Greg Lane - Culturally On Plan: A Pragmatic Guide for Aligning Organizational Culture with a Strategic Plan and Transforming Management to Leadership

Also by Greg Lane

Made to Order Lean Excelling in a High Mix, Low Volume Environment

Mr. Lean Buys and Transforms a Manufacturing Company The True Story of Profitably Growing an Organization with Lean Principles

Co-authored by Greg Lane

Toyota by Toyota Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry

Copyright January 2013 Greg Lane
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 0615731597
ISBN-13: 9780615731599
eBook ISBN: 978-1-63001-799-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954459
Strategic-Leaders.com, Stockton, CA

This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reprinted material is quoted with permission, and sources are indicated. A wide variety of references are listed. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and the publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or for the consequences of their use.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept any legal responsibility or liability in whole or in part for any errors or omissions that may be made.

For my fathers advise and devotion to editing and critiquing.
For the support and understanding of my wife Sonia and my daughters Sofia and Rebeca.

Table of Contents

Although there are many schools of thought on human change, a few of the underlying beliefs on which this book is based are worth disclosing up-front. The other guy syndrome is predominant in human change. Most believe their success results from their traits and behaviors and improvement is something the other guy must do. The other guy maintains the same beliefs and waits for the other guy, and so on, so without an organizational wide plan to develop non-biased self-awareness, you are only haphazardly creating random awareness which has little chance of success. Secondly, people dont resist change as much as they resist being changed, so again involvement and awareness are key. And last is that peoples mindset (that is, beliefs and values) has a profound influence on their decision-making. In this case, that influence applies to their working environment.

It is also worth clarifying the implications of the word culture in the context of this book. The reference will always be toward the organizations culture, which can be defined as values, norms, and traits shared within a group, resulting in predicable behavior and having an influence on decision-making (in other words, the way things get done here).

Even after your considerable effort and dedication in communicating your organizations priorities, you likely have only a few teammates who clearly understand and support your priorities in the manner in which you intended. You dont have to take my word for it. Instead, randomly sample five or ten associates from various levels and departments to see how they articulate and support the organizations goals, and what individual actions theyve identified to support those targets. What youll typically find is what you believed was clear in your teams mind is vague throughout the organization.

People hear what you say, filter it through their experiences, traits, and values, and further judge its importance by how you demonstrate support through your actions. The situation is made worse if your actions dont support your words, or you or your top leaders are flavor-of-the-month types, who read a new book or hear a new idea, and immediately set out in a new direction.

We, as a society, are more or less accustomed to being agreeable and avoiding confrontation. In addition, most employees will openly agree with the boss, even if they disagree privately. If you want to counteract this phenomenon, get your leadership team personally aligned, and motivate them to go above and beyond to reach objectives, you need more than the promise of good career paths and bonuses. You need a team that is encouraged to recognize and address those problems that are in direct conflict with your organizations clearly deployed and supported objectives.

Dont overestimate the transparency of your goals or underestimate the importance of your teams diverse mentality when leading change. If you want to lead breakthroughs, instead of only plodding through day-to-day business, create a plan for cultural transformation that moves you toward meeting your objectives.

Culturally On Plan will take you through the proven and practical rollout of getting the leaderships mindset aligned. This book is full of proven ways for getting inside peoples minds to create awareness, and then converting that awareness to tangible actions. Through this book, youll:

• Get everyone to understand the internal and external circumstances necessitating your strategic objectives.
• Gather input from leaders and identify their corresponding actions in support of your objectives.
• Identify the norms, traits, and behaviors that are essential to reaching your goals, especially your most demanding breakthrough objectives.
• Realize that most breakthroughs require awareness of your existing traits and behaviors; in other words, first objectively coming to terms with your mentality.
• Arrange for specialized training and access to self-assessments for your leadership team, so that they can 1) objectively identify their own traits and behavior, and 2) become aware of the basis of their decisions, whether intuitive or analytical.
• Begin crafting your Cultural Transformation Plan, with practical ideas for directing traits and behaviors in the desired direction.
• Create a culture to reach breakthrough objectives.

Im too pragmatic to only discuss problems and offer vague solutions. Having owned and transformed the culture of my own manufacturing organization, I find academic approaches interesting but not actionable. On the other hand, achieving more than incremental improvements requires a transformation of beliefs, which is really about cultural change. It would be difficult to develop a procedure or tool that reaches into the minds of managers and supervisors and transforms them into leaders. So, changing an organizations culture is about changing intangibles, norms that are woven into the fabric of the people who are creating and continuing the culture. The first step, then, is to create an appreciation and awareness of each persons mentalities, without being offensive.

The process described in this book is a proven system to facilitate a change that can happen inside every organization. This process can be compared to a sculling team avoiding an obstacle or passing the baton in a relay race: everyone must understand the strategy so that obstacles dont result in disaster and handovers can be optimized. This book is not about making major shifts in peoples mentalities, as that is a colossal task that would have a high probability of failure. Instead, well look at proven ways to create awareness of how people make decisions, see how they behave in various environments, and then utilize those mentalities where they best fit in our leadership and decision-making. Well start with a basic understanding of psychology in terms of the biases affecting decisionsthe intuitive versus analytical parts of the mind. Well also explore the extent to which this affects decision-making in cultural change.