Ed Batista

Organizational Effectiveness

What makes organizations effective?  For that matter, what do we even mean by effectiveness?  I've been giving these questions some thought recently and the following graphs are the result.  (Here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file, 75 KB.)

I love the Peters/Waterman/McKinsey "7s" Model, but we can extend it in two directions.  First, looking within an organization, if we reduce the model further and boil it down to its most essential core elements, I think we're left with People (or Staff, in 7s-speak) and Culture (an amalgam of Style, Skills and Shared Values.)  Second, if we look beyond the organization--if we ask why it exists and whether its fulfilling its purpose--we begin to assess its Impact, which includes not only profitability and financial sustainability but also the value created for any stakeholders, from a business's employees to a nonprofit's clients.

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My focus on these three elements is also due to their tightly interrelated nature--they all affect the other two in fundamental ways.

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I think one of the least-understood dynamics is the relationship that exists between an organization's people and its culture.  Sometimes it's difficult to even know where to draw a boundary between the two: Where do I stop and where do my contributions to the culture around me begin?  This may be why so many organizations operate without a clear understanding of their culture.  (And to be clear, every organization has a culture: "When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...")

But what's most important to recognize is the dialectical nature of this relationship.  An organization's founders create the initial culture, which then exerts its influence on them in turn.  Future colleagues are attracted to the pre-existing culture because in some way it meets their needs, and so they reinforce it.

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I've also focused on People and Culture because I see these elements as most closely connected to an organization's Impact.  This isn't to say that other elements don't matter--but ultimately people implement an organization's plans, and the culture in which they operate helps them or hinders them.  Talented people can overcome misguided strategies and suboptimal systems, but they can't outrun a dysfunctional culture (not for long, anyway.)

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And an organization's Impact--its ability to achieve its goals, fulfill its purpose and create value for stakeholders--directly affects its ability to attract and retain effective people and to build and sustain a high-performance culture.

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OK, having mapped out the relationships that exist among these three elements, what do they actually look like?  How do we define People, Culture and Impact in effective organizations?

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Here's my definition of effectiveness as it pertains to People.  I emphasize connections with Culture and Impact; interpersonal skills and accountability; self-development and growth.

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Here's my definition of an effective Culture.  I emphasize distributed leadership, continuous learning, openness, and decentralization.  The final quote from Tom Peters deserves further explanation: The 7s Model is sometimes divided into "Hard" elements (Strategy, Structure and Systems) and "Soft" elements (Skills, Staff, Style and Shared Values).  Our business culture tends to value the former and dismiss the latter, and Peters thinks this is entirely ass-backwards.  The "hard" stuff, from strategic plans to complex financial structures, is actually pretty fuzzy and surprisingly easy to fake.  The "soft" stuff--relationships, leadership, interpersonal skills (in short, culture)--is actually pretty resilient and surprisingly difficult to get right.  Hard is soft, soft is hard.

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I don't believe there's a universal definition of Impact--organizations define value-creation in different ways, and they're answerable to different sets of stakeholders.  But I do believe that effective organizations share the characteristics listed above, which enable them to understand, measure and communicate their impact, and to use that information to drive decision-making (cf. Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer's Hard Facts.)  At the same time, they reality-check regularly and don't let data dictate decisions.

Effective organizations also know when to give up and move on.  They take a pragmatic approach and never let sunk costs fuel persistence--instead, they've mastered the art of strategic quitting.

Finally, effective organizations have a vision of victory that they're driving toward.  What would it look like to win?  For some organizations (including many nonprofits), ultimate victory means putting themselves out of business because they've succeeded in fully and permanently meeting the need that they were created to fulfill.

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Again, if you're interested, here's the whole 9-slide PowerPoint file (75 KB).  As with the other models I post here, I consider this a work-in-progress that helps me make sense of the world, and I welcome any feedback to improve it or make it clearer.

Jonathan Knee on Sales, Analysis and Operations

In Must I Bank? on today's WSJ Opinion page (I'm not sure how long that link will remain outside their paywall), Jonathan Knee of Evercore Partners and Columbia Business School astutely narrows down the career options faced by MBAs (and by extension to most business professionals) to three primary paths: Sales, Analysis and Operations:

Like all service professions, investment banking is fundamentally a sales job. Individuals who feed on human interaction, and have natural empathy (sales is about putting yourself in your customer's shoes), do well in sales. Being good with numbers, often assumed to be the key to banking success, will be of little use in getting a big office with a view if you do not have sales aptitude.

Private equity, like hedge funds and other investing jobs, is essentially analytical. These are solitary professions, and one is judged on the quality of the analysis produced. The quality of this analysis is in turn assessed on highly quantifiable metrics – like whether the stock you recommended went up or if the investment in a private company you sponsored turned out well. If the classic sales person is a deeply social being, the typical analytical person is a bit of a loner.

Working at a start-up or any other company is an operational job. Operators must communicate and "sell," both internally and externally, to effectively function in their positions. Operators must also be "analytical" enough to attain the domain expertise needed to achieve credibility in their operating role.

