The 3 Power Values E-Book

David Gebler

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 353

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Get organizational results by nurturing commitment, integrity, and transparency A healthy corporate culture is the secret to an organization's performance. The good news is that employees already embody the values needed to propel the organization to its goals, but institutional roadblocks get in the way. All too often leaders don't know how to diagnose their culture in order to clear these roadblocks to performance. The 3 Power Values presents a breakthrough model that permits leaders to measure and manage culture. To create a fully aligned high-performing culture, leaders need only focus on nurturing three catalyst values: Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency. * Offers an innovative values-centered model to help organizations achieve short-term goals without sacrificing long-run sustainability * Filled with lively case studies of major companies including Johnson & Johnson and Boeing * David Gebler is a recognized thought leader in the field of values-based ethics and culture risk management The 3 Power Values offers leaders at all levels a unique and accessible approach to identifying the behavioral challenges that are hindering their corporate culture and to removing them effectively.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Endorsements

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

PREFACE

PART 1: Alignment Is the Key

1 Culture Drives Performance

PLACING BLAME VERSUS REMOVING ROADBLOCKS

CULTURE MATTERS

BEHAVIOR AND CULTURE

ELEMENTS OF CULTURE

ALIGNMENT OF CULTURE

THE POWER VALUES

2 Behavior Roadblocks

WE’RE NOT WHO WE THINK WE ARE

SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE POWER VALUES

3 Values Drive Culture

LEVELS OF AWARENESS

THE SEVEN LEVELS OF AWARENESS

BUILDING BLOCKS OF ALIGNMENT

THE PATH FORWARD

PART 2: The Power Values

4 Integrity Aligns Goals and Standards

WHY INTEGRITY MATTERS

INTEGRITY AND CULTURE

INTEGRITY ALIGNS GOALS AND STANDARDS

5 Commitment Aligns Principles and Goals

WHY COMMITMENT MATTERS

FOUNDATIONS OF COMMITMENT

COMMITMENT ALIGNS PRINCIPLES AND GOALS

CREATING CONNECTION

GRANTING AUTONOMY

LOCKING IN COMMITMENT

6 Transparency Aligns Principles and Standards

WHY TRANSPARENCY MATTERS

CLARITY

CAN THE TRUTH BE TOLD?

BUILDING BLOCKS OF TRANSPARENCY

7 Your Plan for High Performance

LOOKING FOR ALIGNMENT

ASSESS

PLAN

ACT

SELF-AWARENESS

SUGGESTED READINGS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Index

Praise for The 3 Power Values

“I have seen David Gebler put these powerful ideas into action, and they work.”

—Shira Goodman, executive vice president, human resources, Staples, Inc.

“Illuminating, compelling, and actionable. A true contribution for leaders navigating the complex intersection of company performance, values, compliance, people, and organizational behavior.”

—Kim Rucker, senior vice president and general counsel, Avon Products, Inc.

“A must-read. I have worked with David Gebler for over seven years, and with The 3 Power Values he is once again at the forefront of driving positive cultural change in organizations.”

—Vincent Brockman, executive vice president, general counsel, and chief ethics and compliance officer, Scotts Miracle-Gro Company

“David Gebler’s book draws as much on his decades of hands-on experience working with companies on their ethical challenges as it does on his keen insight into the three values—commitment, integrity, and transparency—that drive any company’s performance. It’s essential reading for all managers striving to understand their corporate culture and create a high-performing organization.”

—Jeffrey Seglin, author, The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit, and Personal Responsibility in Today’s Business

“The 3 Power Values is a must-read for every manager. Creating a culture of trust and commitment is crucial for any institution to survive long term. Yet sustaining cooperation internally and maintaining a reputation for trustworthiness is complex. The 3 Power Values is a clear and unique guide to creating and maintaining such a culture. It is simple without being simplistic, and convincing without being rigid and inflexible.”

—Tamar Frankel, professor of law, Boston University School of Law; author, Trust and Honesty: America’s Business Culture at a Crossroad

“A breakthrough, commonsense primer for establishing effective corporate cultures to assist employees in avoiding costly and destructive ethical and legal lapses. A compelling read for corporate leaders in today’s heavily regulated and overly litigious environment.”

—Harvey L. Pitt, CEO of global strategic business consultancy, Kalorama Partners; 26th Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

Copyright © 2012 by David Gebler. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gebler, David.

 The 3 power values : how commitment, integrity, and transparency clear the roadblocks to performance / by David Gebler.—1st ed.

p. cm.

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-1-118-10132-2 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-22384-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-23712-0 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-26213-9 (ebk)

 1. Commitment (Psychology) 2. Integrity. 3. Corporate culture. 4. Organization. I. Title. II. Title: Three power values.

 BF619.G43 2012

 650.1—dc23

2011050767

For Claire

PREFACE

It might seem unusual, but the origins of this book stem from a comic strip. In the early 1990s, I was cofounder of a small consulting firm that was among the first licensees for the new Dilbert comic strip. Having secured the rights to use Scott Adams’s characters for internal communications and training, we worked with companies that were trying to be open and self-effacing about their challenges. I began to see a fascinating gap: everybody knew there were issues facing their company, but no one seemed to be willing to talk about them. In fact, Dilbert strips became the language by which employees could communicate their feelings. People wouldn’t say anything to their manager, but they would post a comic strip on their door or cubicle wall.

