How - Dov Seidman [117]
With its incredible performance metrics, you might easily assume that what GE/Durham does have is a highly incentivizing employee ownership structure, or at least a profit-sharing arrangement that motivates them to cut costs and improve quality, but that’s another thing missing from the picture. There are just three pay grades at GE/Durham—tech-1, tech-2, and tech-3—and each is based on skill level and training. The only monetary incentive is to get better educated, which they call “multiskilling.” Multiskilling allows teams to build technical continuity, so that when one tech-3 is on vacation, another can still build a turbine without him. Moreover, no one is trying to graduate into middle management, because there is no middle management. The technicians themselves are responsible for all scheduling, ordering, process management, and deliverables. And they are inspired. “It matters,” said technician Bill Lane. “I’ve got a three-year-old daughter, and I figure that every plane we build engines for has someone with a three-year-old daughter riding on it.”
Within the massive bureaucracy that is GE, GE/Durham stands as an outpost of team-oriented, consensus-based self-governance, a culture unto itself, inspired by common values and common purpose. “Upstairs, you’ve got wrench turners,” said Bob McEwan of his Evendale plant. “In Durham, you’ve got people who think. I think what they’ve discovered in Durham is the value of the human being.”
THE SUM OF ALL HOWS
The success of GE/Durham lies in the unique way people there have chosen to relate to each other, to organize their endeavors, and to govern themselves—in short, their culture. Culture is a company’s DNA, the sum total of its history, values, aspirations, beliefs, and endeavors, the operating system, if you will, that defines and influences what occurs at the synapses between everyone working together in a group, large or small. Unlike an operating system, however, just inserting a piece of code—such as a compliance program or an innovation team—cannot change a culture; cultures are alive; they evolve and change over time. Organizational culture, then, is really more like an ecosystem, a highly sophisticated, interdependent cosmos of evolving organisms with a profusion of interrelationships. More simply defined, culture is the way things really work, the way decisions are really made, e-mails really composed, promotions really earned and meted out, and people really treated every day.
And it matters. Culture is a company’s unique character, its lifeblood. It lives in each company’s achievements, how its members have dealt with adversity, managed growth and contraction, made the hard choices, and celebrated their greatest victories. Much as some people say that character is one’s destiny, culture can be thought of as the destiny of an organization. The culture that grows around any given group of people is unique to them and can’t be copied. Others can perhaps duplicate your HOWS in general, but the specific texture and quality of what they total lives uniquely in the people who live by them.
Though cultures within large organizations often share many traits, group cultures are generally singular; they differ from organization to organization, from team to team, and from unit to unit. A large, multinational company that has grown though acquisitions, operates in highly regulated markets, and faces domestic and international risks, laws, and standards manifests a different sort of culture than a family-owned construction company that has grown organically. A family-owned business is by its nature transparent; a small group of people sit down at the table and eat together each night, sharing the life of the enterprise and furthering its culture over chicken and rice. For a larger organization, influencing culture is a more complex challenge.
If individuals’ best response to the new global conditions of hypertransparency