But the defining characteristic of the operating role is a commitment to a continuing level of involvement with the organization's objectives. A sales person makes a sale and moves on. Analytical people make a call or do a trade, and reap whatever rewards that insight yields. Operators are in it for the long haul.

Most jobs fall into one of these three categories: sales, analytical or operational. The odds that the same person would prosper equally in more than one of these environments are low. The personal qualities that each position draws upon are simply too different. Some...introspection in order to identify which category would likely yield the greatest personal satisfaction is an excellent investment.

...Dedicating oneself to any profession...should not be undertaken lightly. Doing so would ignore the unique gifts that each of us has to offer. It would also meaningfully reduce our chances of ultimate personal fulfillment.

You could argue that Knee's three-headed framework is an oversimplification.  But what I find useful is how many career paths can be boiled down to one of Knee's three options and how the framework's simplicity forces us to ask whether we truly understand the essence of a given profession.

I also think Knee's observation that banking is actually a misunderstood sales field (in which analytical skills are helpful but not sufficient) is a comment on our business culture's habitual failure to appreciate the importance of sales (and the interpersonal and relational skills that make a successful salesperson).  As an MBA working in a business school, I see this attitude reflected in how we develop future business leaders--strategy and finance are held in the highest esteem, while sales is something of an afterthought.

In my experience as an organizational leader, I found that operational and analytical skills were useful, but sales skills were essential.  The organization's effectiveness was impacted by my ability to analyze options and to execute operational plans, but its very survival depended on my ability to sell--to build relationships and convince others to invest their time, energy, faith and money.  As we grew, I hired people whose operational and analytical skills were stronger than mine would ever be--but everything started with that ability to sell.

I benefited greatly from the operational and analytical education I got in business school, but I suspect I would have been a better leader after graduation had there been a greater focus on sales, relationships and interpersonal skills, i.e. "soft" skills.

Someone who really gets this is Tom Peters.  From a November 2007 post (his first-ever in all caps, apparently, reflecting his rage):

BOB WATERMAN AND I, IN 1980, DEVELOPED A MANTRA IN THOSE DAYS OF YORE WHEN "STRATEGY [STRATEGIC PLANS] WAS EVERYTHING." WE SAID:

HARD IS SOFT.
SOFT IS HARD.

THE READILY-MANIPULABLE NUMBERS ARE THE TRUE "SOFT STUFF."

THE RELATIONSHIPS-LEADERSHIP-"CULTURE"-"ACTION BIAS" [OR NOT] ARE THE TRUE "HARD STUFF."

I'm hopeful that Stanford's new curriculum and its emphasis on experiential education and leadership development (soft stuff) is a step in the right direction.

The Fundamental Attribution Error Meets the No Asshole Rule

When I studied Organizational Behavior in grad school with Roberto Fernandez (pictured on the left), one of the most important concepts he taught was the Fundamental Attribution Error, which he described as:

Ascribing causality to personal characteristics when causality actually lies with the situation.

This bias, named by Stanford psychologist Lee Ross, leads us to award far more credit (or blame) to individuals for successes (or failures) than they deserve.  We see it at work most clearly with high-profile, archetypal leaders--presidents, CEOs, coaches, quarterbacks--who are hailed as geniuses when their organizations accomplish their goals and derided as bums when their organizations stumble.

But the bias is at work in ordinary interactions with our peers and colleagues as well.  We view those interactions through a lens that overemphasizes others' personal characteristics and underemphasizes the systems within which we operate.  As a result, we tend to ascribe positive characteristics to others when those interactions go well, and we tend to ascribe negative characteristics to others when those interactions are unpleasant.

This isn't to say that people are all the same, and different interpersonal experiences are solely the result of systemic factors.  Some people truly are wonderful, and others truly are, well, assholes.  But awareness of the fundamental attribution error helps us to expand our frame of reference, to question the accuracy of our perceptions and (as a result) to select interpersonal strategies that are likely to be more effective in future interactions.

I've been thinking about the fundamental attribution error recently in the wake of an unpleasant interaction with another person at work.  I came away thinking, "Wow, what an asshole" (and perhaps he did as well.)  After further reflection I realized that 1) there were a number of things I could have done differently to improve the outcome, and 2) there were a number of systemic factors at work that affected the other person's response to the situation.

But despite these efforts to hold myself accountable and take a broad-minded view of the other person, it's hard not to wonder whether my initial response was right even it if was biased: Maybe he is an asshole.  And this line of thought led me back to The No Asshole Rule, one of the most thought-provoking and entertaining books on organizational life I've ever read, by Bob Sutton (pictured on the right above).

Sutton describes two tests he uses to determine "whether a person is acting like an asshole":

Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the "target" feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized or belittled by the person?  In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself?

Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

By these measures, my counterpart qualifies.  But Sutton goes on to make an important distinction between "temporary" assholes and "certified" ones:

Nearly all of us act like assholes at times... It is far harder to qualify as a certified asshole: a person needs to display a persistent pattern, to have a history of episodes that end with one "target" after another feeling belittled, put down, humiliated, disrespected, oppressed, de-energized and generally worse about themselves.  Psychologists make the distinction between states (fleeting feelings, thoughts and actions) and traits (enduring personality characteristics) by looking for consistency across places and times--if someone consistently takes actions that leave a trail of victims in their wake, they deserve to be called certified assholes.

And I just don't have enough data to draw a meaningful conclusion in this case.  Maybe the systemic factors I'm aware of are even more influential than I realize.  Maybe there are other factors I'm not aware of at all.  Maybe my own missteps are to blame.  Maybe he's a great guy, and I just caught him on a bad day.

It hasn't been a pleasant experience, but it has been instructive.  Reflecting on what I learned from Roberto Fernandez a decade ago, I'm inspired to look beyond my gut-level response and take a larger view of the situation, give the other person the benefit of the doubt, inquire into my own culpability and see the ways in which systemic factors shape our responses to others.  And reflecting on what I've learned from Bob Sutton, I realize that an awareness of the fundamental attribution error doesn't mean that my intuitive response is wrong--it may well be right, but only time and more data will tell.

At the very least, I've learned some valuable lessons about myself and my work environment, I have a heightened awareness of issues I should be paying closer attention to, and I'm better prepared to handle future situations like this one.  Hey, no one said experiential learning was always going to be fun and games.

Three Questions with Mark McGuinness

Mark McGuinness is an executive coach based in London who specializes in working with artists and creative professionals and who writes regularly at Wishful Thinking.  He's also the most tech-savvy coach I know, and he's found a number of innovative ways to integrate technology with his interpersonal work.  As another fan of technology who happened to spend two years in art school as an undergrad, I was thrilled when Mark agreed to do a Three Questions interview with me--thanks, Mark!

1) You describe yourself as "a poet and a business coach," but which came first? Were you writing when you saw an unmet need for coaching among artists and creative professionals, or did you begin to write as a form of personal expression to complement your coaching practice?

Poetry came first. And it will last longest. I never planned on being a coach, I just wanted to write poetry. I got interested in hypnosis as a way of tapping into creativity, and as I like to do things properly I trained as a hypnotherapist. I found myself being consulted by writers who were stuck on their latest novel and actors with stage nerves - they were great fun to work with, and of all the clients I worked with they seemed to get the most out of the sessions. So I started looking for ways of working with more artists and creatives, and developing it as a niche. Most of them weren't really looking for therapy, just a way of kick-starting their creativity, so I started offering professional coaching instead of therapy.

After a few years another coach invited me to do some work with him at Vodafone, which introduced me to the world of coaching in business. One assignment led to another and I ended up doing a lot of work with various organisations, mostly helping managers to become better coaches for their teams. After a few years of that, I decided to put the creative and business coaching together and focus on companies in the creative industries - advertisting, marketing, TV, computer games, web development etc.

I felt reasonably confident of my coaching skills, having been doing it for around 10 years, but I wanted to get more of a sense of the big picture of the industry sector. So I took the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises at the Unversity of Warwick, which was a fantastic course - we studied the usual core business topics like strategy, marketing and organisation theory, alongside intellectual property law, theories of creativity and theories of the creative economy. A great mixture of inspiration and business knowledge, that made me look at my business and my poetry in a different light.

2) Your recent e-book on Creative Management for Creative Teams does a great job of explaining coaching, but I'm also curious about how working with your particular clientele affects your approach. What do you think you might do differently as a coach because of your focus on creative people?

Well two things I might do differently are not to wear a suit and not to call myself a coach! It's probably no surprise that creative types don't feel comfortable with suits, but I discovered through my work and via my MA research dissertation that a lot of people in creative businesses really don't like the word 'coaching'. They associate it with corporate management-speak, so the image doesn't work for them at all. But when we get down to work, the label doesn't matter, we're too absorbed in looking at the situation and finding new options.

Image aside, a lot of what I do with my creative industries clients is no different to what I would do with any other client. People are people after all. There are a lot of issues around communication, collaboration, teamwork, management and generally dealing with other people that are the same, whatever industry you're working in.

The obvious area that is different is working on the creative process, which we can approach from several different angles. Sometimes we focus on fine-tuning creative thinking strategies. Sometimes people have difficulty getting into the right state of mind for creative flow, so with my background in hypnotherapy I can help them find the right triggers for a particular emotional state. Time management doesn't sound like a particularly creative topic, but I show people that if you don't manage your workload it can play havoc with your creativity. Other times we might focus on the craft element - using your critical faculty to appraise and revise your work. And for me the creative process doesn't end until you've reached an audience with your work, so sometimes we're focused on presenting it to others (boss, client, public) in an engaging way.

Another nice thing about working with creatives is sharing what I've learned from my own practice as a poet. I find that a lot of clients are quite intrigued by poetry, so it can be very fruitful to look for the common ground between poetry and graphic design or singing opera or writing a film script or whatever it happens to be. Clients seem to find that helpful and it's fascinating for me - I get a window on all these creative worlds that I can never enter properly, but I can have a look inside as a visitor and see some of the amazing things people are doing.

