Corporate Culture and the Small Ask

Posted by David Stein, David Stein is a co-CEO of Rypple. David was one of the founders and the Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer of Workbrain. He is a recognized HCM strategist and has helped some of the biggest companies in the world to get the most out of their people.

50440 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2010/03/11/corporate-culture-and-the-small-ask/Corporate+Culture+and+the+Small+Ask2010-03-11+19%3A04%3A54David+Stein

Everyone at your organization who interacts with customers or potential customers is responsible for creating a customer first corporate culture. It’s not just the responsibility of your customer service people.

Many sales people believe the key to success is to be very aggressive – to push hard, and have a big “ask”, before they have established a trusted relationship with their potential client.

The principle of the “Small Ask” works in reverse:

1. Care about the problem your prospective client is trying to solve.
2. Think about an approach that is in the best interest of the client. One that mitigates risk, and builds confidence in the shortest period of time.
3. Start with a smaller deal that gives you the opportunity to build a relationship, and see the potential your solution can deliver.

This approach is not commonplace. Many buyers will be shocked by your less aggressive approach and actually embrace it. Many sales managers may also be surprised, and ask, why aren’t you going for the jumbo, enterprise deal?

Our response:
By going against the grain in the short term, you will have to opportunity to quickly build a relationship, establish value, and grow the deal size significantly over time. In today’s challenging and cynical market, an approach and a corporate culture that really puts customers first can be a powerful source of competitive advantage.

The secret of man’s success resides in his insight into the moods of people, and his tact in dealing with them.- J.G. Holland

Tags: competitive advantage, Corporate Culture, customer first, david stein, Sales

Culture in Action

Posted by Beth Steinberg, Beth Steinberg has more than 17 years of human resources experience helping leaders and companies (emerging to Fortune 500) with complex organizational and growth issues. She is currently an Organization Development Consultant living in Silicon Valley.

49920 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2010/02/17/culture-in-action/Culture+in+Action2010-02-17+19%3A06%3A44Beth+Steinberg

Culture refers to the values of the company, the way people get their work done, the way decisions are made, and the way people treat each other, their customers and their shareholders. I have written a lot about the importance of company culture in my previous posts.

Employees may see culture in a very different way than their leaders. This can cause major frustration for employees and it can impact trust and eventually productivity.

One company I work with, The Motley Fool, has put a big focus on company culture. The company was founded in 1993 by brothers David and Tom Gardner, and provides financial solutions for investors of every kind. Because of their various businesses, there are a wide variety of different jobs and a very diverse employee base. The Fool has implemented some simple, yet very effective ways to align the people and the culture.

1. The Mission, Vision and Values of The Motley Fool
   • Our mission: To educate, amuse, and enrich
   • Our vision: To build the world’s greatest investment community
   • Our core values: Honesty, optimism, teamwork, innovation, winning

They are prominent on their website and very visible within the company.

2. The Nomenclature

In all guidelines and written materials, you feel the flavor of the company. Employees are affectionately called “Fools” and strive to be Foolish.

3. Open Space

The Fool has a lot of open space for people to meet and discuss ideas. No one has an office and people regularly engage with each other.

4. Foolishness  Council

A mix of employees, individual contributors as well as leaders, are hand-picked to be a part of the Foolishness Council. The council serves as the stewards of the culture, looking at what is working and what is not. It is not an extra, but part of their jobs and quarterly objectives. As well as being a great way to get a thorough view of the real culture, it is a great way for people to lead in a non hierarchical way.

These are all very simple, yet creative ways to make a culture real. Don’t wait for someone to do it for you. Find ways to make culture real in your organization.

Tags: beth steinberg, Corporate Culture, culture, Motley Fool, Rypple

Corporate Cultures Must Encourage Productive Feedback

Posted by Jamie Resker, Founder and President: Employee Performance Solutions. Jamie is recognized as an established thought leader and innovator in the area of performance management. She is the originator of the Performance Continuum Feedback Method®, a tool for systematically diagnosing employee performance issues and development opportunities and crafting messages about even the most sensitive behavior based issues.

