February 2011
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Archive for February, 2011

Culture Eats Strategy Every Time!

Culture always wins. And if you don’t believe this, just take a look at all the organizational change that fails. It doesn’t fail for lack of solid business reasoning. If you look underneath all the well-conceived strategies and plans, you’ll run into the organizational culture that can quickly undermine all the best intentions.

Culture is the organization’s “personality” with beliefs, values, attitudes, language, work practices, behaviors and underlying assumptions. And like personalities, these elements are powerful and at times invisible.

If, in order to achieve successful change, one of the requirements includes a shift in the organizational culture, the first important step is the leadership team’s ability to understand the realities of the current culture, (the ‘real’ one, not the one displayed on the walls) and their role in shifting their own behaviors and mindset to match the new desired culture.

In my recent experience with the group of 30 executives, I was able to watch this phenomenon play out. I had the group “warm up” with a simulated experience using a card game to illustrate change which involved some cultural components. They did VERY well, and even utilized some excellent leadership teambuilding actions during the simulation.

Then I put them into a role playing activity based on a real company case study about a transformational merger that was stymied as a result of a cultural clash between the two legacy companies. Their assignment was to determine what needed to be done to mitigate this clash. They immediately went into “business mode” and came up with many tactical ideas – most involving strategic ideas that would help to “control” resistance, from new marketing plans, to systems implementations, to employee training. But not one team identified the kinds of changes that the leadership team would need to recognize for themselves. During the role play debrief, one executive stated that it was easy to behave skillfully in the simulated experience (card house) but much more difficult when the situation was “real” where they needed to move past their typical “business behavior” solutions. It was a defining moment for this team of executives, to discover for themselves how they had so quickly resorted to known business tactics in an attempt to solve the cultural clashes.

So what does this mean to those of you who are leading organizational change? How can you accurately identify your company culture and the importance of aligning the leadership team to own new mindsets and behaviors to ensure successful results?

QUESTIONS TO EXPLORE

  • What is really valued in this organization? How is it demonstrated?
  • How are decisions made and communicated?
  • What skills and characteristics does the organization value?
  • How do people from different departments interact?
  • What kinds of behaviors get rewarded? What bad behaviors are tolerated?
  • What kinds of stories do people tell each other?

ACTION TO TRY

Organizational culture change is necessary to support almost all organizational change efforts (strategic, structural, or process). Organizational change efforts will fail if organizational culture remains fundamentally the same.

Try to be an impartial observer of your culture in action. Look at the employees and their interaction in your organization with the eyes of an outsider.

What are they doing? How are they interacting with each other? How do they communicate with each other? What is important to accomplish? What gets rewarded?

You may be surprised at what you observe. It’s a good way to identify the cultural norms or the ‘real’ personality of your company. Then take a look at yourself as the leader and ask how others would view you as a role model for the desired culture.

Terri Hughes is the owner/principal of Terri Hughes, LLC, a leadership development & executive coaching business. She has been in the business of guiding change and developing leaders for over 25 years, primarily in the corporate space as vice president & director of leadership development and organizational change in a large retail corporation. She is a successful personal and leadership coach, and is a master facilitator.

Terri’s recent clients include leaders and teams in manufacturing, technology, retail, health care, government, small business and higher education industries. She works with individuals and teams in a variety of situational change arenas including: leadership behavioral shifts, new role transitions, career changes, and organizational changes.

Going Mad Over Online Printing Companies

With the wealth of information, easy communication, and varied things you can do online, it’s no wonder businesses have chosen the online market to become a huge part of their marketing campaign. Online printing companies have become the printer of choice of many businesses simply because of the convenience they provide. With the excellent printing quality and affordable rates, it’s no wonder every business owner have gone mad over online print shops today.

Who would not go mad? Just take a look at the benefits provided by online print shops:

- Hassle-free ordering – online print shops basically allows you to order your materials right at the comfort of your home or office. You don’t have to drive all across town just to get to the printer. There’s no need to go back and forth the printer just to submit your design, place your order, check the proof, and get your order. All these are gotten rid off with online printing. Everything begins on the web and ends there as well. As a result, you save a lot of time and money, not to mention gas.

- Quick customer support – most online print shops have effective customer support. They are ready to address your need and inquiries anytime, anywhere. You can communicate with them through varied ways such as call, email, and other online means.

