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Chapter 12

THE VOICE AND DISCIPLINE OF EXECUTION, THAT IS ALIGNING GOALS AND SYSTEMS FOR RESULTS.

Henry Emerson Fosdick once said

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed.

No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined.

No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled.

No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

Here is the myth of the role of alignment in executing: you can train and reward independence and expect people to act cooperatively and interdependently, that’s the old paradigm.

the reality is, doing that it’s like trying to play tennis with a golf club or having an analog mind in a digital world. Organizational structures and systems that encourage and reward independence and competition produce an independent culture. Water what you want to grow, when you train for and reward cooperation and interdependence, you get interdependent behavior. That is the new paradigm.

So the first alternative to the aligning role of leadership would be to believe that the personal modeling of an individual is sufficient to keep an organization on a path of healthy growth.

The second alternative would be to believe that by continuously communicating the vision and strategy you’ve carefully and intentionally developed, you will be able to achieve your goals as an organization. Structure and systems are of secondary importance.

The third alternative would be to 1) use both personal moral authority and formal authority to create systems that will formalize or institutionalize your strategy and the principles embodied in your shared vision and values, 2) create cascading goals throughout the organization that are aligned with your shared vision, values and strategic priorities, and 3) adjust and align yourselves to regular feedback you receive from the marketplace and organization on how well you are meeting needs and delivering value (which is one of the systems). If you say you value cooperation, you reward cooperation, not competition. If you say you value all stakeholders, you regularly gather information on all stakeholders and use it for realigning. You water what you want to grow.

Modeling principle-centered living and leadership creates and inspires trust. Pathfinding creates shared vision and order without demanding them. But now the crucial question becomes, How do we execute both values and strategy consistently without relying on the formal leader’s continuing presence to keep everyone going in the right direction? The answer is alignment designing and executing systems and structures that reinforce the core values and highest strategic priorities of the organization (selected in the pathfinding process).

Consider the current structures, systems and processes in your organization. Do they enable people to execute top priorities, or do they create roadblocks to doing so? Are they consistent with the organization’s espoused values? It is the responsibility of leadership to remove obstacles not create them. Yet the process of alignment requires a deep and humble examination of self and many “sacred cow” organizational systems and structure.

ORGANIZATIONAL TRUSTWORTHINESS

As mentioned earlier, the organization is the second major source of trust. When trustworthy people work within structures and systems that are not aligned with the organization’s espoused values, the untrustworthy systems will dominate every time. You simply won’t have trust. Through tradition and cultural expectation, these systems and processes become so deeply embedded in the organization that they are far more difficult to change than individual behavior.

xQ data confirm that there is a serious “trust gap” within organizations. Only 48 percent of respondents agree that their organizations generally live up to the values of the organization.

For instance, almost all organizations espouse the importance of teamwork and cooperation, but they have deeply embedded systems that reward internal competition. I often tell the story of how I once worked with a company that had no spirit of cooperation. The CEO couldn’t understand why his people wouldn’t cooperate. He had preached it, trained for it, psyched people up about it. But still no cooperation.

While we were talking, I happened to glance up behind the CEO’s desk and saw a curtain that had accidentally been left open. Behind the curtain was a mock horse race. Lined up on the left-hand side were all the horses. An oval picture of each manager’s face was pasted on the front of each horse. On the right side hung a travel poster of Bermuda showing a romantic couple walking hand-in-hand down a white, sandy beach.

Now imagine the misalignment here. “Come on. Let’s work together. Let’s cooperate. You’ll make more. You’ll do better. You’ll be happier. You’ll enjoy it more.” Then, pull the curtain . . . “Which one of you is going to win the trip to Bermuda?” He again asked me, “Why won’t they cooperate?”

Systems will override rhetoric every day of the week.

One of the great insights of Edwards Deming was that over 90 percent of all organizational problems are systemic. The problems arise because of systems or structures. They’re not what he called “special caused” or people caused. However, in the last analysis, since people are the programmers and systems are the programs, people are ultimately responsible for those systems. Systems and structures are things. They are programs. They have no freedom to choose. So the leadership still comes from people. People design systems, and all organizations get the results they are designed and aligned to get.

