1. Leadership and Culture
Session 22
Leadership and Culture

2. Learning Objectives
Explain the relevance of vision and performance in helping leaders clarify their strategic intent
Define and illustrate the value of passion and selection/development of new leaders as means to shape their organization’s culture
Define and explain what is meant by organizational culture, and how it is created, influenced, and changed
Explain two roles organizational leaders have in an organizational culture
Describe ways leaders influence organizational culture

3. Strategic Leadership: Embracing Change
The leadership challenge is to galvanize commitment among people within an organization as well as stakeholders outside the organization to embrace change and implement strategies intended to position the organization to succeed in a vastly different future

4. Clarifying Strategic Intent
Leaders help their company embrace change by charting strategic intent—a clear sense of where they want to lead the company and what results they expect to achieve
Leader’s vision—an articulation of a simple criterion or characterization of what the leader sees the company must become to establish and sustain global leadership

5. “I have vision and the rest of the west wears bifocals”
Butch Cassidy circa 1870

6. “By the end of this decade I commit this nation to putting a man on the moon”
John F. Kennedy 1961

7. “By the turn of the 20th century there will be more computers than televisions in the U.S.”
????

8. Recruiting and Developing Talented Operational Leadership
The New Leader: global managers, change agents, strategists, motivators, strategic decision makers, innovators, and collaborators if the business is to survive and prosper

9. Organizational Culture
Organizational culture is the set of important assumptions (often unstated) that members of an organization share in common
Every organization has its own culture: can be functional or dysfunctional.
Assumptions become shared assumptions through internalization among an organization’s individual members

10. Attributes of an Org’s Culture
Degree of Individual autonomy
Organizational Structure: groups/arranges workers
Level of Warmth/ Personal Support
Willingness of Employees to Identify as Member
Performance reward: Meritocracy or Not?
Conflict tolerance: Reward Good Tries or Just Performance
Risk tolerance: Ready, fire, aim; Do something even if it’s wrong. At least then we’ll know.

11. Origins of Culture
History
Environment
Staffing
Socialization

12. Culture and Competitive Advantage
Culture Must:
Generate Specific Value for the Firm
Be Rare
Not easily imitable

13. Shaping Organizational Culture
Passion, in a leadership sense, is a highly motivated sense of commitment to what you do and want to do
Leaders also use reward systems, symbols, and structure among other means to shape the organization’s culture

14. Primary Embedding Mechanisms
What leaders pay attention to, measure and control
Leaders reactions to critical incidents/organzational crises
Mentoring - Deliberate role modeling, teaching, coaching
Criteria for the allocation of rewards and status
Criteria for recruitment, selection, promotion, retirement and excommunication

15. Secondary Embedding Mechanisms
Organizational design and structure
Organizational systems and procedures
Design of physical space, facades, buildings
Stories about the important events and people
Formal statements of organizational philosophy, creeds, charters

16. Twitter: What they do
Ranked #1 for corporate culture based on employee surveys
Roof top meetings and friendly colleagues
Supportive and team-oriented environment
Company had a great mission statement
“make the world more connected and open”
Everyone generally did the right thing and acted with integrity

17. Twitter: How they do it
Management sessions led by Twitter CEO Dick Costolo
Regular employee satisfaction and idea-generating surveys
Helping employees learn five core skills, regardless of their position: communication, development, direction, change and collaboration
Encouraging continuous feedback from all employees at all levels

18. Google
Carefully examine each applicant, even though that is over 6,849 per day
Free breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Free health AND dental
Free haircuts, dry cleaning, and massages
Nap pods, videos games, foosball, and ping pong
Optimized lunch line waiting times and long tables to enable people to meet
Paid time off for new mothers
Diner Booths vs. Conference rooms

19. Facebook
Artist-in-residency program: allows employees to create large murals to get away from computers
“Bring your authentic self to work”
A woman put the woman first in the facebook logo
Interns created the rainbow filter
“Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem”
No one owns the culture. It is autonomous and decentralized. Everyone owns it together.
Provides a wide variety of extra curricular classes
Set up like Disneyland except everything is free to employees

20. What do they all have in common?
Value human emotions over quantitative results.
Offer many perks and benefits to allow the employees to focus on their jobs, not what they are going to make for lunch.
Highly innovative fields
Thousands of people apply each day

21. Shared Values (culture)
McKinsey 7-S Framework
Shared Values (culture)
Strategy
Staff
Systems
Style
Structure
Skills
(Organizational)
(leadership)
(Human Capital)

22. The Role of the Organizational Leader
The leader is the standard bearer, the personification, the ongoing embodiment of the culture, or the new example of what it should become
How the leader behaves and emphasizes those
aspects of being a leader become what all the
organization sees are “the important things to
do and value.”

23. Manage the Strategy-Culture Relationship
Link to mission
Maximize synergy
Manage around the culture
Reformulate strategy or culture

24. Remember: Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!

25. Culture, Structure, Leadership and Reward Systems should be Strategy Based

26. celebrate, point out, document, ritualize, measure and reward
celebrate, point out, document, ritualize, measure and reward behaviors/skills/actions that achieve efficiency, innovation, product quality or customer responsiveness.