- Affordable printing – the great thing with online print shops is that they offer low cost printing services. In fact, most of them offer discounts in print jobs especially if you order in bulk. This saves you a lot of money in getting the task done.

From the cost to the amount of time needed to get a print job done, there is no doubt that online printing is the best choice. But to ensure that you achieve all those benefits, you need to make sure that you find the perfect online printer that will give you the best print job. Before you hire an online printer, you better think about these important considerations:

- Look at the credentials of the printer. It’s important that you determine if the printer is credible and professional enough to handle your print job. You can contact the printer and ask some questions. This will help you determine if they suit the print job you have at hand.

- Check out their website. There’s no better place to know more about the printer than their website. Visit the website to determine their competence and the satisfaction they will provide. If the website is unsightly, you can’t expect the printer to provide you good print job. They can’t even take care of their website, so it would be best to move on and look for other printer.

- Look at the sample work of the printer. It would be best if you can look at the previous work of the printer. This will give you an idea on the quality of job they provide.

Commercial Window Tinting – One Way Perception

There are many options to consider when having windows tinted for a commercial space. Certain types of window film allow for “one way perception,” meaning you can look out but others cannot see in. These types of window films can provide commercial buildings with a sense of privacy and can even improve visibility at night. This improvement can make a big difference for both employees and customers without racking up a high cost; in fact, it can even save you money on your energy bills.

Protection from UV Rays

One way perception window films can come in dark or medium tints, depending on your preference. These films block heat from the sun and reduce glare. By reducing the amount of heat penetrating through office windows, rooms are easier to cool. Window films are even able to pay for themselves over time through monthly energy savings; office buildings with many windows can save a significant amount of money just by having the windows tinted. In places where the sun is especially strong, employees and customers alike will appreciate the reduced glare.

As well as incurring savings on air conditioning expenses, window films can also help furniture and flooring last longer. The sun’s UV rays are so powerful that they can degrade furniture from continued exposure and cause it to fade. Even paint on the walls is not safe from the sun, as it can peel and become brittle over time. Commercial tinting can prevent damage done by the sun by reflecting UV rays, protecting your fabrics and other surfaces from fading and keeping your investments looking new longer.

Privacy

By allowing greater visibility from the inside while reducing outside visibility, clients and customers will enjoy increased privacy during the day as well as at night. Dark tints prevent people on the outside from looking in, but do not prevent natural light from entering the room. Privacy has become a key issue for many people and businesses these days, and tinting is a great precautionary measure that any business can easily take in order to protect those inside the building. Statistics show that having tinted windows even deters criminals from breaking in, as the window film prevents them from easily scanning the layout of the room from the outside.

ISO 9001 Simplified

Quality has many definitions and has garnered a perplexing reputation for such. Indeed, the term “quality” is often used in a vague manner. The term has almost always been defined in the context of the manufacturing industry. In it, quality is the measure or state of excellence or being free of defects, achieved through strict and consistent adherence to standards to attain uniformity that satisfies customer or user requirements.

There has always been a lot of confusion about what quality really means, with individuals saying one product has a higher level of quality than another. This is probably because when people speak of the quality of a product or service, they usually refer to its excellence, perfection, or value. In reality, of course, quality should be defined in terms of how much the product or service meets its designed purpose and satisfies its original requirements.

Take for instance a $250,000 Porsche and a $20,000 Toyota. It would be very unfair to say that the Porsche has a higher level of quality simply because it costs more. Both vehicles, however, have met their predetermined quality requirements because they have been built to their exacting standards and are equally acceptable as “quality” cars. It may simply be that the individual quality requirements differ.

A company controls its business operations through a quality management system which, if implemented correctly, will lead products and services of a predetermined quality to an ISO certification 9001. Simply put, a Quality Management System (QMS) is the structure of responsibilities, methods, activities, resources, processes, and events that together provide procedures of quality implementation to ensure that the organization is able to meet quality requirements.

What are the requirements of a Quality Management System and ISO registration? To be successful, organizations must be able to provide products that satisfy customer requirements while complying with relevant standards. Above all, organizations must be able to provide proof of quality product claims. How can anyone supply this proof? The easiest and most widely recognized is to conform to the quality requirements of ISO 9001:2000.