Many honest people are incompetent when it comes to designing organizational systems. And likewise, some competent people are dishonest and duplicitous. But organizational trustworthiness requires both organizational character and organizational competence. Simply put, alignment is institutionalized trustworthiness. This means that the very principles that people have built into their value system are the basis for designing structures, systems and processes. Even if the environment, market conditions and people change, the principles do not. It is described well in the language of the architect: Form follows function. In other words, structure follows purpose. Alignment follows pathfinding. Discipline is manifest both personally and organizationally. In the organizational context, discipline is called aligning because you’re creating or aligning your structures, systems, processes and culture to enable the vision to be realized.

Beware of synergistic decision making and stovepipe execution.

If the value system focuses on the long term as well as the short term, then the information system should focus on both long and short term. If the value system holds cooperation and synergy supreme, then the compensation system should reward cooperation and synergy. This doesn’t mean that individual effort and performance should not be recognized and rewarded also. For instance, the size of the compensation pie may be based upon cooperation and synergy, but a particular individual’s piece of that pie would be based upon individual effort within the complementary team, thus nurturing both interdependence and independence.

Many organizations fall into the trap of rewarding only individual effort at the expense of cooperative effort. Little more than lip service, the value of cooperation is not built into the recognition and reward system. Since everybody is operating on their own agenda, people go along with compensation systems that reward individual effort. Even if serving the customer at the optimal level requires teamwork, that teamwork will not happen, and the result will be failure in the marketplace. It’s not that people do not want to cooperate, it’s that the system rewards individual effort or internal competition. Again remember that systems will overwhelm rhetoric or good intentions “at the end of the day.” “DIDN’T YOU HIRE ALL THESE PEOPLE TO BE WINNERS?”

I came across another commonly misaligned system while speaking to a group of about eight hundred at their annual convention. In their system, only thirty of the eight hundred received rewards—thirty of eight hundred! I turned to the president and said, “Didn’t you hire all of these people to be winners?” “Yes.”

“Did you hire any losers?”

“No.”

“You have seven hundred seventy losers tonight.”

“Well, they didn’t win the contest.”

“They’re losers.”

“Why?”

“Because of the way you’re thinking? It’s win-lose.”

“What else could you do?”

“Make them all winners. Where did you get the concept that you have to have contests? Don’t you have enough competition in the marketplace?”

“Well, that’s the way life is.”

“Really. How’s your relationship with your wife? Who’s winning?”

“Some days she wins. Some days I win.”

I said, “Is that the kind of modeling you want to give to your kids for their futures? Come on.”

He said, “How do I do it with compensation?”

I said, “Set up an individualized win-win performance agreement with every person and every team. If they accomplish the desired results, they win.”

One year later I was invited back after a lot of pathfinding and aligning work had been done. Over one thousand people were at the annual rally. And of the one thousand, guess how many won? Eight hundred. The two hundred who didn’t, chose not to. It was their choice. There was no comparison at all. And what did those eight hundred produce? They produced as much business as the previous year’s thirty—per person. The whole culture had changed. The whole culture had moved from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking. Eight hundred people were where the last year’s thirty were.

Why?

Let’s answer the question by contrasting this story with the earlier Bermuda story: Instead of each one thinking, “Which one of us is going to Bermuda?” each was thinking, “I want you to go to Bermuda with your spouse. I want all of us to go. I’m pulling for you.” Imagine how that thought process could revolutionize an internally competitive organization!

In both cases the presidents were not untrustworthy men. They had the character, even an abundance mentality; they just didn’t have the mind-set or skill-set to create aligned compensation systems; they didn’t have complete information systems. It’s analogous to flying an airplane with only one dial working—it’s disastrous! But they grasped the concept right away. Again, their problem wasn’t character; their problem was competency. They had never learned the skill, and they’d been caught in a scarcity minded, traditional, duplicitous system that would remain duplicitous until they acquired the skills.

ALIGNING REQUIRES CONSTANT VIGILANCE

Aligning work is never finished. It requires constant effort and adjustment simply because you’re dealing with so many changing realities. Systems, structures and processes must remain flexible so that they can adjust to those changing realities. Yet they must also be based upon unchanging principles. With this combination of flexible changelessness you create an organization that is both stable and agile.

Principles represent the deeper well. This deeper well of principles supplies all the shallower wells and root structures of empowerment, quality, producing more for less, sustainability, scalability and agility.

