Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine-Tune Your Employee Culture - Hardcover

   · New York Times bestseller
   · Wall Street Journal bestseller
   · USA Today bestseller
   · 800-CEO-READ best in category
   · Inc. Best of the Year list
   · Fast Company Best of the Year list
   · Miami Herald Top 10 business books list
   · Soundview Top 30 best list
   · Booklist Top Ten Business Books of the Year: Starred Review
   · Publisher’s Weekly: “must read”

A NOTE TO MANAGERS WHO DON’T EVEN HAVE TIME TO READ THIS SENTENCE

ALL STUFF, NO FLUFF

Your employee culture is not the same thing as your employees and it is far more important as a driver of business impact. This book will finally explain how an employee culture actually works and exactly how to work it. It will provide plenty of new insight for you, and it will allow you to get an astonishing level of commitment from your own culture, along with the flexibility, resiliency, accountability, and innovation that come with it. This is a book about results.

MAKE IT YOUR OWN

Of course I want you to cancel every listing on your calendar, bar the doors, and read this book start to finish in one jaw-dropping, life-changing lost weekend of epiphanies. That will give you the ultimate understanding of culture, which is the ultimate key to your success as a manager. But if you’re facing an urgent performance issue, you can also self-curate these pages for focused help.

Go right to the Original Sin to get the essential explanation of what your employee culture really is, and why it chooses to buy or reject any management plan. Go right to any of the other Seven Sins for fast tactical steps you can take around issues like change, communication, and compensation. Go right to any of the Four Vulnerabilities to fix circumstances of unusual stress on your company.

What I want most for you is the success you want for yourself.

Let’s go.

INTRODUCTION

THURSDAY MORNING. 7:30 a.m. I’ve been asked to an urgent meeting with the senior strategic team of a very well-known IT company.* They are not happy.

“Seriously, this strategy could be a matter of life and death for us,” one of them explains earnestly. “We’ve made some mistakes, okay? And we’ve been slow. We’ve got one big move left, and if we don’t get it right we’re going to be irrelevant in a competitive market and never recover.

“We do have a turnaround plan, and we know it’s really good,” he insists confidently. “We’ve actually had it for a while, but we’ve waited to implement it until we got the whole company on board. It’s going to need a lot of change from our people.”

“So we did everything right,” chimes in another. “The big strategy kickoff, then the regional strategy road shows, then the employee intranet strategy site. We did the strategy T-shirts, the strategy posters, the strategy mouse pads, the strategy screen savers, and the strategy wallet cards.”

“We did those balloons,” adds a third.

“That’s right! We did the strategy balloons for everybody.”

“On the eve of execution we decided to audit our employee culture,” they continue. “Not because people didn’t know about the strategy. You’d have to be brain-dead not to know about the strategy; it’s all we’d been talking about for eight months. It’s that we’re sure our turnaround is going to work. This is going to be taught as a case study someday, and we figured some proof about all the patience we showed under pressure would make it even better.”

“So we polled our entire employee population and asked only one question: Do you understand our new strategy? When the answer came back, it was overwhelming.”

“No.”

“What is wrong with these people?” they moan.

Nothing is wrong with the employee culture. What’s wrong is that the executive team didn’t read the whole response. The employee culture wasn’t actually saying, “We don’t understand the strategy. You’re using too many big words.”

The employee culture was saying, “We don’t understand why we should get up for making the strategy happen.”

With all the rah-rah and blah-blah, management forgot to acknowledge the mantra of successful selling: You must respect why your customer buys. And the mantra of this book:

You can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.

1, 2 . . . 10!

Increase revenue. Increase margin. Don’t just make market share; take it. Improve customer reputation. Improve product quality. Get to market faster. Put major distance between you and the competition. Become one united team across business units.

What employee could argue with the irrefutable logic of these corporate performance strategies? In a perfect world, your own employees would immediately grasp the logic and devote themselves wholeheartedly to achieving them.

Wake up, wipe the drool from your desk, and say “hi” to reality.

In the real world, neither business logic nor management authority nor any compelling competitive urgency will convince an employee culture to adopt a corporate cause as if it were its own. In the killing field between company concept and employee commitment lies many a failed strategic plan.

Want your employees to buy a new management goal? You have to know how to sell it to them. This means selling to your employee culture—knowing how the culture works and how to work the culture.

We’re not just talking about a bunch of employees. When they form a relationship with a company, employees become a culture and are far more self-protective, far more intelligent, and far more resistant to standard corporate methods of influence. A culture is a distinct organizing framework that gives your people a motivation fundamentally different from the company’s motivation.

It’s not late-breaking news that you have employees, but it’s only when you truly understand them as a culture that problems once considered chronic are finally resolved, and opportunities once considered unattainable are finally realized. The difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture is the difference between whether your performance goals succeed or fail.

FROM MACRO TO UH-OH

You’re going to need that understanding. Like any company, your company regularly bets its life on the ability to roll out new strategies to the marketplace—ahead of schedule, ahead of budget, on the heads of your competitors. Yet most strategies in most companies don’t really work. They don’t really do what they were supposed to do, don’t really cost what they were supposed to cost, and don’t really happen when they were supposed to happen. They only look like they’re moving forward because they’re being slammed from behind by the next strategy.

This is because even the smartest companies subscribe to the most dangerous strategic myth: A strategy has to be planned well to be successful. In fact, a strategy has to be implemented well to be successful.

