Most culture change takes years to take hold (if it ever does) because management is often reluctant to address the most significant obstacles. However it can be accelerated if you target three main areas. The suggestions below are based on observing the behaviors of senior leaders in various companies and locations, research on how manager and leader behavior impacts their departments and overall company culture scores using validated models.

1. Drive for results combined with high-touch

The most consistently outstanding financial performance, employee satisfaction and culture scores can be linked to leadership behaviors that combine tenacity and focus on results with strong positive relationships and interactions with employees. Using a combination of formal and informal communication along with a rigorous focus on standardized work and continuous improvement can create a great culture and a great organization. Think lean without the mean.

2. Screaming and disrespectful conduct is not tolerated

The organizations with the best culture scores and long term track record of success do not tolerate any abusive leadership behaviors including screaming or yelling at subordinates or treating them in a demeaning or disrespectful way. In our experience, managers and supervisors with these traits can change, however rebuilding trust is a long, difficult journey. Whether it is addressed through training, coaching, reassignment or termination, any tolerance of these behaviors will drag the culture lower and keep performance from reaching its full potential. And these behaviors cannot be tolerated between employees and colleagues because the resulting conflict and lack of trust will block teamwork and limit performance.

3. Communication is the secret sauce

The second highest ranked motivator identified by employees is feeling that they are included in what is going on. To feel like an important part of the team, the employee needs to receive communication and be asked for their input. Using a combination of formal communication (newsletters, town hall meetings, small group discussion) and informal communication (conversations with managers as they interact with employees) – employees are keenly interested in how the organization is doing and the outlook for the future. This takes time, and the best leaders make the time to do it. They either invest more of their time, or they get so good at delegating less important tasks to lower levels in order to free up their time to do this. Any leader who stays in his or her office instead of mingling with the troops will never have the depth of relationships that truly motivate employees.

How good do you have to be?

During some recent training on the linkage between a manager’s or leader’s behavior and the impact on his or her department it was quite a surprise. Simply being above average, say having a 4 or 5 in a 7-point scale, often caused an incredible impact on culture. Only managers and leaders scoring a 6 or 7 out of 7 had the kind of positive impact that creates exceptional culture. This is not meant to discourage – simply to reinforce that truly exceptional leadership is required to create exceptional results and the best culture.

Our culture sucks but we make lots of money!

Companies can make profits for lots of reasons – few competitors, superior negotiating skills, proprietary technology, economies of scale. And some companies can confuse cause and effect, thinking that their aggressive or passive culture has made them successful when in fact it was other factors. This usually becomes apparent when the winds of change start to blow and the company can’t respond quickly or effectively enough.

It can be a challenge to change the culture when things appear to be going well. The symptoms of dysfunction are often apparent but ignored because the bottom line is strong or sales are growing rapidly.

Putting Ideas into Action

If you a senior leader in your organization, evaluate yourself and your leaders on how effective they are in the three areas above. Admit to your own short comings and get the training or coaching you need to make improvements. You will start to see an impact right away.

If you are a middle or front line leader, work on your own behaviors first. It is possible to create a positive sub culture at a departmental or divisional level.

Think someone else in your organization needs to read this, please send it along.

We can help you in a number of ways – training, coaching, measuring. It starts with a conversation.

A boss who is constantly critical and focuses on problems without being willing to provide support and suggestions is not helping. In fact they may be demotivating the team. The resulting decline of morale and attitude will hamper long term performance.

Can you be too helpful?

Being helpful and supportive does not mean sheltering your team from challenges and set backs. Some leaders take back tasks at the first sign that an individual is struggling instead of taking the role of coach. As a coach you job is to empathize with the struggles, ask questions to help the person discover a solution and encourage them to persevere. You can also share suggestions and how you dealt with a similar challenge in the past.

Is there a time for “harping”?

In our book Employees Not Doing What You Expect by Irwin and I describe one of the reasons employees don’t meet expectations is because of mixed signals from the boss. The manager or supervisor might describe his or her expectations and then never follow-up. Employees get the message that it really can’t be that important. In this case it can be helpful for the manager to follow-up to demonstrate the importance of the task. This kind of constructive “harping” sends the signal to employees that the standard of performance is higher. An effective leader follows up on what she says and applies positive and negative consequences when expectations are met or not met.

Action tips to being a helpful manager or supervisor

• Clarify your expectations so that your employees can meet them.
• Help employees find solutions for themselves.
• Allow employees to learn from mistakes.
• Backup the decisions of employees and coach them privately.
• Coach by sharing personal stories, asking questions and challenging assumptions.

As a leader, focus on how you can support the people who work for you to achieve the expectations you have set. You might even be the manager or supervisor they think of when asked “Who is the best boss you have ever worked for?”

