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Once upon a time I was a twenty- year-old college student who worked a 19-hour shift in one day – from 7am to 2am. A hurricane had come through and the only restaurant open was the local Burger King, which had food and gas for grilling the burgers. I was employed at that Burger King and was lucky to live close by and earn a few extra dollars. Things were closer to normal the next day in the neighborhood, so my shift was shrunk to 12 hours.
Youth was on my side allowing the energy for that 19-hour work day… just once. I certainly couldn't have continued at that pace for very long. I wonder how many very long work days in a row the human mind and body can take? The answer to that question may be important to know if you go to work at Amazon, whose workplace culture was described in depth in a recent NY Times article. Another key fact noted by the article was the harshness of the "rank-and-cut" performance management process. Weird, if you ask me. Even GE -- one of the pioneers of that process -- stopped using it after decades. They realized how silly it is to year after year eliminate good performers.
The reality is that leaders need to constantly shape their organization's culture. Amazon does have their fourteen points for leaders, but do they accurately know how well it's working? Their company devotion to analytics is admirable. But are they measuring the right things? There seems to be enough info in the NY Times article to indicate they are not. There is no mention of a Gallup or Work in America type employee opinion survey. Such a leadership tool could give leaders some good data.
Once leaders in an organization commit to the idea of a survey of employees, they need only to pick a model. I mentioned two companies above which provide models of corporate cultures build into the questionnaire itself. One such model that I'm most familiar with is Weisbord's Six-Box model, which is found in the "Organization Diagnosis Questionnaire". That questionnaire has been used by organizations such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, FAA and Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. It has also been translated into French to be used in the public sector in Canada.
The questionnaire measures six areas of an organization's culture with specific actions designed into each question. The six areas are:
Whether or not an organization's leaders like this particular model, I believe the important thing is that leaders garner the courage to ask employees their opinions about how well the desired culture is being driven by the leaders.
So my question today is: Do you have the courage to ask employees how well you are leading the culture?