How - Dov Seidman [125]
• Cultures of informed acquiescence make individuals into managers of job function, consistent with its strict, hierarchical approach to organizational structure. Personnel development is achieved through a training approach to carefully tailor information to specific function and expertise. Emphasis is on performance and performance management. To develop yourself in informed acquiescence cultures, you would read a book called The 14 Steps to This or The 50 Rules of Great That. Trust flows between people as it is earned, but is often restricted by a system of checks and balances that keeps managers accountable for their underlings. These carrot-and-stick cultures reward honorable work consistent with company directives. This is capitalism as we know it, with customers and suppliers more often seen as vendors and suppliers than partners. Contracts rule external relationships, with lots of requests for proposals (RFPs) and multiple bids for services even when proven supplier relationships exist. These approaches strive for fairness and impartiality, and often achieve it within a controlled framework.
• In self-governing cultures, the role of every individual is to lead and be a leader. Each individual is called upon to make more values-based decisions, so people need the education and, more important, the experience of wrestling with issues and coming to their own conclusions. Rote learning and training approaches fall short of giving them the tools they need to be self-generating. This book, in many ways, takes an educational approach to HOW. It gives you few rules of thumb or exercises to impart its knowledge, but rather tries to lay out the broad picture of the issues it addresses and stories that illuminate the many ways the concepts can be applied. It might make it a little harder for you, the reader, to get quick and easy answers, but it does give you a perspective and knowledge from which you can evaluate things for yourself, a lens through which you can view the myriad and quick-changing events that make up a business day. In self-governing cultures, there is no one way to take the TRIP; to become self-governing is a continuous evolution unique to each individual and group. Someone can point the way, but you must traverse the hills (and spend some time in the Valley of C) on your own.
Self-governing cultures are high-trust cultures. As Paula Sims’s experience at GE/Durham demonstrates, behaviors that sent signals of distrust undermine the enfranchisement of the individual. Trust begets trust, and the opposite is also true. In return for trust and autonomy, relationships between members of the group recognize the implicit social contract and include the greater good. Likewise, suppliers and customers are embraced as partners; mutual collaboration and improvement become the rule with suppliers, and added value the goal with customers. The language of values that drives these cultures can inspire behavior above the floor of contracts and agreements, adding the capacity to delight customers and exceed expectation in every relationship.
How We Recognize
The fourth HOW of culture is simply the way culture tends to reward achievement and discipline transgression.
• Blind obedience cultures, obviously, reward conformity and/or obedience. Supervisors, at their whim, mete out punishment, and the arbitrary nature of the discipline creates fear, which keeps people in line.
• Informed acquiescence cultures take a far more rational approach and attempt to create clear rules and standards by which reward and control are exercised. The rewards accrue