Several of the early classic strips mocked Dilbert’s company’s core values. I thought a lot about why that was so funny. The values, such as integrity and trust, were good and important concepts. So what made them such perfect targets for satiric irony? The employees wanted these values. The organization said it wanted these values. What was happening in the middle to make such a joke—and such a mess—of it?

I carried this puzzlement with me as I began to help organizations develop ethics and compliance programs. Companies that wanted to reduce and prevent misconduct kept falling back on check-the-box compliance training that basically told employees: “These are the standards of behavior that are expected of you.” It soon became clear that employees rarely needed to be told that they should do the right thing or even to be told what the rules were. They knew all that. What they needed was help in removing the frustrations and pressures that could cause a good person to do a bad thing. As I dug more deeply, it also became clear to me that the root cause of ethics issues was also the root cause that kept an organization’s performance weaker than it needed to be or made it hard to motivate employees who really wanted to be engaged and committed to the company. At the heart of performance is the environment in which employees work: the culture.

Culture was clearly having an impact on performance, and yet leaders were not seeing it. I felt like the little boy in the fable who was the only one willing to shout that the emperor was not wearing any clothes. Why is it so hard to say what needs to be said? I saw that most organizations did not have a systematic way to look at their culture so that they could make the changes needed to improve performance.

One of the challenges for leaders who want to influence their culture is that culture cuts across many disciplines. The task of understanding culture requires the best thinking in leadership, ethics, organizational development, behavioral science, and psychology. Extensive new research over the past twenty-five years or so has helped uncover the factors that influence behavior. Classic social psychology has always had insights into how to create an effective and high-performing culture. There is plenty of information on this topic but not many strategies for organizing the data so a leader can develop a coherent plan. If you are like most other leaders, you know that you should look at culture and that improving the work environment will improve performance and reduce the risks that bad things will happen. But you don’t know where to start. And one reason is that you do not have a workable model of culture that will help you change how people go about their work.

The 3 Power Values presents a new way of looking at culture that is geared to helping managers and leaders make the link to performance. I present a model of how various elements of culture can either work together to create a high-performing organization or work at cross-purposes, creating dysfunction that can lead to poor performance or even misconduct.

From my twenty years of experience working with large and small organizations across the globe, I have learned that employees already embody the values needed to create a high-performing culture. Leaders do not need to invent a culture. They just need to get out of the way of their people creating one naturally. I found that every organization has key levers that managers can use to influence the behaviors that drive culture. Behaviors associated with three values—commitment, integrity, and transparency—remove the behavior-based roadblocks that keep people from being able to live their values at work. That’s when corporate core values stop being a joke.

Culture change needs to be supported from the top of the organization, but it needs to be implemented in the field. This book is for every manager or leader who feels the need to create a more effective team, unit, division, or organization. I offer you practical advice and guidance, gleaned from my work with global organizations, on how to make changes in your organization’s culture that will improve its operational and ethical performance.

Throughout the book, I refer to people, employees, managers, and leaders. When I speak about the “people” in an organization or about “employees” generally, I am referring to everyone who works in an organization, from hourly employees through senior leadership. I use “line employees” if I am referring to employees who do not manage others. When I speak of “leaders,” I intend to include anyone who manages others, from a frontline supervisor to the CEO. If I am intending to refer to senior executives, the context will make that clear. I shy away from distinguishing “managers” from “leaders,” because every manager is a leader and each has his or her own set of responsibilities and role to play in managing the culture.

Removing the roadblocks to performance is a journey. The successful companies are the ones that focus less attention on what the final destination will look like—too many things can change along the way—and more on how they are going to get there with their mission, their skills, their profits, and their principles intact.

Let’s get started.

David Gebler Sharon, MassachusettsFebruary 2012

PART 1: Alignment Is the Key

1

Culture Drives Performance

The quality engineer couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In 2005, when a sample from a batch of more than a million bottles of St. Joseph aspirin wouldn’t dissolve properly, the engineer did what Johnson & Johnson quality professionals had been doing for generations: he blocked that batch from shipping. Now he was being chewed out by his boss. “Do you like working here?” the manager asked. “Then make sure this shipment passes. There’s no reason it should fail.”1

The engineer thought, How could this be happening? Back in the 1980s, quality professionals were the white knights of the company. Entrusted with its reputation and expected to enforce its highest production standards, they were empowered to stop any shipment. But now the company was facing tremendous pressure to cut costs, and harried operations managers were reluctant to throw away millions of bottles of product, so they came down hard on the quality engineers. And sure enough, many of the quality engineers bowed to the pressure. Once honored for their integrity, they now found themselves saying one thing and doing another.

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) had been one of America’s most admired companies for over one hundred years. Products such as Band-Aid, Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, and Tylenol were trusted brands. J&J had been praised countless times as one of the best examples of a values-driven organization, relying on the core principles and beliefs embodied in its fabled Credo to guide leaders through tough decisions.