Organizations can get bogged down because employees are focused on playing it safe, fearing career-limiting consequences for making mistakes. In sporting terms, they play defense more than offence.

This hiding tendency makes it difficult for senior management to size up what it going wrong in the organization and sometimes even senior leaders are playing things too safe.

The challenge for this type of organization is growth. Because of the tendency to avoid all risk it becomes difficult to innovate and try new things. And new initiatives are often not given the support to succeed in terms of investment or time. The company bails out too early and any employees who bought in too early become collateral damage along the way. This makes them more gun shy when future initiatives are launched.

Putting Ideas into Action

• Observe your organizational culture – how willing are people to stand out and be noticed for their contributions? Or are they more focused on keeping their head down and nose clean for fear of reprisal?
• Can you begin to shift the focus towards success, innovation and calculated risk taking?
• When failures do occur (and they will) can you avoid punishing and instead look for learning opportunities?
• Take the lead yourself by encouraging growth, learning and trying new things.

By gradually transforming your organization to be success-focused instead of mistake-focused you can enjoy greater growth, higher employee motivation and better financial performance.

An HR Manager shared with me they as she looked back on all the people they had put on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) most ended up being terminated either in the short term or the long term. Does that mean we should just go ahead and pull the plug on poor performers? Can any be salvaged?

Another manager who was frustrated with an employee who had gone completely sour lamented that he had no doubt the person could be fixed but the amount of time, energy and therapy (his words) was too much for the company to invest.

In the Front Line Leadership course I ask supervisors and team leaders to reflect on whether they have ever seen an employee who struggled to perform under one boss subsequently improve after being transferred to another department. Virtually everyone in the class had to acknowledge that they have indeed seen this happen.

Prison of Performance

While the reasons an employee’s performance can slip below expectations are many, the leader has to be careful not to trap the employee in a performance prison from which he or she cannot escape. Once the boss labels the employee as a poor performer in the boss’ mind the leader may not be able to see the employee do anything right. Therefore the boss continues to see only the negatives and provides only negative feedback.

Escaping the Prison of Performance

Using a progressive disciplinary process can send a signal to the employee that there will be consequences for unacceptable behavior. The leader however needs to quickly acknowledge any improvement in behavior and provide positive feedback. In this way, the employee will see that the leader is willing to acknowledge strengths, giving the employee hope for success.

Putting Ideas into Action

• Confront employees about performance and behavior that you find unacceptable. Provide consequences.
• When you see them doing something right, acknowledge it and build on positives.
• Reflect on the fact that you as the leader may be causing the continuation of the very behavior you are trying to fix. Change yourself first and then see the employee change.
• If the employee does not improve after being given every opportunity do them a favor and terminate them so they can find a position that will be a better fit.

Leaders should allow employees an opportunity to rehabilitate, and only after a number of chances, terminate employment and start over with a new employee.

As a people watcher have you ever noticed that the majority of people gravitate to the easiest way of accomplishing a task?

Instead of being aggravated as a manager or supervisor, perhaps you should tap into this reality.

Constant nagging means there could be an easier way

One of the symptoms that you might need to simplify a process is when you have to constantly remind people to do what you want. Not only is the nagging annoying to the manager, it is also annoying to the employees. An examination of the process might reveal an opportunity to streamline steps, provide a checklist or provide pictures or samples in place of words.

Doing it right the first time

A friend of mine who I consider to be an IT guru says that laziness causes him to write better computer code. How so? When he writes a program that works well he won’t get lots of phone calls asking him to fix bugs and change the code. It just works!

The lazy leader

Okay, it probably sounds insulting to suggest that the leader could be more effective with a slight dose of laziness. While the majority of managers are overwhelmed and frazzled, a small minority are calm and effective. The secret of the few is to be more effective at clarifying expectations, delegating responsibility to others and then giving them the authority to act. These managers free up time to pursue other opportunities or even kick back and enjoy their success. The employees appreciate the challenge and empowerment.

Putting Ideas into Action

• Make it easy for people to do what you want (and conversely more difficult to do what you don’t want)
• Reflect on how to simplify a system or create visual reminders instead of constantly nagging people to do what needs to get done.
• Clarify your expectations of employees, challenge them, empower them and get out of their way.
• Enjoy the extra time and smile to yourself knowing that you have discovered how to make life easier for yourself and others.

And speaking of repetition… it seems that every time I’m working with front line supervisors and managers they identify ‘negativity’ as one of the employee behaviors they ‘put up with’.

When asked what they are putting up with, front line supervisors and managers always put employee negativity on the list. And the reason the leader puts up with it is because despite the negativity, the employee is often able to do their job to at least an acceptable level. Sometimes a negative employee is one of the top performers.