3) One of the reasons I've enjoyed your work is your effective use of technology--photos from Flickr, a Facebook group, a Tumblr link blog, prominent links to your feed, etc.  I wish more people in the field did the same, but I know that many coaches and consultants are daunted by the prospect.  How do you decide which new tools are worth using, and how do you implement and support them?

I discovered blogging by reading Seth Godin's e-book Who's There? (PDF, 2MB) and it was such an exciting idea there wasn't a decision to make - I was going to do this and I was prepared to learn all the techy stuff I needed to get it up and running. So I immersed myself in the blogging world out of sheer enthusiasm, reading sites like ProBlogger and CopyBlogger and devouring what they were teaching.

A lot of the other tools came about by seeing cool things on other people's blogs and thinking 'How do they do that?' and investigating from there. These days time is a big factor for me. E.g. I wanted to do a links blog for a while but looked around for something that wouldn't add to my workload. I was already bookmarking pages on Delicious, so I wanted a Firefox extension that would allow me to simultaneously post to Delicious, my Tumblr links blog and StumbleUpon - I found the Mahalo share extension [for Firefox] which does a great job. It means I'm creating a whole new blog without any extra work - result!  [On a related note, see Mark's e-book on Time Management for Creative People.]

If you're thinking of taking the plunge with blogging and social media, the key thing to remember is that it's not about technology, it's about people. That's why they call it social media - the tools are designed to connect people and they do a great job, I've met loads of great people since I started blogging, and the tools are getting more user-friendly as they develop.

Bonus Personal Question: Your first New Year's Resolution for 2008 was maintaining a daily meditation practice.  How's it going?

So far so good! I've settled into a rhythm of meditating first thing in the morning for 15-20 minutes and now it feels like the normal thing to do. I'll admit there have been a few days I really didn't feel like sitting, but I found myself thinking 'Well, you promised your readers you would do it - what are you going to tell them?'. And sat down. So there you have it - the power of blogging!

Joel Peterson on Organizational Culture

Joel Peterson, Vice-Chair of JetBlue, investor and serial entrepreneur, spoke on organizational culture at the Conference on Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few weeks ago:

When you think about topics to talk to entrepreneurs about, culture is one of the last ones you typically think about, because you're in the business of getting something started, it's chaotic [and] the last thing you're thinking about is culture-building.  It's just the most irrelevant topic...and I'm going to try to convince you that it's not as irrelevant as you think.  I was teaching a similar...course a few years back, and I...called on one of the entrepreneurs in the audience and asked him about culture, and he said, "We don't have any culture in our business..."  Well, you have a culture.  When you've decided you don't have a culture, you've got one...  The question is: Do you want to influence it or not?  Do you really want to have a hand in shaping it or not?  You are going to have it, either inadvertently or with some planning and some forethought.

I imagine few readers of this site need to be convinced about the importance of organizational culture, but it's still inspiring to hear a financial heavyweight like Peterson make the case.  (I took a class with Peterson as a student at the GSB, and I've written twice before about thought-provoking concepts that I took away from his lectures.)

Grant McCracken on the Elements of Reinvention

When we sit down to make change happen, when we seek to reinvent our organizations (and ourselves), what dynamics characterize that process?

Grant McCracken has come up with a short list based on his recent work on a "reinvention exercise" with "a large American corporation."  I intend to refer back to this regularly in my own work, so I'm pulling out the key phrases that caught my attention, but you really should read the whole thing:

1. Furiously Framing and Reframing

...a really liquid kind of problem solving.  We are are framing and reframing and reframing yet again...until the wisdom of this little crowd becomes apparent.

2. Tagging

Vivid pictures and phrases get the job done...  Good ideas have no hope of surviving to maturity and adoption unless (or until) they are well tagged.

3. Pattern Migration

There are wonderful moments when someone will say, "look, here's something we know about this context.  I wonder if we could transfer this to another problem set."

4. Scaling Up, Scaling Down

At one moment, we were dealing with the biggest possible problem sets in the broadest possible ways.  The next, we have zeroed down to a very particular problem.

5. Messier Models

We saw people insisting on messier models in order to honor some of the messiness in the world in the model.  The bigger point to make here is that as the world gets messier, more multiple, more various and changeable, discourse about change is beginning to take on these structural properties.

6. Acknowledging Fear

For the first time, I saw people building models of process that acknowledge the emotional difficulties inherent in the change making process.  Everyone always feels the pain of entertaining new ideas and having to give up old verities, but this used to be a very private condition.  Now people are openly acknowledging it.

7. New Language like "Chunking"

When problem sets are really messing and heard to read, "chunking" is useful.  It's a way of saying let's call this [thing] a something. Because we are chunking we are not obliged to say or to know what it means.  We are just saying "there's something here we need to look at."

