The First 90 Days (44 page)

Power.
Who do employees think can legitimately exercise authority and make decisions?

Value.
What actions and outcomes do employees believe create value? Value can take such forms as making profits, satisfying customers, promoting innovation, creating supportive working environments, and so forth.

How do you tease out fundamental assumptions? To understand assumptions about power, look at how decisions were made in the past. For example, who deferred to whom? To understand assumptions about value, look at how people spend their time and what energizes them most. For instance, do team members seem to focus most on forging positive, collaborative relationships with one another? Do they make customer service a priority? Do they spend most of their time trying to generate promising new product ideas? Is precision in execution valued?

Initiating Cultural Change

You can’t hope to do more than diagnose the culture and begin to work on changing some behaviors in the first 90

days. The following list sets forth five ways to begin cultural change. Whichever methods you use, aim for cultural changes that will align with your group’s strategy, structure, systems, and skills.

Change performance measures and incentives.
Change the metrics by which you judge success.

Then align employees’ objectives with those new measures. For instance, consider changing the balance between individual and group incentives. Does success require people to work closely and coordinate with one another— for example, in a new-product development team? If so, then put more weight on group incentives. Do people in your group operate independently—for example, in a sales unit? If so, and if their individual contributions to the business can be measured, then place more emphasis on individual incentives.

Set up pilot projects.
Give employees opportunities to experiment with new tools and behaviors. For example, set up a task force to experiment with an innovative approach to production or to tackle problems with distribution.

Bring in new people.
Judiciously bring in people from the outside to stimulate creative thinking and discipline among group members. A new person could be a substance expert in a key area—for example, new-product development or R&D management. Alternatively, you could bring in a process consultant— someone with a strong business background, but who focuses on running the process of

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group dialogue and supports your efforts to implement change.

Promote collective learning.
Expose group members to new ways of operating and thinking about the business—for instance, new perspectives on customers and competitors. One idea is to engage in some benchmarking of best-in-class organizations.

Engage in collective visioning.
Find ways to bring people together in creative ways specifically to envision new approaches to doing things. For example, schedule an off-site meeting to brainstorm ideas for improving existing processes.

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Getting Aligned

Draw on all this analysis to develop a plan for aligning your organization. If you are repeatedly frustrated in your efforts to get people to adopt more productive behaviors, step back and ask whether organizational misalignments might be creating problems.

ACCELERATION CHECKLIST

1. What are your provisional observations about misalignments among strategy, structure, systems, skills, and culture? How will you dig deeper to confirm or refine your impressions?

2. What decisions about customers, capital, capabilities, and commitments do you need to make?

How and when will you make these decisions?

3. What is your current assessment of the coherence of the organization’s strategy? Of its adequacy? What are your current thoughts about changing your organization’s strategy?

4. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s structure? What are you thinking about potential structural changes?

5. What are the core processes in your organization? How well are they performing? What are your priorities for process improvement?

6. What skills gaps and underutilized resources have you identified? What are your priorities for strengthening the skills base?

7. What are the functional and dysfunctional elements of the culture? What can you begin to do to change the culture?