Successful implementation starts with being able to enroll your employee culture in fierce support of the strategy. If you can do this, you’re well on the way to achieving strategic insurance. If you can’t, and you think any strategic or performance goal will be successful without the hard-core support of this particular group, you’re building a base camp on Mt. Delusional.

WHAT THIS BOOK WILL DO FOR YOU

This isn’t another book about how to successfully manage employees; it’s a unique book about how to successfully manage an employee culture, which is a whole different thing.

Yet an employee culture is the same thing whether you have two employees, 200, or 20,000, or whether your employee culture is located in Manhattan, Mumbai, or Machu Picchu. And the best ways to gain its ultimate commitment are the same, whether you are a senior manager with responsibility for the entire company or you are a line manager with responsibility for a single team.

If you have a wonderful employee culture, this book will help you scale it. If you have a troubled employee culture, this book will help you fix it. If you have an employee culture under pressure, this book will help you ease it. If you have a new employee culture, this book will help you shape it. And if you are investing in a company, this book will help you protect your greatest purchasable asset.

There is often frustration among managers about why an employee culture acts the way it does: Why can’t it just dependably support what’s important to the business? But it’s not up to an employee culture to understand the business logic; it’s up to the business to understand an employee culture’s logic. This book will explain exactly why your own employee culture may choose to resist supporting a strategy or performance goal and explain practically and tactically what to do about it. Not just to gain your employee culture’s support. To gain your employee culture’s maximum, dependable, adrenalized support.

Along with frustration, there is a belief among some managers that there’s a genetic limit to an employee culture’s willingness to give sustained commitment and loyalty. There’s not, of course, but this book is going to blow the cap right off any limitation. You’ll learn how to get whatever you want from your employee culture, whether it’s greater commitment to the company and its goals, increased accountability, increased innovation, rapid acceptance of change, improved speed and accuracy of execution, or representation of your company’s best intentions to your customers. Whatever plan you have for increased performance, I can assure you it will be far better protected and promoted by your people.

I can assure you because for years I have been applying these same proprietary methods in many of the world’s most successful, demanding organizations in information technology, financial services, entertainment, mobile, manufacturing, and retail—creating large, sustained metrics impact for companies that don’t include “Patience” on their list of corporate values.

MYSTERY ACHIEVEMENT

As a kid I was notorious in my family for certain behaviors. One of them was being very hard to bluff: Parents: “Eat your vegetables; there are people starving in China.” Me: “Name one.” Another was an obsessive curiosity about how and why things work. How did it come to be? Where is the power? How can it go faster, do more, or do something new? How do you fire it up, fine-tune or fix it? What is under the hood?

I carried this obsession into adulthood and into business. It causes the results my company gets for our clients today. That’s because I found the ultimate answer to how and why things work. An employee culture is the power that drives the enterprise engine. Fire it up and it will take you wherever you want to go; fine-tune or fix it and it will take you there faster. You want maximum business performance? Look under the hood and you’ll find your employee culture.

Under the hood there is both power and mystery. To harness the rumbling power of your employee culture you’ve got to solve the mystery of what that culture actually is, how it operates, and how to move it forward. These are the keys that this book is going to put right in your hands and that’s a real good thing. A company that will achieve long-term progressive success without them? Name one.

LET’S MAKE IT PERSONAL

My company is renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee, and customer cultures. That’s what we do; the reason I do it is because I believe that, short of homicide, the worst thing one human being can do to another is to make them feel small: You’re not. You can’t. You won’t ever be. This is a killing of the soul, of hope, and of potential. Domination and disregard drive me absolutely nuts, whether it’s committed by individuals or by organizations.

The world works, and it is affected by work. A person made to feel small on the job doesn’t stay on the job. These same people are parents, partners, neighbors, and voters: The toxic impact is incalculable. Nothing—no motive, no circumstance, and no position of authority—grants the right to cause it.

The passion that fuels my work is that nobody should be diminished by business—working in it or buying from it. This may be a noble sentiment, but it’s too unproductive to interest the typical profitable enterprise, so I long ago translated it into a series of high-impact ROI methods that most definitely do.

When an employee culture is repositioned as a newly precious, workable asset, a company will naturally protect it, same as with any asset. An employee culture can’t be protected without protecting the humanity it represents and without managers reclaiming their own humanity where it may have disappeared in the labyrinth of their job descriptions.

If we lose humanity in business, we’re all doomed. If we save it—company by company and manager by manager—we will have saved ourselves.

In case you fear this icy hand of altruism will grip your own company by the throat and choke the life out of revenue, not to worry: We’re talking here about making the business case for humanity. In any environment where meaning is determined by metrics, the point of view and processes in this book are going to cause measurable, sustainable results.

BETTER YET, LET’S MAKE IT PERSONAL TO YOU

James Bond is strapped to the table as a laser beam relentlessly moves to cut him in half. As it’s about to reorganize critical parts of his anatomy, Bond frantically offers, “If you kill me, they’ll just send another agent to take my place.” Goldfinger gives him the villainous eye roll. “I don’t think so, Mr. Bond.”

“Can you afford to take that chance?” Bond counters, and the laser is shut off.

If you’re a senior manager and all the last major strategies or critical performance goals in your company worked just like they were supposed to, maybe you don’t need to leverage the true motivations of your employee culture. But they probably didn’t, and considering that your company’s success in a hypercompetitive market—as well as your own success and legacy—could depend on the next one, can you afford to take that chance?