One way to lubricate your organization’s ability to make the constant and necessary alignment changes is, again, to be serious about benchmarking against superior performers of similar functions within your own organization and in all industries or professions throughout the world. This gets people involved in coming up with world-class awareness and definitions, instead of just looking to the past or extrapolating from trends in either their own industry or with their current competitors. Look for best-practice organizations that are reputed to be superior performers—not that they are perfect or will even remain superior—but look constantly for today’s best and learn from them.

Observation, common sense and solid research have shown that successful organizations aren’t a product of solo acts of people or of the individual traits of formal leaders. Successful organizations are a product of the organizational trait. They are not personality dependent. They are system and culture dependent. (We’ll discuss culture in greater depth when we move into the empowering role.) General Electric is one illustration of a company that made the transition from the Industrial to the Knowledge Worker Age with many of its divisions. The primary focus of the longtime CEO Jack Welch and Dr. Noel Tichy, who served as GE’s manager of management education, was to embed leadership development in GE’s genes and in training its leaders: Mr. Welch’s insight, which was not widely shared in business at the time, was that leadership was not the province solely of the CEO in his or her senior executive team, but had to be institutionalized throughout the company. A globalizing economy meant that a business world long characterized by stability, autocracy and strictly bounded processes would have to become more change embracing, which would require the development of nimble, adaptable leaders up and down the company hierarchies. That in turn meant building the capacity for teaching men and women not only how to manage change, but how to create it.2 INSTITUTIONALIZED MORAL AUTHORITY

Aligned organizations and institutions that are truly principle-centered have institutionalized moral authority. Institutionalized moral authority is the institutional capacity to consistently produce quality, trusting relationships with various stakeholders, and continued focus upon efficiency, speed, flexibility and market friendliness. Certain individuals may blow it from time to time, but the institution handles them appropriately and moves on.

We see institutionalized moral authority all the time in countries that have culturally sustained constitutions, written or unwritten. Individual leaders may not always act consistently with their constitutions, but these countries are able to build on the strengths of the individual leaders and rely on the rest of government to essentially make these leaders’ weaknesses irrelevant. This wouldn’t be the case with dictatorships or with tender, newly developing democracies that are still filled with codependent, culturally endorsed corruption.

Admittedly, corrupt, dictatorial, or ego-driven leaders can do a lot of damage for a period of time even when there’s a great deal of institutionalized moral authority. But usually the organization or institution bounces back. Fundamentally, the power is in the system, not in the elected officials or appointed bureaucrats. The system is stronger than the individual weaknesses of the participants. This is why the Marriott Corporation teaches that the devil lies in the details, but success lies in the systems.

I visited recently with J.W. “Bill” Marriott, chairman and CEO of Marriott International, the world’s largest hotel operator. Bill, and his father before him, created one of the finest organizations in the world, and they’ve done it in part by creating a communication system that taps into the genius of their people.

“The biggest lesson I’ve learned through the years is to listen to your people,” he told me. “I find that if you have senior managers who really gather their people around them, get their ideas and listen to their input, then if you sit around a table with those managers and listen to their input, you make a lot better decisions.” His appreciation of that lesson came early in life, Marriott told me, from an encounter with one of the world’s most renowned leaders, President Dwight David Eisenhower.

“I was finishing up college, had been in the navy for six months and had come home from the Supply Corps School for Christmas,” he recalled. “U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson came down to our farm with General Eisenhower. Eisenhower was president, and I was an ensign in the navy.

“It was colder than blazes outside,” Marriott said, “but my dad had put up these targets for shooting. He asked President Eisenhower, ‘Do you want to go out and shoot, or stay by the fire?’ “He turned around to me and asked, ‘What do you think, ensign?’ ”

Even today, telling me the story, Marriott seemed stunned.

“I said to myself, ‘You know, that’s how he got by, dealing with de Gaulle, Churchill, Marshall, Roosevelt, Stalin, Montgomery, Bradley and Patton—he asked that golden question: What do you think?” “So I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s too cold out there, stay inside by the fire.’ ”

To this day, Marriott said, that lesson has stayed with him.

“It was a real defining moment for me,” he told me. “I remember thinking afterward, ‘If I ever get into business, I’m going to ask that question. And if I do, I bet I’ll get some pretty good information.’ ” That’s why Bill Marriott has structured his hotel chain the way he has, creating a culture that encourages communication both up and down the line. He realizes that simply asking “What do you think?” can turn even people who are considered “manual” workers into “knowledge” workers by listening to them and respecting their experience and wisdom.

