Chapter 3: Shaping Your Culture with the Powerhouse Partner Model

OVERVIEW

Few there are that rightly understand of what great advantage it is to blush at nothing and attempt everything.

—ERASMUS, THE PRAISE OF FOLLY

Imagine a government transportation agency spun off as a for-profit enterprise. It has conducted extensive research in the area of transportation. It has tested everything from the type of paint used to stripe lanes on highways to chemicals that melt snow and ice on mountain passes. It is a company of engineers housed in a campus-like setting in which each person has his or her own office with a window and a door that mostly stays shut. Suddenly, its leaders realize that the enterprise cannot continue to operate as an exclusive pool of independent, highly educated, well-paid individuals; rather, it has to operate as a collective to address and resolve transportation problems for clients around the world. Everyone needs to interact with each other to find the best solution for clients, and often that solution means combining talents and intelligences. The solution chosen was to construct a new building with an open-space office plan and move the engineers from offices with doors to open cubes with low walls to facilitate discussion, interaction, and teamwork.

What was this organization thinking? Only in hindsight did the leaders consider that employees might need help in adapting to this new environment and that adapting might require relationship and partnering skills. The example is one approach to building a new culture, though housing people in a new building with a new office layout is not going to change fundamentally how people interact and work together. Physical proximity is an important enabler-distance is a relentless adversary-but the ways in which people communicate and work together day in and day out are human activities that occur regardless of building design or office layout. The planners deserved credit for the ambitious open-plan design—after all, moving people from behind closed doors is a good beginning-but they failed to recognize the fundamentally human component of culture. Culture is not about the floorplan of a building. It's about how you lead people. It's about being aligned strategically and tactically, creating an enabling organization structure, hiring the right people, and offering incentives that recognize and reward the collaborative behaviors that create a partnering culture. Organizations do not partner; people partner.