If you are in this situation, regardless of the size of your organization, have you asked the following questions of your top management:

What do you mean when you say “value”? What is important and valuable to the organization?

Value can mean different things to different individuals. When company leaders want to know how HR will create value, it is imperative to understand what they mean by that statement. Do they want to see a positive ROI on HR projects? Do they want to see increased employee engagement? Reduced turnover?

If you don’t have a clear understanding of what leadership values from its HR department and services, it will be difficult to gain buy-in and demonstrate success. Once you know what they see as value, you can tailor your projects and services around delivering around that value. Even if you don’t fully agree with their definition of value, delivering on their expectations of value will demonstrate that HR does have an important role within the organization, and these small wins can be used to frame future discussions and projects to really demonstrate what HR can do for an organization.

1. They ignore job descriptions

2. They’re eccentric…

3. But they know when to dial it back

4. They publicly praise

5. And they privately complain

6. They speak when others won’t

7. They like to prove others wrong

8. They’re always fiddling.

Honestly, I have no issue with any of these. I agree wholeheartedly with all of them – they are all great attributes to have within an organization.

Now, the question is: Will my employer allow me to be remarkable?

This is where the culture of an organization plays such a huge role in the unleashing of creativity and talent from their employees. A great culture will nurture these qualities and allow individuals to tinker with things, ignore their job descriptions and go off on the unbeaten path.

But the problem is many cultures won’t let their employees do these things. Everyone has to follow the rules. No creativity is allowed. This is how we’ve always done it and how we are always going to do it. They don’t seek out improvement. They prefer the status quo.

The status quo does not allow the remarkable to happen. Look at your organization – do they allow you the freedom to explore the best way to do your job? Do they let you fully utilize your talents and interests to improve the organization? Or do they want you to fall in line and behave in a uniform manner?

Everyone in the organization should be aware of whether they are meeting expectations, and that is especially true with new hires. They are still assimilating into the culture and do not understand what is right and what is expected. It is critical that the supervisor or manager keeps in constant with the employee on whether they are doing their work correctly, and providing feedback on what needs to be improved. This feedback process should continue long after the employee is hired, as feedback is a necessary and important process within the organization. The employee wants to know whether the work they are producing is accurate, and if it isn’t, what needs to be improved.

Your organization cannot improve if the individuals within the organization are not given feedback on what they need to improve.

On days when workers have the sense they’re making headway in their jobs, or when they receive support that helps them overcome obstacles, their emotions are most positive and their drive to succeed is at its peak. On days when they feel they are spinning their wheels or encountering roadblocks to meaningful accomplishment, their moods and motivation are lowest. (emphasis added)

I am not going to deny that progress is important when it comes to motivation. Any person would become frustrated if they continued to work hard, put in a full effort, and still not make any headway. Unfortunately, when that happens, it isn’t due to anything that the employee has done, it is a fault of the system and processes that the employee operates in.

I think the bigger key is the part highlighted in bold – it isn’t just making the progress that is important, it is that they are receiving the support needed to do so, and most likely, recognition for making progress. An individual can toil away in an organization, making progress but receiving no recognition or benefits from their hard work and success. In my opinion, progress will be motivating if the individual receives some type of gain from the progress, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be financial. Numerous studies have shown the important of giving and receiving simple recognition can improve attitude and performance. Employees want to be recognized for their effort and success. It feels great to know that you have accomplished something; in an organizational setting, it is even better for someone else to notice the progress and hard working you are achieving.

HT: Dan Pink

The same goes for organizations. In order to become as effective as you can possibly be as an organization, everyone from the top down needs to be motivated. And it has to be genuine motivation – not some fake, ra-ra crap put on at a ‘corporate rally’. In organization development, it is said that change won’t occur unless there is a felt need. The same goes for achieving an optimal level of effectiveness – the organization has to realize that improvements can and should be made, and individuals are willing to commit to make these changes a reality. That is where the true motivation comes from. It is a result of commitment to change and improvement.

Being the best – whether it is being the top firm in your industry or reaching a maximum level of effectiveness (which very well may lead you to the top of the industry) – takes work. People, and organizations, rarely make it to the top by luck only. It takes hard work. It takes effort. It takes commitment. And it takes motivation to keep working towards the goal. Tiger Woods has a goal in mind, and dedicates himself to reaching that goal and motivating himself to achieve his goals. The same should go for you and your organization. Set goals to improve effectiveness and stay motivated to achieving success and reaping the rewards of achieving your goal.

How did our world become so focused on the short-term? It has really become a “what have you done for me lately” culture that has gripped our world. Yes, to be successful a company needs to have some short-term success. But it isn’t the only thing that matters. Companies and individuals not only have to look at the short-term, but more importantly make sure that those short-term goals are aligned with long-term objectives. If what the company has set out to do in the short-term will not help achieve its long-term vision, it doesn’t matter.

