How - Dov Seidman [124]
• Unlike blind obedience cultures, in which everyone defers to the boss, in informed acquiescence cultures everyone defers to the rules. Rules try to present an objective and fair guide for all behavior. These cultures tend to create organizational hierarchies based on expertise and function, promoting the most qualified to management roles where they manage by top-down decision making. Managers try to act consistently (and rationally) within the rules. The responsibility for monitoring fealty to the rules falls to a discrete organizational unit, often legal counsel or compliance officers, charged with training and monitoring compliance. Informed acquiescence relies on a reward and punishment structure to motivate people, and people follow because they see compliance to be in their own best interest. This central self-interest factor places informed acquiescence cultures in the center of the behavioral spectrum between internal and external control. People acquiesce to what is asked of them because they are primarily motivated by personal success, and they see doing what has been asked as a high-value step toward that goal. Leaders and managers in these cultures use carrots-and-sticks methods to motivate desired behavior.
• Self-governing cultures find their engine of behavior in values and principles. Values and principles are the source of inspiration, and when we are guided by them or acting on their behalf we believe in what we are doing and find significance within the effort. On the spectrum from internal to external behavioral control, self-governance relies on the internal resources of the individual for much of its power. Authority accrues to individuals in accordance with their alignment with group core values, and the emphasis throughout the group is on personal enfranchisement and individual accountability. People joined together by common inspiration and shared core values form tight, unconditional bonds, unlike the lighter, conditional bonds of carrot-and-stick cultures. Organizational structure in self-governing cultures is tightly integrated—flatter, if you will—and the synapses between individuals and teams operate in a state of high trust. Self-governance requires universal vigilance; in self-governed groups, the responsibility for one’s own and others’ behavior becomes the job of everyone on the team. (As Thomas Jefferson, one of the crafters of the U.S. Constitution and no stranger to the concept of individual liberty, said, “The price of Freedom is eternal vigilance.”7) Acting on shared beliefs makes everyone self-regulating with regard to both company priorities and external control. At GE/Durham, for example, no one has a “boss”; everyone is one. “I have 15 bosses,” reported Keith McKee, a team technician. “All of my teammates are my bosses.” With everyone accountable for the team’s success, no one tolerates slacking; the culture becomes self-enforcing and feedback becomes the name of the game.
How We Relate
The third HOW of culture describes the dimensions that govern and influence the interpersonal synapses between members of a group: the roles and types of skills that each person manifests, the group’s approach to developing those skills, the level of trust that fills the decision-making process, the group’s relationship to doing the right thing, and the nature of the relationships between employees, customers, and suppliers—basically, how we all get along.
• Blind obedience cultures delegate little power down the chain of command. They fill their ranks with followers and workers who often feel subjected to heavy inspection of their efforts by bosses. Stiff penalties keep the rank and file marching in the lockstep necessary for the endeavor to move. Suspicion often