How - Dov Seidman [126]
• Self-governing cultures reward those who further the mission and significance of the enterprise, even if it might cause short-term financial loss. That is because the interpersonal alignment that makes these cultures successful is more valuable in the long run than a short-term opportunity. Preserving this alignment allows the culture to be largely self-policing, with deviation from common values met by the stigma from peers and that sense of betraying oneself we spoke about earlier.
The HOWs of celebration—who gets the awards, who gets featured in the company newsletter, who is feted by the team at the annual retreat—are often overlooked in group cultures, but they are vitally important to the nature of culture. Companies that want A, however, often reward B. My friend Steve Kerr, former chief learning officer at GE and Goldman Sachs, first wrote about this phenomenon more than 30 years ago in an article for the Academy of Management Journal called “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.”8 “I built a nice little model that illustrates the effect of a reward system on culture,” he told me one day. “If you take a chance based on the best information available and you get it right, you get a small reward. If you take a chance based on the best information you have and you get it wrong, you get a medium-sized punishment. If you take no chance, and just go along with the boss or go along with the majority, you get a small reward. So what would you do?”9
I had to think about it a moment; then I did the math and it became clear: Taking a chance and getting it right gets you about the same size reward as taking no chance. Taking no chance avoids the possibility of getting it wrong. “In such a system,” Steve concluded, “you end up with tremendously risk-averse behaviors. The leaders, lacking self-awareness, don’t realize they’ve caused this, and they complain about their ‘gutless colleagues’ who take no chances. But the culture flows from the rewards and punishments in place.”
A recent WorkTrends study by Gantz Wiley Research revealed the deep schisms that lie at the heart of many business cultures. While six in 10 respondents believed “My company’s senior management supports and practices high standards of ethical conduct,” only a third felt that “Where I work, people do not get ahead unless their behavior clearly demonstrates my company’s values.”10 A Workplace 2000 Employee Insight Survey revealed that, though workers want their work to make a difference, 75 percent of them do not think their company’s mission statement has become the way it does business.11
Charles Hampden-Turner, who works with companies the world over on issues of culture, told me a great story about Hewlett-Packard (HP), a culture that, until its board scandal, was famous for getting its HOWs right. “My friend Carl Hodges at Hewlett-Packard got a gold medal for defiance from Dave Packard, the head of the company,” he told me. “HP was doing R&D for the Apollo lunar landing module, and Packard wanted it out. ‘I don’t want to see it again,’ he told Carl. So Carl got it out of research—he put it into production. And Packard was really upset with him. Later, he relented and supported the project, which allowed the descent on the moon and made a mint of money for HP. So Dave Packard gave Carl Hodges a gold medal for defiance, and he delivered it in front of everyone, so everyone knew that he was wrong and Carl was right.”12
How We Pursue
We have agreed that groups come together to achieve a higher goal, one greater than individuals can achieve alone. The final, and perhaps most important, HOW of culture deals with the dimensions that express why we do what we do, the nature and purpose of our efforts. Foremost among these dimensions is our relationship to time.
• Individuals working within a blind obedience culture find success in a short-term relationship to their efforts. They are generally task-oriented, and spend little time considering the future or the long-term implications