8. Porousness

People are now prepared to acknowledge that the corporation is no longer a free standing, discrete entity.  It is customary to hear people dealing with the fact that the corporation has loose boundaries.

Grant's conclusion after coming up with this list?

All of these new intellectual inclinations and practices suggest I think that the corporation is learning to live with dynamism by learning how to practice dynamism.

Three of these dynamics jump out at me and seem closely intertwined: tagging, messier models, and acknowledging fear.  Grant's reference to the importance of tagging ideas reminds me of Howard Gardner's emphasis on "representational redescriptions" in the influence process:

A change of mind becomes convincing to the extent that it lends itself to representation in a number of different forms, with these forms reinforcing each other...

"Messy models" reminds me of Pema Chödrön's embrace of imperfection:

[T]rying to tie up all the loose ends and get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience.  There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride... Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

And I'm particularly struck by Grant's inclusion of fear as a key factor to be addressed (or at least acknowledged) in any reinvention or change management process.  (He goes a step further and references any "emotional difficulty" in the text, but I agree that "fear" made for a better headline.)  Our inability to sense, legitimize and express our emotions in the workplace creates a huge gap between our collective and our individual experiences. For example, I'm scared or angered by your proposal, but I can't effectively communicate those feelings at work, so you never truly understand my position--and we're left wondering why we make so little progress!

A link I see among these three dynamics is an acceptance of the fact that our brains work in ways that are often described as "irrational" (or at the very least run counter to many notions of rationality):

Ideas stick when they're made vivid and colorful--and even the best ideas will die if not made sticky.

The world is messy and complicated--and models that incorporate the mess are actually more useful to us than reductive, straightforward ones.

And we're scared and angry--a lot!--and pretending those feelings aren't there doesn't make them go away.

Much of my work as a coach and group facilitator involves helping people better understand and express feelings that typically get ignored in a professional setting, and Grant's observations suggest to me that this is precisely what we need to do more of when we're involved in any change-making process.

Logrolling: I encourage you to pre-order Grant's new book, which is due out in May, but be warned that I consider him a friend and an inspiration.

Photo by Pop!Tech 2004. © All rights reserved.

The Influence Pyramid

My last post on the nature of interpersonal power coincided with some thinking I've been doing on influence (which, of course, isn't quite the same thing.)  That work resulted in the model shown here, which is an attempt to understand not the conceptual basis of influence, a la Robert Cialdini, but a larger process that begins with a decision to influence, concludes with an actual attempt to influence, and is layered throughout with Argyris-style learning loops.

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I. Foundations of Influence

The ability to influence 1) starts with a choice to be powerful, 2) builds upon an awareness of our strengths, weaknesses and capacity to change, 3) relies upon an understanding of conceptual models of influence 4) which we translate into specific tools and techniques that 5) must be tested empirically and repeatedly:

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II. Influence Learning Loops

Practical experience leads to learning at ever-deeper levels: 1) refined execution of tools and techniques; 2) strategic application of conceptual models; 3) a more accurate sense of self via feedback and reflection; and ultimately 4) a belief structure that supports our choice to be powerful:

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Here's a 3-slide PowerPoint file of the graphics above (49 KB).  This model is a rough work-in-progress, to be sure, and I'd be grateful for any feedback and critiques.  That said, I do like the way it integrates A) a deeper sense of personal empowerment (or lack thereof) and beliefs about power that support or inhibit our efforts to be influential with B) a more cognitive awareness of our interpersonal impact and the concepts, tools and techniques that underlay contemporary "theories of influence."

Continued thanks to Patricia Day Williams, whose "Self-Empowerment, Awareness and Choice" in the Reading Book for Human Relations Training got me thinking about all this at a much deeper level.

Reading List

I was recently asked by a colleague to recommend some books on executive coaching, and the process of drawing up that list got me thinking about all the books that have had a major impact on my professional development.  This list isn't exhaustive--and by focusing on books per se it omits many articles, papers and chapters that have had an even greater impact than some of these books--but it hits many of the high points.  I may return later to add items or make comments or to sub-divide the list into categories, but at the moment I find that an alphabetized list strikes a nice balance between order and (seeming) chaos:

The Answer to How is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block

Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell

Changing for Good, James Prohaska et al

The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke et al

The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub

Co-Active Coaching, Laura Whitworth et al

Comfortable with Uncertainty, Pema Chödrön

The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Kerry Patterson et al

Exuberance: The Passion for Life, Kay Redfield Jamison

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time, Susan Scott

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge

The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, Peter Senge et al

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, Peter Block

The Flawless Consulting Fieldbook and Companion, Peter Block et al

Getting Things Done, David Allen

Harvard Business Review On Managing Yourself

Harvard Business Review On Women in Business

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini

The Inner Game of Work, Tim Gallwey

Management Challenges for the 21st Century, Peter Drucker

The Masterful Coaching Fieldbook, Robert Hargrove

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

More Than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson, Rich Teerlink and Lee Ozley