He summarized by saying, “My son John was working up in New York with a division of a company that we had acquired. While in the kitchen, he walked up to one of the people and said, ‘We’ve got this problem out front—what do you think we should do?’ “Tears came to the eyes of this worker as he answered, ‘I’ve worked with this old company for twenty years, and no one has ever once asked me my opinion about anything.’ ” THE ALIGNING TOOL: THE FEEDBACK SYSTEMS

Three of the leadership roles and their tools deal with one basic question: What matters most? The third role, aligning, deals with the question. Are we on target? Are we on track regarding what matters most?

The truth is, as mentioned earlier, we’re all off track most of the time, all of us—every individual, family, organization or international flight to Rome. Just realizing this is a significant step. But, for many of us, the feeling of being off track brings with it discouragement and despair. It needn’t and shouldn’t be so depressing. Knowing we’re off track is really an invitation to realign ourselves with true north (principles) and recommit ourselves to our destination.

Remember, our journey as an individual, team or organization is like the flight of an airplane. Before the plane takes off, the pilots file a flight plan. They know exactly where they’re going. But during the course of the flight, wind, rain, turbulence, air traffic, human error and other factors act upon the plane. They move that plane slightly in different directions so that most of the time it is not even on the prescribed flight path. But barring anything too major, the plane will still arrive at its destination.

Now how does that happen? During the flight, the pilots receive constant feedback. They receive information from instruments that read the environment, control towers, other airplanes even sometimes from the stars. And based on that feedback, they make adjustments so that time and time again, they return to the original plan.

The flight of that airplane is, I believe, the ideal metaphor for these four roles. Modeling, pathfinding, and empowering allow us to determine for our families, our organizations, our jobs and ourselves what matters most. These are our flight plans. The constant feedback that we, like pilots, receive represents our opportunity to check our progress and realign ourselves with the original guiding criteria. Together these roles and tools help us arrive at our envisioned destination.

ACHIEVING A BALANCE BETWEEN GETTING RESULTS AND DEVELOPING CAPABILITY

The key to the principle of alignment is to always begin with the results. What kind of results are you getting in the marketplace? Are your shareholders happy with the return on their investment? What about your employees? Are they happy with the return on their mental, physical, spiritual and emotional investment? What about suppliers? What about the community? Do you have any sense of social responsibility toward the kids, toward the schools, toward the streets, toward the air and water, toward the context in which your employees work and raise their families? What about all these results from these stakeholders? What about the customers? How is it going? What are the results? How do they benchmark against world-class standards? You have to study and examine all these stakeholder results and then examine the gap between those results and your strategy.

Effectiveness is the balance between production of desired results (P) and production capability (PC).* In other words, it’s the golden eggs that people want and the goose that lays them. Sometimes we call this the P/PC Balance. The essence of effectiveness is achieving the results you want in a way that enables you to get even more of these results in the future.

Over the last ten years there have been many approaches developed to measure the P/PC Balance. I have frequently taught the importance of 360-degree feedback suggesting that the first 90 degrees represents financial accounting, and the remaining 270 degrees consists of scientifically gathered information on the perceptions of the organization’s key stakeholders and the strength of their feelings around those perceptions.

There are many names for this kind of feedback. One of the strongest recent movements calls it The Balanced Scorecard. Sometimes I have called this approach double bottom-line accounting. Traditional accounting has always focused on the single bottom line (the golden eggs). Double bottom-line accounting also shows respect for the “goose,” quantifying the health of the “goose” by summarizing the quality of the organization’s relationships with all its key stakeholders—customers, suppliers, associates and their families, government, community, etc. You can imagine the power of having a two-page summary of the present and future health and strength of your organization—one page devoted to the financial statement (the present fruits of prior efforts), and the other giving you a leading indicator of your relationships with the stakeholders, which will produce all your future results.

The important thing is to come up with what we’ll call a Scoreboard, a compelling scoreboard. The people who are involved, who will be evaluated, need to participate in establishing a compelling performance scoreboard that reflects the criteria built into the mission, values and strategy of an organization so that they can continuously stay aligned with the process and be both responsible and accountable. They need to emotionally connect to it and own it. This is also true of individuals, teams, departments or any person who has responsibility to complete a task or handle a project. Everyone should be involved in developing the Scoreboard, and then be accountable to it. Additional practical application suggestions on creating a compelling Scoreboard will be given in chapter 14.

