Rol Fessenden gave us a very clear picture of the responsibility of
all of us for culture, but made it a particular responsibility of
bosses. Since we are presumably a group of people attempting to gain
useful insights into creating LOs, Rol's comments re culture are IMO
the central and most important issue for all of us. Rol also gave us
some very high quality examples of actions to form the best culture.
I totally agree with Rol, although I would stress that responsibility
for the culture of a company or any group within a company (no
matter how small that group may be) rests with that company's or
group's boss. And I agree with Rol that no matter what the overall
culture of the company or larger group is, a smaller group within the
whole can maintain a different culture if it's boss so requires.
I believe culture formation and maintenance to be a boss' primary
responsibility since all other things result from that task. Cultures
strongly impact processes, quality, customer service, policies,
profit, efficiency, sales and the like.
Any workplace must decide what to do and how to do it from the
mechanistic standpoint of what tools, procedures and the like by
which to create the product. Empowerment is all about getting
employees to make these decisions on their own as much as possible
so that they will "own" the work and feel full responsibility for it
rather than blame someone else for what they do. But the environment
in which this occurs is our culture and it can be supportive or
destructive or something in between.
Culture addresses how we go about doing the whats and hows of the
work, i. e. how industriously, carefully, cooperatively, honestly,
compassionately, responsibly, neatly, cleanly, forgivingly, openly,
introspectively, aggressively, respectfully, knowledgeably and the
like. It is called a culture because it affects the way an individual
does everything that they do. It is the common thread linking all
actions.
The issue of knowledgeably is an LO's main concern, but it is
strongly dependent on the others as are all of them, not independent
at all. I like to think of these "hows" as the values we use to do
our work only because this has worked out to be easy to communicate
to working levels. Bosses have much more difficulty with them since
they tend to philosophize rather than use the KISS principle of "keep
it simple stupid". But our experience has been that bosses will KISS
values as soon as they find out how powerful values are in aiding
empowered juniors to become exceptional performers.
Just 2 cents, Joan
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Joan Pomo The Finest Tools for Managing People
Simonton Associates Based on the book
jpomo@gate.net "How to Unleash the Power of People"
--"jpomo@gate.net" <jpomo@gate.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>