The Neurotic Behavior of Organizations, Uri Merry and George Isaac Brown

The No Asshole Rule, Bob Sutton

The Organizational Behavior Reader, Joyce Osland et al

Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership, David Bradford and Allan Cohen

Reading Book for Human Relations Training, Alfred Cooke et al

Start Where You Are, Pema Chödrön

Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton

The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes, William Bridges

What Should I Do with My Life?, Po Bronson

When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön

Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (free download), Andy Goodman

Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones

The World According to Peter Drucker, Jack Beatty

Work Matters: Women Talk About Their Jobs and Their Lives, Sara Friedman

Working with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman

Photo by joguldi.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Geert Hofstede on the Dimensions of Cultural Difference

Some recent reading (James Hunt & Joseph Weintraub's The Coaching Manager and Terry Bacon & Karen Spear's Adaptive Coaching) led to further thinking about the dimensions of cultural difference: What are the ways in which cultures differ?  How do we measure these differences?  And how do these differences affect our interpersonal relationships?

Hunt and Weintraub referenced a paper by Geert Hofstede on "Cultural Constraints in Management Theories," first published in 1993 in the Academy of Management's journal Executive (now known as Perspectives), and cursory research suggests that Hofstede has been the leading thinker on this subject since the 1970s.  (A full copy of Hofstede's paper is available online.)

Hofstede joined IBM in 1965 as a trainer in the international Executive Development Department, and his work over the next 15 years formed the basis for his 1980 book Culture's Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values (republished most recently in 2003 as Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations across Nations.)

Hofstede initially identified four primary dimensions of cultural difference and subsequently added a fifth on the basis of further research conducted by Michael Bond.  Here's a quick overview of these dimensions of difference (definitions excerpted from Geert-Hofstede.com and from Hofstede's 1993 "Cultural Constraints..." paper):

• Power Distance
  The degree of inequality among people which the population of a country considers as normal: from relatively equal (that is, small power distance) to extremely unequal (large power distance).  The extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. This represents inequality (more versus less), but defined from below, not from above. It suggests that a society's level of inequality is endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders.


• Individualism
  The degree to which people in a country prefer to act as individuals rather than as members of groups.  On the individualist side we find societies in which the ties between individuals are loose: everyone is expected to look after him/herself and his/her immediate family. On the collectivist side, we find societies in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. The word 'collectivism' in this sense has no political meaning: it refers to the group, not to the state.


• Masculinity
  The degree to which tough values like assertiveness, performance, success and competition, which in nearly all societies are associated with the role of men, prevail over tender values like the quality of life, maintaining warm personal relationships, service, care for the weak, and solidarity, which in nearly all societies are more associated with women's roles. Women's roles differ from men's roles in all countries; but in tough societies, the differences are larger than in tender ones.


• Uncertainty Avoidance
  The degree to which people in a country prefer structured over unstructured situations. Structured situations are those in which there are clear rules as to how one should behave. These rules can be written down, but they can also be unwritten and imposed by tradition. In countries that score high on uncertainty avoidance, people tend to show more nervous energy, while in countries that score low, people are more easy-going. A (national) society with strong uncertainty avoidance can be called rigid; one with weak uncertainty avoidance, flexible. In countries where uncertainty avoidance is strong a feeling prevails of "what is different, is dangerous." In weak uncertainty avoidance societies, the feeling would rather be "what is different, is curious."


• Long-Term Orientation
  Values associated with Long Term Orientation are thrift and perseverance; values associated with Short Term Orientation are respect for tradition, fulfilling social obligations, and protecting one's 'face'. Both the positively and the negatively rated values of this dimension are found in the teachings of Confucius, the most influential Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C.; however, the dimension also applies to countries without a Confucian heritage.

Both Hunt & Weintraub and Bacon & Spear discuss a related dimension which appears to be rooted in Hofstede's work:

• High vs. Low Context
  (Hunt & Weintraub) The influence of context involves the degree to which protocol and tradition dictate how communication should proceed.  In high-context cultures, greater emphasis is placed on protocol, and communication tends to move from the general to the specific.  In low-context cultures, communication tends to be more to the point, an approach that can come across to individuals from high-context cultures as rude.
  
  (Bacon & Spear) Some cultures, mostly Western, are low-context cultures that practice explicitness and directness in their communication style.  They depend on the people in the immediate communication situation to convey meaning and create a unique context.  The purpose and outcome of the communication--the transaction--take precedence over the interpersonal relationships involved... High-context cultures, on the other hand, prize subtlety and indirectness... They depend on a shared cultural context to carry meaning.  Instead of getting down to business, high-context cultures tend to rely first on existing relationships outside the business arena so that shared understandings make explicitness unnecessary.  Or they take time to build relationships of the participants are strangers--often maddening amounts of time to a transactionally minded, low-context person.  To a low-context culture, this style of communication can look undisciplined, evasive, untrustworthy, uninformed (dare we say "stupid"?), or just plain lazy and a waste of precious time.  To a high-context culture, the explicitness of low-context communication can look boorish, pushy, patronizing, indelicate, distrustful, unnecessarily detailed ("stupid"?), and insensitive.