Hardly anyone measures progress on their most important goals. Only 10 percent of xQ respondents report that they have a clear, accurate, visible scoreboard that provides genuine feedback. Actionable intelligence for front-line decision making is the imperative.

Let me illustrate the importance of this idea of the Scoreboard feedback system by sharing an experience with you of an organization that came face-to-face with these diagnostic questions.

I was speaking to a national association of newspaper publishers and editors at a large conference. To prepare for the event I gathered data from cultural audits performed on various newspaper organizations. They indicated trust levels, commonality of purpose and values, systemic misalignment, and consequent disempowerment in the industry.

Before presenting the data I decided to try a different approach: walking around the large hall with a microphone and asking the questions “What is the essential role of newspapers in society? What is your central purpose?” As I handed the microphone to person after person, they unhesitatingly spoke of the absolutely vital role that newspaper organizations play in our society. They believed the deeper analysis in the print media keeps government honest and public officials accountable and visible to the public. A cumulative expression focused around serving the country and our communities by preserving our most basic values: freedom, government being accountable to the people, the preservation of the checks and balances identified in the Constitution, helping to inform people in order to preserve the ideals of our democratic republic and free enterprise system.

Then I shifted my questions to “Do you really believe those purposes? Do you feel them in your heart?” And I walked around the room asking people to respond. The response was unanimously “yes.” The next question was tougher. “How do you know if a person really believes particular values?” As different answers came forth, I posited the idea that one of the tests would be that the person tries to live his or her values. I suggested that integrity toward values indicates real belief. They agreed.

Then I got to the key question “How many of your newspaper organizations possess some function within your organizations that is similar to the function you provide to your community and to the country?” They were puzzled by my question. So I asked, “How many of you have a function inside your own organizations and/or culture to keep people honest, accountable, and aligned with your most basic ideals and values?” Only about 5 percent raised their hands. Then I shared with them the data that had been gathered from their cultural audits. I showed them the extreme levels of distrust, interpersonal conflict, interdepartmental rivalries, misalignment and profound disempowerment of people.

I then proceeded to share with them the idea of the four roles of starting with themselves, of beginning the process of involving others in clarifying purposes, of setting up information and reinforcement and reward systems to create an optimum environment of empowerment. Many of those editors and publishers walked away from that event with a totally different paradigm of leadership. It was a very interesting and illuminating experience for all of us.

THE IMPORTANCE OF this kind of feedback applies not only to an organization, but also to individuals within an organization.

At one time I did a training program for the commanding generals of the air force in a country with a history of challenge and conflict. I was talking about the importance of getting feedback from their key stake-holders, and I noticed that the generals were nodding their heads in agreement. I turned to the general in charge and said, “Does this mean you’re using such a system of feedback and measurement?” He said, “That’s the way we train these people. They’re top pilots, not trained managers. Everyone gets an annual printout of the perceptions of all those they interface with, and the strength of those perceptions. They use it as the basis for their personal and professional development, and no one gets promoted unless they have high marks, including from their subordinates.” I said, “You have no idea how hard it is to get that concept bought into by many organizations in my country. What keeps it from becoming a popularity contest?” Looking at me with disdain, he replied, “Stephen, the very survival of our country depends on these people and they know it. Do you really think we would allow ourselves to enter into popularity contests? In fact, sometimes the most unpopular people among us are given the highest marks, because they perform.” Aligning structures and systems with values and strategy is one of the toughest of all leadership and management challenges, simply because structures and systems represent the past, tradition, expectations and assumptions. Many people derive their security from the predictability and certainty of such structures and systems. They truly are “sacred cows” and cannot be ignored or kicked around unless there is deep buy-in and emotional connection to the strategic pathfinding criteria.

The following chart contrasts the structures and systems of the old Industrial Age control model with the new Knowledge Worker Age release/empowerment model (see table 5). While it’s helpful to see the two in contrast, the real world would put these on more of a continuum than either/or. At the very least, perhaps these contrasting lists show the extreme ends of each continuum and may serve to highlight the enormous leverage of aligning cultures, structures and systems with the pathfinding criteria.

