, fear-driven rubrics will eventually sap the organization of the creative energy it needs to continue to succeed in the marketplace. Remember when you could be sure if it's Westinghouse?




Powerhouse Partners. A Blueprint for Building Organizational Culture for Breakaway Results
Powerhouse Partners: A Blueprint for Building Organizational Culture for Breakaway Results
ISBN: 0891061959
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 94

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