In addition, Bacon & Spear discuss two other dimensions of difference:

• Achievement vs. Ascription
  In ascription-oriented societies, factors such as age, gender, social connections and social class, family background, and religious or spiritual position define status... These societies define status based on who the person is.  On the other hand, achievement-oriented societies tend to define status based on what the person has achieved: educational credentials, both in terms of degrees earned and where they came from; stature in the business hierarchy; amount of experience.  In actuality, these two distinctions can be tightly intertwined... Some "ascriptions" are harder to cross than others... Likewise, even the most achievement-oriented culture still looks for certain markers of ascription: the right references, the right schools, the right dress, even the right physique.  There is a tendency to think of ascription-oriented cultures as traditional and achievement-oriented cultures as more modern and progressive, but it is more useful to see how sources of ascribed value change and continue to influence all societies.


• Objective vs. Subjective
  Western culture conceives of itself as having a rational, empirical, objective relationship with the world... For someone bound up in objectivist ways of knowing and interacting, emotions simply cloud the issue and waste time... For a person for whom a subjective emotional response is a gauge of something worth attending to, something worth putting your heart in, detached objectivity signals disengagement or unimportance, coldness, and distance.

I found it helpful to have these definitions clearly articulated; they give me a useful frame of reference when considering the ways in which cultural differences could be at work in a given interaction.  But what really brought these concepts to life for me was Hofstede's research on the United States--again, quotes are from Geert-Hofstede.com:

There are only seven (7) countries in the Geert Hofstede research that have Individualism (IDV) as their highest Dimension: USA (91), Australia (90), United Kingdom (89), Netherlands and Canada (80), and Italy (76). [Note: The world average is 43.]

The high Individualism (IDV) ranking for the United States indicates a society with a more individualistic attitude and relatively loose bonds with others. The populace is more self-reliant and looks out for themselves and their close family members.

I've always held individual autonomy and freedom of choice to be among the most important values; in fact, much of my work revolves around helping others be more fulfilled and effective by realizing their individual identities more fully.  And while I've certainly been aware that these beliefs are culturally conditioned, it's striking to realize that I live in the most individualistic society on the planet.  This knowledge doesn't necessarily alter my values, but it puts  them in a useful context.

The next highest Hofstede Dimension is Masculinity (MAS) with a ranking of 62, compared with a world average of 50. This indicates the country experiences a higher degree of gender differentiation of roles. The male dominates a significant portion of the society and power structure. This situation generates a female population that becomes more assertive and competitive, with women shifting toward the male role model and away from their female role.

Again, although I'm well-aware that my attitudes about gender roles are culturally conditioned, it's interesting and useful to know that U.S. society is substantially more male-dominated than the rest of the world.

The United States was included in the group of countries that had the Long Term Orientation (LTO) Dimension added. The LTO is the lowest Dimension for the US at 29, compared to the world average of 45. This low LTO ranking is indicative of the societies' belief in meeting its obligations and tends to reflect an appreciation for cultural traditions.

I actually find this piece of data confusing.  It's hard to believe that the U.S. is much more appreciative of cultural traditions than the rest of the world, particularly when our Uncertainty Avoidance ranking--see below--is so low, suggesting a high level of comfort with change and ambiguity.  (Perhaps I'm simply misunderstanding the concept of Long-Term Orientation and its implications for tradition.)

The next lowest ranking Dimension for the United States is Power Distance (PDI) at 40, compared to the world average of 55. This is indicative of a greater equality between societal levels, including government, organizations, and even within families. This orientation reinforces a cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural environment.

The last Geert Hofstede Dimension for the US is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), with a ranking of 46, compared to the world average of 64. A low ranking in the Uncertainty Avoidance Dimension is indicative of a society that has fewer rules and does not attempt to control all outcomes and results. It also has a greater level of tolerance for a variety of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs.

As with Individuality, Hofstede's research on these final two dimensions resonate deeply with me.  I feel that I share my culture's low Power Distance and Uncertainty Avoidance and as a result have a clearer understanding of just why I feel at home in the United States.  At the same time, having this objective view of my culture allows me to see it from a new perspective--it's suddenly visible to me in a way that it wasn't before, and I have a better understanding of myself as a product of my culture.

This brief exploration of the dimensions of cultural difference doesn't address the third (and possibly most important) question I raised above: How do these differences affect our interpersonal relationships?  But any answer to that question has to start with a better understanding of our own culture and the ways in which it has shaped us as individuals, and by knowing more about U.S. culture and its impact on me, I feel much better prepared to engage in a discussion with someone from another culture about our mutual differences and their collective impact on our ability to understand each other and work together.

UPDATE: Small world [heh]--the day before I wrote the post above, Stephanie West Allen cited Hofstede in a post on cultural differences and neuroscience:

Neurocience research is showing us that the brains of people in different cultures are not the same. Because brains differ from culture to culture, so will resistance to change. Also varying will be how conflict is viewed—and resolved. Here are just a couple of examples of the research on brains and culture.

