3 things an executive can do: influencing in passive-aggressive cultures
The Chief Digital Officer (CDO) had a compelling vision for leading a digital transformation that would be critical to remaining a viable competitor in their marketplace. She was hired to deliver on this innovation, and everyone knew that without implementing this vision, the company would not survive for more than four or five more years.
Yet, the CDO could not get her C-Suite peers to have a reasonable debate and reach a decision on a path forward. The rest of the leadership team was avoiding the issue, and her attempts to engage them went unanswered. They weren’t hostile, and in fact expressed agreement on the importance of the change—they just refused to respond and take needed action. Because the company had this “nice” culture that avoided even healthy debate, the CDO was completely frustrated. She was losing ground rapidly, and yet was under the gun to deliver. She didn’t know what to do.
During a coaching session, she said to me, “Do I express my frustration and risk being seen as angry? That will not get me far. So how can I be authentic without upsetting my peers? I am tired of being ‘nice’ and getting nowhere! There are two big non-traditional competitors out there who will eat our lunch if we do not act now. Don’t they see that inaction will lead to the death of the company? I was given responsibility for a mission-critical job, yet no one wants to debate it or make any decisions! I’m going crazy!”
“Nice” cultures: death by a thousand unspoken cuts
The CDO was describing a passive-aggressive organization. These cultures are not rare. In fact, studies have found that over 25% of companies can be classified as passive aggressive. On the surface, everyone is friendly, which makes reaching consensus easy. The problem is that the consensus is really false agreement since it was reached without constructive debate. As a result, few people are really committed to the decision since they gave in rather than buying into the decision. So, everyone drags their feet when it comes to supporting implementation.
A common symptom of false consensus is second guessing. Since team members don’t express their true concerns the first time around, they may bring up a concern or a question later, after you thought the team had made a decision. And since no one likes confrontation, the second guessing brings everything to a halt.
Everyone is pleasant, but nothing can get done. And this can go on for months, if not years. Meanwhile, the company’s competitors are starting to steal market share.
3 things a leader can do
We worked with this leader to plan her path. These three actions, when done in combination, can unlock conversation, collaboration, healthier debate, as well as a way to accelerate your ideas, while navigating the culture of “nice.”
- Make the case – the executive team needs to be persuaded on the value and benefits to move off their position
Explain, in simple language, why the company needs a digital transformation now. Use a few key pieces of data. For example, tell a quick but compelling 2-3-minute story of how a customer filed a complaint because the company’s databases did not talk to each other. Or refer to an industry study that makes the case for the need for a transformation. Show data that is important to your audience – your C-Suite peers.The goal is to show them you need to take action now. - Explore their resistance – understanding what’s behind their behavior helps you to connect to what matters to them
Of course, as you are making your case, your audience is thinking of all the reasons not to take any bold actions.To break the norm of a passive-aggressive culture, it is important to make it safer for people to voice their concerns. You need to understand their resistance, not ignore it. How can you deal with their resistance if you do not know what it is? You want concerns out in the open, rather than buried under a veneer of “nice.” The trick is to create the setting to make this comfortable and productive.
In this case, we coached the CDO to break down the executive team into groups of 3 or 4 people and start the conversation with something like, “You all have heard my plans for a digital transformation. I know I probably didn’t think of everything. Maybe there are some unintended consequences I haven’t considered. Or maybe I am not aware of some data you have. Or maybe parts of my plan seem ambiguous or not clear. In your breakout groups, I’d like you to discuss your biggest concerns and questions. I need to know them so I can make the right tweaks to my plan. Come back with a list of your biggest concerns.”
By doing this, she is giving them permission to challenge her. But, at the same time, she is making it clear she is going ahead with her plan. This process is a good authentic way to display both the humility required in a “nice” culture, as well as the assertiveness needed to get things done.
Hopefully, this type of exercise will yield some insights into their real resistance, which makes it easier to respond to concerns, and possibly adjust your plans to meet their needs. And sometimes you will not be able to meet their needs, but at least they will feel heard, and you may be able to offer an alternative solution. For example, you can say, “I understand this initiative will take resources away from you, but this mission-critical project is in the best interest of the company and will keep us sustainable. Perhaps we can find some way to give you some temporary help.”
By hearing and responding to their concerns, you are increasing the chance of buy-in and hopefully minimizing the second guessing that often comes later.
If you have successfully made your business case (step #1 above) and you have been given the responsibility to transform the company, you do not need to make sure everyone agrees with you 100%. The goal of decision-making, even consensus, is not unanimity, but unity.And once you have that unity – the agreement to proceed with the transformation – the next step is to rally the troops. - Inspire the troops – lay the groundwork to engage and inspire everyone to do their part in delivering on the transformation
Once the C-Suite is united around the vision of the digital transformation, it’s time to get everyone, not just the executive team, on board. Often, a leader can have the right vision, but the troops will stifle execution. Especially in a passive-aggressive culture, a functional or department head may be talking negatively about your vision to their people but saying positive things to your face. Talking to and hearing from people directly eliminates the backchanneling and filter.
One powerful option is to go on a “vision tour” and meet with the various departments and functions to explain the vision and answer questions. For our CDO, ideally, she would be accompanied by the CEO and the department leader.