47421 commenthttp://rypple.com/blog/2010/02/01/corporate-cultures-must-encourage-productive-feedback/Corporate+Cultures+Must+Encourage+Productive+Feedback2010-02-01+15%3A58%3A20Jamie+Resker

People are really good at making excuses for not giving feedback. “We’re really nice at XYZ organization” or “we avoid conflict and causing people to feel badly about themselves” are the justifications we most commonly hear. Translation: it’s just easier to let the under performance continue as is; I’ll just focus on my A and B level players.

There are many reasons for not having performance conversations:

• He’s only got another two years before retirement.
• She can’t change.
• That’s the way he’s always been.
• What if I make things worse?
• It’s a personality issue and it’s not my job to deal with that type of thing.
• We can’t afford to lose her.
• The most contradictory of all: “We’re a gentle, nice type of place to work and we avoid conflict”.

A Human Resources Director of a Boston based technology company had a manager ask for assistance to move an under performing employee out of the company. When the HR Director asked the manager when he had a conversation with the employee about the issue, he admitted he hadn’t brought it up with them. She then asked point blank: “So you’d rather fire this person than try to have a conversation about changing the behavior? (See my paper How to Address Employee Behavior Issues) Sadly the manager answered, “Yes, I’d rather just get rid of the person”.

This is an unfortunately common story in many organizations. So, if the organization was really the nice place it claimed to be wouldn’t it make more sense to provide early-on and actionable feedback that would help the employee get back on track?

Good and kind organizations promote these conversations early on before the issue has reached the point of no return. From the employee’s perspective it’s particularly unfair when the issue is in their blind spot. They have no idea their performance is problematic, not because the leader who should be having a conversation is unaware of the issue, but unsure of how to go about the conversation. On the surface this appears to be the “we’re a nice organization who doesn’t engage in conflict”.

What can you do?

What if you work for an organization that is kind and shies away from giving feedback for fear of “upsetting people”? Don’t wait for someone to wave their magic wand and give you the feedback. You could be waiting a very long time. I hate to say it, but assume that there’s information that people are aware of but just aren’t going to tell you about. We all have blind spots; do you know about yours? Be the initiator of gathering important developmental information. Tap into your network of trusted advisors and ask the one thing questions:

1. Tell me one thing I’m doing well that I should continue with (after all it’s just as important to know what we’re doing well and should continue with).
2. Tell me one thing that would help me be more effective? (notice I’m not asking for a commentary on a weakness; I want the person I’m asking to think forward about something I can take action on in the future)

Being a kind organization means giving people the opportunity to improve, even when it might mean initiating an uncomfortable conversation. The goal should always be to “help the employee out” before “helping them out of the organization”.

Tags: Corporate Culture, Feedback, Performance Management, productive feedback

Driving a Culture of Accountability and Responsibility

Posted by Beth Steinberg, Beth Steinberg has more than 17 years of human resources experience helping leaders and companies (emerging to Fortune 500) with complex organizational and growth issues. She is currently an Organization Development Consultant living in Silicon Valley.

40570 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/21/driving-a-culture-of-accountability-and-responsibility/Driving+a+Culture+of+Accountability+and+Responsibility2009-12-21+20%3A47%3A06Beth+Steinberg

Photo by Lars Plougmann

The behaviors organization accept are generally baked into their corporate culture. Accountability is no exception. The cues we get from the company leadership, our direct manager, and our peers formulate how we think about these behaviors. Although often quite subtle, these cues help us understand the importance of accountability in our own organizations.

Companies get the behaviors that they model into their culture. Many organizations don’t take the time to think about the cues their policies and rewarded actions give to their employees. I’ve always been puzzled why the dive and catch is so celebrated in the corporate world. A company I worked at actually had a Fire Fighter Award, which perpetuated that saving the day was to be “rewarded” rather than preparedness and proper planning. Bob Sutton has written on this topic before (see Your Lack of Planning is Not My Emergency) and had a strong response from most people.

Netflix’s presentation on Freedom & Responsibility Culture recently made the rounds. It contains many references to empowerment, hiring practices, and adherence to behaviors and values, which are all great concepts. It makes sense and I would love to see how it actually plays out in day-to-day work, but it’s not enough.

