Getting Unstuck

Does your organization feel stuck? Is morale down? Does it feel like your organization has fossilized into an inflexible, unwieldy, impossible-to-change entity? If so, I hope you take some encouragement from this photo. Even solid rock can be sculpted into new shapes with persistence over time. 

From a cultural perspective, there can be many different reasons that an organization can be stuck. National cultures that prioritize hierarchical structures and feel a need to try and control the unknown can slow change to a crawl. I was recently in a conversation with two wonderful colleagues who both grew up in Uruguay. Uruguay has a score of 61 out of 100 on our Power Distance (PDI) scale, a score of 98 out of 100 on Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), and a 26 out of 100 on Long-term Orientation (LTO). So although their PDI isn’t as high as in many other cultures, the 98 on UAI combined with their 61 on PDI and the 26 on LTO paint a picture of a society that values order, well established hierarchies, and a focus on how things have been done in the past. 

While national culture and organizational culture are different things, national culture tends to influence how businesses are set up and which values guide process. One of the colleagues told a story about a time she was working at a business in Uruguay and noticed that one of the processes that was used by management was woefully inefficient. She had come up with a new way to structure the approach to make it more effective. When she mentioned this to her supervisor, she was severely chastised. Her supervisor reacted by saying, “Who do you think you are? We have done it this way for the last 15 years. Why would you think you could possibly have a better idea?” So this organization preferred to rely on past practices that were known and trusted rather than risk making a change; it was stuck. And while I do not mean to imply that all Uruguayan businesses work in this way, we do see that cultures with a similar profile of high scores on PDI and UAI tend to view process as more important than result, and that cultures with low PDI and low UAI tend to focus more on result than on process, often remarking, “Why does it matter how I do my work if I get the correct result?”

How can an organization get unstuck? One way to begin is by conducting a thorough review of your business’s practices. When we work with clients who feel stuck, we focus on their strategic intent along six lines, or factors, in combination with the context of their industry. What makes for a good, safe nuclear power plant versus a thriving advertising agency are two very different things. In our Multi-focus Model (MFM), we look at the following questions:

1. Organizational effectiveness: Should you be more means-oriented (the how) or goal-oriented (the what)? 
2. Customer orientation: Should you be more internally driven (“we know what is best for the customer) or more externally driven (“the customer is king”)? 
3. Control: Should you be flexible and informal at work or should you maintain a lot of control and discipline over people and procedures?
4. Focus: Should the focus be on the local unit or the profession itself?
5. Approachability: Should you have an open or a closed system? Should there be a greater concern for employee welfare or should employees be left to “sink or swim”?
6. Management Philosophy: Should the company’s managers be employee-oriented or work-oriented?

Last week we reviewed the process of measuring where a business’s practices fall on these scales, establishing where they want to be, and addressing those gaps. Today, let’s look more closely at the first two factors.

Organizational effectiveness: Should you be more means-oriented (the how) or goal-oriented (the what)? 

I would venture that many of my readers who are from the US would likely say “goal-oriented” immediately. We need to look more deeply at what we mean by these terms, though. So if we take our example of the nuclear power plant we can clearly see that the goal is safety, so the focus needs to be on the procedures and routines that keep a nuclear plant running without dangerous incidents. So in this case, according to our model, a nuclear power plant should have a score that’s firmly in the “how” range and not the “what” range, which would fall on the lower end of the scale. Creative agencies, like advertising and marketing agencies, do not have the same safety and procedural concerns. They tend to have optimal scores near the top of the scale.

Customer orientation: Should you be more internally driven (“we know what is best for the customer) or more externally driven (“the customer is king”)? 

When considering how customer-oriented a business should be, again we must consider context. On this scale, it’s helpful to consider what the extreme ends of the factor imply. What does it mean for your business if you are entirely internally focused? You are likely entrenched in rigid processes that benefit your team more than your customers. Businesses in this range tend not to last very long as they can easily be out maneuvered by more externally motivated competitors. Some industries need to stay closer to the internally driven end of the scale, though, such as medical facilities. Most of us do not have enough medical training to know what is best for us, so we rely on the very specific expertise of doctors for treatment. With healthcare options, patients cannot have access to just any treatment or medication they want. 

Apple is also at the lower end of the scale. This may be surprising, since Apple products are designed appeal to our sense of individuality, being named “iPhone,” “iPad,” and such. However, Apple produces a standard set of products and does not deviate much from them apart from making improvements on them over time. Looking at the extreme end of the externally driven scale, we see that there are businesses which give the customer whatever they want regardless of whether it is in the customer’s best interest. Tobacco companies, for instance, fall in this category. It is well known that long-term use of tobacco products is correlated with a myriad of health problems. Tobacco companies know this, but continue to sell their products anyway. Why? Because there is a very high demand for the products. Financially, it’s a very lucrative market. 

How do our customers use these scales? As I mentioned last week, it’s extremely difficult to guess what your company’s actual scores will be. Top level executives often don’t know what’s going on in the lower levels of their organization. They don’t have easy ways to find out what the culture of the organization is like in other departments. That’s why we measure and that’s why we always recommend taking a cross-section of the various levels of your company. 

Companies also use these scales to determine what an ideal or optimal set of scores would be. We walk clients through this process. And after we identify gaps, we provide feedback on any adjustments that should be made to current practices and suggest ideas for alternative practices if needed. Since everything we do is research based, our suggestions come from our database of the over 1,500 companies we have scanned. We have a deep knowledge of which practices support which strategies and can assist you through the change process.

Is your business stuck? Are you curious where you fall on these scales? Do you need ideas on how to get unstuck? Don’t guess where you should make changes: let us help you measure and know. Then go in surgically and fix what’s broken without spending money on what’s working well. Email us at [email protected] to schedule a complimentary needs analysis call.