FILM: Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was up for over forty years—over two generations. Imagine how deep the division between East and West became in the minds and hearts of the people. What a profound separation! What a profound contrast! When in 1989 it physically came down, it didn’t necessarily come down in the hearts and minds of most of the people. It was like a sacred cow, like the old structures and systems of the Industrial Age. Tradition dies hard. I’ll never forget a cab ride into East Berlin with no Berlin Wall, and hearing the cab driver complain about the feeling of insecurity he felt adjusting to a freer market and a more democratic society. He preferred the security and stability that the old regime and wall represented. This was a shock to me to hear him talk this way. He said most of the old-timers feel that way, and they are critical of the new generation, who prefer greater freedom to security.

As you view this film, think of how truly difficult it is for people to develop a new mind-set, a new paradigm, a new and different way of thinking—how it requires a new skill-set and a new tool-set. Think also of how futile it would be to teach people the new skills and tools with the old mind-set. It would be like putting new wine in old bottles. Please go to www.The8thHabit.com/offers and select Berlin Wall from the Films menu.

We move now to the final and culminating role of leadership: empowering.

QUESTION & ANSWER

Q: What if you’re in the middle of an organization with systems that are so focused on the short term, internal competition and force ranking systems, and numbers that it has produced a culture that feeds upon itself? What can you realistically do in such a situation?

A: If such an organization is tied to the competitive forces of the marketplace, you can use your freedom of choice and trim-tab yourself into a larger circle of influence. If it is not tied to the competitive forces of the marketplace, you may use the Greek philosophy—Ethos, Pathos and Logos, until others come to realize that their purposes will be better served by accepting your recommendations. Or, if you have paid the price in personal and professional development on a continuous basis to the point where your security lies in your power to produce solutions to problems and to meet human needs, you will have endless opportunities to do other things. In such a case you may do exactly that—choose to go elsewhere and do those other things.

Q: What is the most crucial activity of any management or leadership team, next to setting up the process of doing strategic pathfinding work?

A: I would say recruiting, selecting and positioning people. To use Jim Collins’s language, to make sure that you have the right people in the right seats on the right bus. I would even say that recruiting, selecting and positioning are more important than training and development. The problem is that most organizations in a fast-moving economy need people so fast and the problems are so urgent that they go into crisis hiring practices. Remember, that which you desire most earnestly, you believe most easily. Then downstream you often have to live with real disasters. Instead, you should do strategic hiring so that you have carefully thought through the criteria, communicated them and paid the price to look in-depth at the track record of different people. Pay the price to really build a relationship with possible candidates to the point that they are authentic and transparent and have the time to decide whether their own vision, value and voice are in alignment with the strategic criteria of their future work. After this, the key is execution.

Q: In your experience, what is the best question to ask people when you hire them?

A: In my experience the best question is to say, “Starting with your earliest memory, what did you really like doing and did well?” Then push that through grade school, junior high, high school, university and work assignments afterward, until you start to see a real pattern of where people’s real talents and strengths are where their real voice is. You’ll also see patterns of dependency, independency or interdependency, and you’ll see a pattern of working with things, people or simply ideas. You must also be willing to share the strategically developed criteria of the roles you expect people to play.

Q: What happens when codependency (passivity and compliance) gets rewarded?

A: It will only be temporarily rewarded the marketplace will slap it down; it cannot succeed in the long run because a passive, codependent person will not serve customers well with creativity, ingenuity and anticipation. In the long run, if you have transparency in, and good feedback from, the marketplace, neither codependent people nor cultures can survive. Lean, empowered, nimble, creative, innovative cultures are what is needed in today’s global economy, particularly if your competition is global, not local.

Q: What about the whole process of building a team?

A: Team building is fundamental, particularly in developing complementary teams where people’s strengths are made productive and their weaknesses are made irrelevant by the strengths of others where the unifying force is a common vision and value system. But I’ll tell you, it takes a lot of aligned systems and structures to reinforce team building. If you say to one flower, “Grow,” but you water another, the first one won’t grow. If you say let’s work as a team, but then think independently and authoritatively and make a lot of unilateral, arbitrary decisions, you won’t build a team. Team building is an extremely important and desirable activity if it is reinforced by team building principles inside the structures, systems and processes of the organization; otherwise, it will become a buzzword and sideshow and will not come under the main tent.

Q: How do you get a united, cohesive culture when you have so many different visions and goals throughout an entire organization?

A: Induce pain. As long as people are contented and happy, they’re not going to do much. You don’t want to wait until the market induces pain so you have to induce it in other ways. A balanced Scoreboard approach does it, particularly if people are accountable to it and if rewards are based on it.