Culture is measured by what you tolerate and reward.
I once worked for a CEO who had a two pronged focus – financial health and the avoidance of failure. As long as the monthly financials were in line and there was no bad news, he tolerated almost anything. Instead of catching employees doing something good, the emphasis was on catching them doing something wrong. Rule after rule was implemented, designed to prevent something bad from happening. He didn’t value big successes as long as nothing was lost. He avoided feedback. The result: Sunday night found me dreading going to work on Monday morning. I don’t think I was the only employee feeling that way.
I worked for another inspiring CEO who tolerated nothing less than outstanding customer service. He promoted that culture by putting employees first. He inspired us to always go the extra mile and he loved to celebrate the stories of employees delighting our customers. I saw him get angry only once, when members of our senior team were having parking lot conversations instead of going directly to him. He didn’t tolerate the lack of respect and he rewarded risk taking and continuous improvement. He valued feedback that made us stronger. The result: I loved coming to work and so did the other employees. We were making a difference, and it was fun.
What do you tolerate and reward?
Tags: culture, integrity, leadership, organizational cutlure, reward, tolerance, trust
I often tell people that I have a simple formula for success in business: Never make a promise you aren’t going to keep, keep every promise you make. and never be late for a meeting. Simple to say and understand, harder to do sometimes. It’s good to state values in a positive assertion, I have found.
It’s clear from the above what I don’t tolerate: the dishonesty inherant in deleberatley making an empty promise, the lack of accountability and self-discipline in failing to keep a promise, and contempt for the people you work with expressed in lateness.
But leadership usually expresses itself in positive pressure. You listed things your Second CEO wouldn’t tolerate, yet say you only saw him angry once. Sounds like a fine leader.
-=John Loven
Mra-ent.com
An Eastern bloc country once announced that they were going to “initiate strict meat rationing in order to restore faith in socialism”.
Negative feedback and sitting back on heals never blooms into anything spectacular. Tom Peters reminds us to reward the oddball people and ideas.
Management by command & control only stiffles people when what they really crave is autonomy, mastery & purpose in their work (Daniel Pink).