Along with sending a message of accountability throughout corporate culture, people need to have a strong and positive relationship with their direct manager and an inherent trust in the organization in order to feel accountable for their results. You need to feel that your relationship to your employer is “reciprocal” for the building the blocks of accountability to fall into place. Mihnea C. Moldoveanu writes much more about this in his Harvard Business Review Article, The Promise: The Basic Building Blocks of Accountability.

Some guidelines on how to promote accountability and responsibility in your organization:

1. Leaders must model accountability. This includes taking accountability for mistakes and giving credit where credit is due.
2. Do not create silly policies in your organization. Most of the people do the right thing most of the time.
3. Communicate and share information. It hard for people to feel accountable if they do not understand what is happening in the organization.
4. Create a safe learning environment. People need to not be afraid to give feedback and share mistakes or missteps. This is how people learn.
5. Focus on the relationship managers have with their teams. Create systems, tools and training that help managers develop better relationships. This is the foundation for driving accountability in the organization.

Tags: accountability, beth steinberg, bob sutton, Corporate Culture, dive and catch, fire fighter, freedom and responsibility, HBR, mihnea moldoveanu, netflix, the promise, Trust

Gear Up for Success in 2010

Posted by Jesse Goldman, Business Development

39440 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/15/gear-up-for-success-2010/Gear+Up+for+Success+in+20102009-12-15+18%3A32%3A45Jesse+Goldman

Tomorrow at 12pm ET (9am PT) we’ll be hosting an exciting live event with Intuit. We’ll be sharing three keys to help you create a true performance-oriented culture in 2010.

What does that mean? Here’s a sneak peek: based on our experience working with awesome companies and industry thought leaders, we’ll share techniques to accelerate learning, improve focus, and boost productivity – so you can drive outstanding results in 2010! It’s a live discussion – so a great opportunity to hear from others as well!

Join us to learn more!

Tags: Corporate Culture, Intuit, live event, performance, performance-oriented culture

Job Design and Challenging Work

Posted by Beth Steinberg, Beth Steinberg has more than 17 years of human resources experience helping leaders and companies (emerging to Fortune 500) with complex organizational and growth issues. She is currently an Organization Development Consultant living in Silicon Valley.

39211 commenthttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/12/14/job-design-and-challenging-work/Job+Design+and+Challenging+Work2009-12-14+19%3A48%3A24Beth+Steinberg

Photo by ItzaFineDay

Employees want to know that their work matters to the overall success of the company. It’s important that jobs are designed in a way that their value and impact is clear to the employee. Technology companies are a great example of this: engineers at Facebook take part in Hackathons where they can work on new projects that may end up being product features. At Google, 20% of an employee’s time is set aside to work on personal projects and new ideas. Job design and clarity of contribution can make a big difference on productivity.

• Make sure everyone in the company knows how they contribute to your overall success. This is true regardless of how you define success: goals, objectives, mission, etc. You can create a simple template to role objectives to all employees and link them appropriately. It does not need to be over engineered, just make it simple. You should review this at least quarterly with the team to make sure everyone is still on track.
• Understand your team’s competencies and interests. Think about this broadly, including what people are good at and like to do inside of work and outside of work. Try to make sure part of the role includes areas that are interesting to them, even if they may not be part of the day to day job. This can be achieved by letting employees work on cross functional project teams, shadow leaders, do lunch times talks, etc. There are many ways to make sure people are finding joy and passion in their work. As a leader, one of your primary roles (if not your primary role) is to facilitate this.
• Ask and listen. Ensure that you know your team well enough to know how much is too much and when they are not challenged enough. There is no special way to do this. You need to talk with your team, communicate openly about their work and ask appropriate questions. Being bored is about the worst thing for smart people. Being consistently overworked will ultimately have a diminished return.
• Rethink the traditional “job description”. I think people get too caught up in job descriptions. I like to think about “job accountabilities”. Nike uses a “Success Profile”. Whatever you use, make sure it does not limit people. Think about contribution and accountabilities instead of simply writing a description.

Tags: 20% time, ask, challenge, Coaching, competencies, Corporate Culture, facebook, Feedback, Google, hackathon, interests, job descripition, job design, listen accoutnability, Rypple

Social media drives culture change

Posted by Daniel Debow, Co-CEO

28350 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/10/15/social-media-drives-culture-change/Social+media+drives+culture+change2009-10-15+19%3A20%3A15Daniel+Debow

It’s not often that CEOs are excited to hear that their product could be made obsolete.