One of our clients relayed the story of their mail room. There were eleven employees working in the mail room of a large financial services company. One of the employees did his job but also was very negative in his interactions with co-workers. Finally management terminated the employee and the remaining ten employees were able to do more work, more quickly than the eleven had done previously. The negative employee was acting as a productivity drain on the rest of the work group.

What impact does negativity have in your workplace? Do you find it difficult to schedule two employees to work side by side because of conflicts? Do you notice employees going out of their way to avoid dealing with someone who is known to be difficult?

As a leader it is tempting to label the person as having a negative attitude. However most of us have negative attitudes from time to time. It is not the attitude, it is the behavior that is a problem. The behaviors might include speaking in a demeaning tone, always criticizing, talking negatively about other departments or coworkers, being abrupt with customers, being disrespectful, or not cooperating.

The manager has a right (and obligation) to address the situation. It can be simply by commenting and questioning in private, or if the behavior continues it might escalate into a disciplinary conversation.

Some supervisors and managers in a unionized environment will avoid the disciplinary route because they know that the discipline will likely be overturned in the grievance process. Effective leaders aren’t preoccupied by the fact that the discipline won’t stick – they still proceed because they know that at least the message has been sent that the behavior is unacceptable.

Putting Ideas into Action

• Identify the source of negativity in your work group.
• Think about the cost of putting up with the problem in terms of your time being wasted, customers not being serviced or employees not working well together.
• Consult with your manager and the HR department to develop a strategy and to practice what to say to the employee.
• Have the meeting with the employee.
• If you notice an improvement, offer praise and reinforcement for the changed behavior.
• Observe how your life as a leader gets easier and how the productivity of your work group increases without the negative influence.

When you tackle the negativity you will gain the respect of your employees and your manager.

Occasionally I receive a phone call or email asking if I can come in and conduct a training workshop for employees on a subject like harassment and respectful communication. With a little probing it turns out that many of these group training sessions are in response to the actions of a few misbehaving individuals.

Instead of (or in addition to) dealing with these individuals directly, the whole group has to endure training on a subject they already comply with.

Recently I was re-reading an excellent book, The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey. In the book Covey illustrates a number of examples where we pay a trust ‘tax’ – essentially extra cost and reduced speed because of a lack of trust. Many policies, procedures, regulations and compliance training add to this trust tax – slowing down the organization and adding to its cost.

This is very evident to my HR clients who often see big chunks of their training budgets allocated to compliance training with precious little left over to develop the organization in a more proactive way (think leadership training and customer service skills training).

One example that stands out in my mind was in a health care setting where staff had to endure multiple in-services (health care term for training) on patient documentation because a few staff failed to maintain complete and accurate documentation. Instead of taking those few people aside, everyone had to endure needless retraining. It took up valuable time and money in an already cash-strapped environment. The manager was avoiding the confrontation and because of her fear, everyone paid the price.

Putting Ideas into Action

• Instead of creating a ‘rules based’ organization, consider focusing on your values and attributes. This clarifies the expectations of behavior and defines your culture.
• Train your leaders on coaching, confronting and correcting skills so that they will talk to employees whose behavior differs from expectations.
• Think twice after an incident before deploying additional policies and procedures. Assess severity and probability before adding this extra burden to your organization.
• Consider reviewing your existing policies and procedures and eliminating those that cause the greatest amount of aggravation for employees and supervisors.

The vast majority of your employees want to behave consistently with your expectations. Avoid allowing the behaviors of a few to slow down your organization from focusing on the real prize – the customer.

A front line supervisor, manager or team leader can make things better or worse, both with what they DO and what they DON’T do.

Commit- things you DO and shouldn’t

These errors of ‘commission’ can hurt employees and make the leader’s job more challenging:

• Destroying teamwork by setting up internal competition instead of getting everyone to focus on achieving their full potential.
• Answering every question and solving every problem instead of getting employees to learn and grow by thinking for themselves.
• Being overly sarcastic, cynical and negative instead of being more positive and optimistic and saying it like it is.
• Being unapproachable by looking either too aggressive or by avoiding eye contact instead of being more approachable and friendly.
• Overloading good employees and letting poor performers coast instead of proactively confronting the performance issue.

Omit – things you DON’T DO and should

These errors of ‘omission’ can hurt employees and make the leader’s job more challenging:

• Forgetting to explain ‘WHY’ when asking employees to do something.
• Waiting for employees to bring problems and questions to you instead of proactively touching base with them every day.
• Ignoring difficult employees and spending time only with your favorite employees instead of giving attention to all employees.
• Avoiding decisions and problems, hoping they will take care of themselves.

Being an effective front line leader involves both STOPPING negative behaviors and STARTING more positive ones.