This isn’t a view that is only for organizations – individuals need to take this view also in terms of their performance and development. Let’s, for example, look at the performance review. I’ve railed on about my annoyance with how performance reviews are handled. Managers need to not only look at what the individual has done in the short-term in terms of decision making, but also take a long-term view on whether the individual has improved their performance, knowledge, and skills from one year to the next. Short-term issues need to be handled immediately, so that it can help their development over the long-term in becoming a better employee.

Let’s get away from this short-term mindset. As an organization, what are you doing to improve overall performance and effectiveness over the next 5 years? Do you have long-term objectives, and if you do, are your short-term goals being used as stepping stones to reach those 5 year goals? Long-term performance and sustainability cannot be achieved by looking through a short-term windshield – you won’t see that cliff three miles down the road, and you won’t see a long-term trend of improvement.

1. The External Resource Approach is used to evaluate the organization’s ability to secure, manage and control scarce and valued skills and resources.
2. The Internal Systems Approach is used to evaluate the organization’s ability to be innovative and to function in a quick and responsive manner.
3. The Technical Approach is used to evaluate the organization’s ability to convert skills and resources into goods and services effectively.

I don’t necessarily believe that one approach is better than the other. In reality, an organization should utilize all three approaches, as they each have a different focus. For example, taking a strictly external resource approach could lead to too much focus on stock price and market share, and lead to inefficiencies and missed market opportunities that would have been discovered using a technical or internal systems approach.

Wrapped around all three approaches is the use of goal setting. Each approach and their measures used should have attached organization goals. For an external control approach, one goal might be to reach a market share of 30%, or reducing material costs by 10% for the year. An internal systems goal might be to bring a new product to market every 6 months, or to reduce the number of people required to make a major decision. A technical goal could be to increase the number of widgets made per day to 50, or to increase client satisfaction by 5%.

The key is to not let your organization measure effectiveness using one approach. A truly effective organization will utilize all three approaches, setting goals that fit into each category and measuring its performance against those set goals.

In double-loop learning, the individual must question the assumptions he is operating under when making decisions.

When studying organizational culture, the change agent must question and discover the assumptions underlying the culture to really understand what is going on.

In order to really learn, to really understand the world around us, we must continually question the assumptions that we operate under. Often they are outdated, incorrect, and just plain wrong. So if that is the case, then how can you make correct decisions, especially those of critical importance? One must understand, question, and validate their operating assumptions when making decisions within the organization. Even the organization as a whole, when looking at its operations and strategy, must question their assumptions concerning the economy and marketplace in order to make a wise decision.

There’s a reason that old saying has become a part of our language.

Cultures aren’t designed. They aren’t like a car, or a shopping cart. You can’t just design and create it, and then built it to specification. Cultures grow and develop over time. They are living, growing, developing, and constantly changing.

The management of an organization should take proactive steps in nuturing the creation of a strong, supportive corporate culture. But, in the end, it is up to the overall constituency in the organization to accept and take hold of this culture. Management can spend their time creating public ceremonies, or workplace rules that foster creativity, but in the end, it is up to the workers of the organization as a whole to accept the culture as a shared experience.

Edgar Schein defines a corporate culture as

a pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Organizational Culture and Leadership, p. 17)

A culture is learned. It isn’t designed by managers and leadership. It is created through a shared learning process by the organization as a whole as they work to solve problems. If you think that you can walk in and design a culture to fit your liking, then I would suggest you head back to the drawing board.

It is an idea that Ashforth advances under the banner of “tribalism” in a chapter he authored for the forthcoming SAGE “Handbook of New Approaches in Management and Organization.”

After all, says Ashforth, a pack of paralegals or a covey of consultants drinking java or hanging about the proverbial water cooler is not so different from a tribe of Neolithic hunters sitting around a campfire. We as a species have come a long way since the days when the morning commute meant braving saber-tooth tigers but, at our core, people are still very much the same social animals we’ve always been. We want to feel like we belong and we value our closest connections beyond people we don’t know.

In a very real sense, organizations big and small would benefit by seeing themselves framed by a variation of Former U.S. House Speaker Thomas (Tip) O’Neill Jr.’s maxim, “All politics is local.” People care about the big issues, but place a very large importance on whether the potholes on their street are fixed and if there are jobs to be had in their town. So it is with organizational culture: The big issues matter but employees are most likely to judge an organization by their most local contacts — their boss and immediate coworkers.

Ashforth says an organization’s success is largely linked to its smallest social units, the tribes who congregate around the coffee maker.

Ashforth does make a worthwhile point about the connections made and the translation of higher-order communication to the lower level, he neglects to mention the downside of such talk: office gossip. Every office has it, and I rarely ever see it as a positive. Generally, the gossip is negative in nature and really doesn’t do anything to benefit the organization. I don’t really see the groups that gather around the office as tribes…I think they more resemble packs of hyenas looking for tidbits of news to prey on.