But two weeks ago at HRTech in Chicago, David and I heard just that from one of our more prominent corporate users and we couldn’t be happier!

Of course, Rypple isn’t really going anywhere and the comment was actually good news with respect to the impact of social media on organizations. Let me explain.

HRTech is an annual trade show and conference. It’s coordinated by the dean of HR technology writers, Bill Kutik, who moderates a “Cool New Technologies” panel every year. My co-CEO, David Stein, delivered a fantastic demo of Rypple at this year’s session. The feedback from the live audience was super-positive and we got some great feedback via Rypple afterward!

One of our executive users pulled me aside for a quick conversation the day before the demo. He’s the CEO of a mid-sized professional services firm who’s been using Rypple for a year.  He wanted us to know he loved Rypple.  Awesome!

Then he said:

“I think you might have a real problem.  I’m concerned that using Rypple might make Rypple obsolete. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed that people are much more willing to give me feedback face-to-face.  They’re willing to talk to me — and to each other.”

To which we said:

That’s the furthest thing from a problem we can imagine! In fact, your observation of “increased feedback” is actually the goal of our service.  Using a social tool like Rypple to drive an increase in face-to-face interaction is precisely what makes Rypple so compelling.

The point is: social media is not simply narcissistic self-exposure online. When carefully and thoughtfully designed, social media can enhance real world interaction (ask anyone who’s been to a TweetUp!). We’ve worked hard to help support and encourage feedback as a social behavior in our customers’ companies because we believe it leads to learning, better execution, and success.

In fact, we’ve found that when an organization or senior executive integrates Rypple into their operation, they do so because:

• feedback, transparency, and communication are important to them
• there is a real commitment to continuous improvement
• what their people think matters.

Great social apps encourage people to develop real, actual social interaction.

If introducing Rypple to a firm filled with smart, high performing individuals made them more open to giving and getting feedback and increased teamwork and collaboration, then we hope more CEOs tell us that Rypple is going to be obsolete!

Tags: Bill Kutik, collaboration, Cool New Technologies, Corporate Culture, Culture Change, HR, HR Tech, learning, lessons, Social Media, teamwork, TweetUp

“That will never work in our culture!”

Posted by David Priemer, Product & Community

22070 commentshttp://rypple.com/blog/2009/09/15/that-will-never-work-in-our-culture/%22That+will+never+work+in+our+culture%21%222009-09-15+18%3A07%3A34David+Priemer

John Baldoni, one of the world’s top leadership gurus, points out that:

1. knowing what your employees really think is integral to cultivating good ideas, and,
2. reporting back on the impact of employee ideas is the key to getting more good ideas.

Fair enough…but surfacing employee thoughts and sentiments is one thing. Turning them into a tangible plan of action is quite another.

In fact, tons of great ideas are destined to be non-starters because we often don’t understand the process and barriers to acting on them.  We didn’t realize this, but it turns out that Rypple can help to uncovering barriers as well as solicit ideas.

Here’s an example:

The other day I watched  Kevin Schlabach on RyppleTV.  Kevin’s a project coordinator charged with driving innovative ideas and thinking at his company.  Kevin talked about using Rypple to solicit feedback and new ideas.

What was unexpected was that Kevin was using Rypple as a platform to uncover barriers to implementing ideas – cool!

He described how people were providing focused, constructive feedback on new ideas, but they were also appending their feedback with comments like:

“your idea is good…but it would never happen in our culture!“

NEVER happen in our culture you say!? Now we’re getting somewhere!

Not only had Kevin been able to identify a good, actionable solution to a problem, but he now had:

1. the basis for asking follow-up questions to drive his good ideas forward
2. a tool that would allow him to find out what people REALLY thought about the barriers associated with them by asking things like:

• “Why won’t the idea work in our culture?”
• “Who do you think would object the most to this idea?”
• “What would we have to do in order to bring this idea about?”

We love hearing stories of users like Kevin, but more importantly we love learning how we can help people and organizations use feedback to really drive themselves and their businesses forward.

Thanks Kevin!

Tags: agile, business development, Corporate Culture, employees, Feedback, People, Rypple, sentiments, Workplace