Recently scientists in Singapore and Illinois compared how the brains of East Asians and of Westerners reacted to visual stimuli. They found that the older East Asian's brains responded differently from the brains of the older Westerners. In an article "Culture sculpts neural response to visual stimuli, new research indicates" principal investigator Dr. Denise Park is quoted as saying:

These are the first studies to show that culture is sculpting the brain.

In another study, researchers looked at how native English speakers and native Chinese speakers did arithmetic. From an Associated Press article about the research:

Simple arithmetic was easily done by both groups, but they used different parts of the brain...

I've expressed some concerns about how neuroscientific findings are applied--I think there's a powerful contemporary desire to reduce the brain to quasi-mechanical terms, and as a result we tend to privilege neuroscience and dismiss the "outdated" humanism of thinkers like Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow from the 1950s and 60s.  But that said, it's clear that anyone with an interest in understanding human behavior must integrate neuroscience into their perspective and view it as a complementary discipline (which seems to be West Allen's approach.)  Thanks, Stephanie.

Forces for Good and High-Impact Practices

What common practices are shared by "high-impact" nonprofits?  And can organizations in other industries benefit from these same practices?  Leslie Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant tackle the first question in their soon-to-be-published Forces for Good (due out October 19), and based on an excerpt that came out today in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, it's clear that the answer to the second question is an unqualified yes.

In the SSIR article, Crutchfield and McLeod Grant discuss the six high-impact practices that make up the heart of their book, and in my opinion all of these concepts have relevance beyond the nonprofit sector.

Their key theme is that what's happening outside an organization is more important than what's happening inside, and yet so many of our efforts aimed at improving effectiveness are focused on activities within an organization's formal boundaries.  (And not, I suspect, because that's where we can have the greatest impact, but because that's what's easiest.)

Here's are the six high-impact practices identified by Crutchfield and McLeod Grant, with brief excerpts from the SSIR article and my interpretation of how these concepts could be applied more broadly:

1. Serve and Advocate

High-impact organizations may start out providing great programs, but they eventually realize that they cannot achieve large-scale social change through service delivery alone. So they add policy advocacy to acquire government resources and to change legislation. Other nonprofits start out by doing advocacy and later add grassroots programs to supercharge their strategy. Ultimately, all high-impact organizations bridge the divide between service and advocacy. They become good at both. And the more they serve and advocate, the more they achieve impact.

So what's the equivalent of "advocacy" outside the nonprofit sector?  Lobbying.  Just take a stroll through the Lobbying Database to see how much "high-impact" companies are spending.  Microsoft has topped $8 million annually for the last 4 years, and Google went from $200K in 2005 to over $800K last year.  I'm not saying this results in good public policy, but it's reality.

2. Make Markets Work

High-impact nonprofits have learned that tapping into the power of self-interest and the laws of economics is far more effective than appealing to pure altruism. No longer content to rely on traditional notions of charity, or to see business as an enemy, these nonprofits find ways to work with markets and help companies "do good while doing well."

Not much to add here.

3. Inspire Evangelists

High-impact nonprofits build strong communities of supporters who help them achieve their larger goals. They value volunteers, donors, and advisers not only for their time, money, and guidance, but also for their evangelism. To inspire supporters' commitment, these nonprofits create emotional experiences that help connect supporters to the group's mission and core values.

What jumps out at me is the emphasis on "emotional experiences."  Is your organization creating any emotional experiences for your supporters?  And if not, why would you expect them to evangelize on your behalf?

4. Nurture Nonprofit Networks

Although most nonprofits pay lip service to collaboration, many of them really see other groups as competition for scarce resources. But high impact organizations help their peers succeed, building networks of nonprofit allies and devoting remarkable time and energy to advancing their fields.

This is more industry-specific.  If you're in a mature industry and focused on stealing market share, collaborating doesn't make as much sense.  But if you're in an emerging industry and growing the overall market is a quicker and cheaper path to success, you need to take a broader view of the competition.  A zero-sum perspective will limit everyone's growth potential.

5. Master the Art of Adaptation

High-impact nonprofits are exceptionally adaptive, modifying their tactics as needed to increase their success. They have responded to changing circumstances with one innovation after another. Along the way, they've made mistakes and have even produced some flops. But unlike many nonprofits, they have also mastered the ability to listen, learn, and modify their approach on the basis of external cues.

I love the phrase "external cues."  What cues are you picking up from beyond the boundaries of your organization?  But listening is just the beginning--what are you doing with that information?

6. Share Leadership

The leaders of these 12 organizations all exhibit charisma, but they don't have oversized egos. They know that they must share power in order to be stronger forces for good. They distribute leadership within their organizations and throughout their external nonprofit networks, empowering others to lead.

I'm reminded of this comment on from Bill George: "To me, the great leaders today are able to align people around a sense of purpose and values and get that consistency all around the globe, and then empower other people to step up and lead.  And I've found that in organizations that are really effective at generating leaders, there are thousands of leaders because people empower them to step up and lead."