Culture Sustains Performance — For Better or For Worse This is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Tom Krause and Kristen Bell’s book “7 Insights into Safety Leadership.” We’ve never met a leader that didn’t want a better culture for their organization. Statements like, “we need to change the culture,” are heard every day in…
It was 1993 and Paul O’Neill was attending his first board meeting as a Director at one of the largest companies in the world. Just as the meeting was coming to a close, O’Neill asked, “Where is the safety report?” As the story goes, no safety report was planned but the question had profound effects. It set the company on the path to creating safety excellence and embedding safety as a cultural value. Board member influence can do that — uniquely — and it saves lives while creating business value.
Few leaders can honestly say they know how to create, maintain, and enhance their culture. At the same time, the success of a culture change effort depends on the degree to which leaders understand and relate their own decisions, behaviors, and thought processes to the culture itself. The most challenging part of culture change is…
Catastrophes are a risk in organizational life. From a quality issue that causes consumer fatalities and brings reputational damage to a hostile working environment leading to harassment or to employees becoming seriously or fatally injured. These things are usually a surprise to the senior-most leaders. “I knew we had some issues at that facility, but…
Organizational culture has been defined in numerous ways. To some, it’s about what we as a group really value — production, quality, technical excellence, safety, diversity, growth, profit, engagement, goal attainment, and efficiency. From this perspective leaders start by understanding what they value, then develop what they think we should value. Then they develop a strategy…
A bad workplace culture is a hazard in itself. But even a mediocre one can contribute directly to a disaster. NASA won awards for being the “best place to work” among U.S government agencies. But the Space Shuttle Columbia failure, which resulted in the loss of seven astronauts and countless resources, was directly related to…
There are two sections in Tom Krause’s book “If Your Culture Could Talk: A Story About Culture Change.” In this video he highlights the key takeaway from the initial story, and one of the five, research-based variables that leaders must pay attention to in order to build and maintain a strong culture. For more information…
SAY you have a manufacturing location with problems — three plant managers in two years, unusual variation in quality and/or safety, seemingly unpredictable swings in productivity. The options senior leadership considers may be to sell it, give it a defined period to show or go, or take on the task of rehabilitation. Leadership may wonder…
If organizational values on paper don’t match up with employee’s day-to-day experience, culture suffers. Here’s how to back them up with action. How often do organizations go through the motions of defining their company value statements, only to leave them to languish like just another exercise checked off the list? When organizational values such as…
CNN’s four-part series, “Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight,” tells the story of how a series of decisions made by competent, dedicated, and well-intentioned leaders set the stage for a safety exposure that brought down the Space Shuttle Columbia — an exposure that was not understood at the time. As an organizational psychologist, I’ve studied decision-making…
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