A successful vision tour focuses on two points:
- Demonstrating how the change will benefit the audience
Everyone probably has a horror story about the current situation that is leading up to the change – it could be something like how frustrated they are when trying to get accurate information quickly, or how their systems do not talk to each other. Share a short story from someone in that function about their pain points and draw the connection to the change. Show how you understand their frustrations and how this initiative will make their work life better
- Giving people a chance to ask questions and express their concerns
Consider convening a virtual or in-person town hall. Ask people to get together in small groups and come up with three questions or concerns. Have a spokesperson from each group take turns sharing a concern. Answer as many of these questions are possible. It is important to be as honest and transparent as you can. If you do not know the answer or need more time to give one, say so, but be sure to get back to the group with a response as soon as possible. By being authentic and honest, people will begin to trust you and see you have the best interest of the enterprise at heart. In passive-aggressive cultures, people are used to leaders saying everything will be fine when everyone knows everything will not be “fine.” You will gain lots of credibility if you are honest with people about the challenges change brings.
And just as important, you will model a way to be “nice” and respectful without the need to avoid difficult conversations.
Be appropriately nice and appropriately assertive
If you follow these three steps, you will greatly increase your ability to influence change. True, you can’t change a passive-aggressive culture overnight. But you can take some actions to minimize the chances that your ideas will be stymied and gently killed by a “nice” culture. Remember, “nice” cultures are really not very nice. As Carolyn McCray says, “You do realize that passive-aggressive behavior is aggressive behavior for cowards, right?” You need to take the fear out of speaking up.
You are expected to lead, so lead. You are also expected to be nice, so be nice. You can do both.
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You’re buckling in for an overseas flight in a brand-new Boeing 777. The pilot comes on the PA: “Ah, ladies and gentlemen, our flight time today will be six and a half hours at a cruising altitude of 33,000 feet. And I should mention that this is the first time I have ever flown a 777. Wish me luck.”
Before setting foot in the real world, pilots, military personnel and disaster response teams use intense simulations to learn how to respond to high-intensity challenges.Why should we place corporate leaders and their teams in situations without first giving them a chance to try things out? The risks are huge — new strategy investments can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. BTS offers a better way to turn strategy into action: customized business simulations.
‘Now I Know What it’s Like to be CEO’
A customized business simulation of your enterprise, business unit or process, using real-world competitive dynamics, places leaders in a context where they step out of their normal day-to-day roles and gain exposure to the big picture. Participants make decisions in a risk-free environment, allowing them to experience critical interdependencies, execution best practices and the levers they can use to optimize their company’s key performance indicators. It takes the concept of a strategy and makes it personal, giving each individual the chance to see the direct impacts of their actions and the role they play in strategy execution.
Leading corporations are increasingly turning to business simulations to help build strategic alignment and execution capability when faced with the following business challenges:
- Key performance objective and new strategy implementation.
- Accelerating strategy execution and innovation.
- Improving business acumen and financial decision making.
- Transforming sales programs into business results accelerators.
- Leadership development focused on front-line execution.
- Implementing culture change as tied to strategy alignment.
- Modeling complex value chains for collaborative cost elimination.
- Merger integration.
Within minutes of being placed in a business simulation, users are grappling with issues and decisions that they must make — now. A year gets compressed into a day or less. Competition among teams spurs engagement, invention and discovery.
The Business Simulation Continuum: Customize to Fit Your Needs
Simulations have a broad range of applications, from building deep strategic alignment to developing execution capability. The more customized the simulation, the more experience participants can bring back to the job in execution and results. Think about it: why design a learning experience around generic competency models or broad definitions of success when the point is to improve within your business context? When you instead simulate what “great” looks like for your organization, you exponentially increase the efficacy of your program.
10 Elements of Highly Effective Business Simulations
With 30 years of experience building and implementing highly customized simulations for Fortune 500 companies, BTS has developed the 10 critical elements of an effective business simulation:
- Highly realistic with points of realism targeted to drive experiential learning.
- Dynamically competitive with decisions and results impacted by peers’ decisions in an intense, yet fun, environment.
- Illustrative, not prescriptive or deterministic, with a focus on new ways of thinking.
- Catalyzes discussion of critical issues with learning coming from discussion within teams and among individuals.
- Business-relevant feedback, a mechanism to relate the simulation experience directly back to the company’s business and key strategic priorities.
- Delivered with excellence : High levels of quality and inclusion of such design elements as group discussion, humor, coaching and competition that make the experience highly interactive, intriguing, emotional, fun, and satisfying.
- User driven: Progress through the business simulation experience is controlled by participants and accommodates a variety of learning and work styles.
- Designed for a specific target audience, level and business need.
- Outcome focused , so that changes in mindset lead to concrete actions.
- Enables and builds community: Interpersonal networks are created and extended through chat rooms, threaded discussions and issue-focused e-mail groups; participants support and share with peers.
Better Results, Faster
Well-designed business simulations are proven to significantly accelerate the time to value of corporate initiatives. A new strategy can be delivered to a global workforce and execution capability can be developed quickly, consistently and cost-effectively. It’s made personal, so that back on the job, participants own the new strategy and share their enthusiasm and commitment. This in turn yields tangible results; according to a research report conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by BTS, titled “Mindsets: Gaining Buy-In to Strategy,” the majority of firms struggle to achieve buy-in to strategy, but those that personalize strategy throughout their organization significantly outperform their peers in terms of profitability, revenue growth and market share.
Business Simulations: Even More Powerful in Combination
Comprehensive deployment of business simulation and experiential learning programs combines live and online experiences. The deepest alignment, mindset shift and capability building takes place over time through a series of well-designed activities. Maximize impact by linking engagement and skill building to organizational objectives and by involving leadership throughout the process.
Putting Business Simulations to Work
Simulations drive strategic alignment, sales force transformation, and business acumen, financial acumen and leadership development, among other areas. A successful experiential learning program cements strategic alignment and builds execution capability across the entire organization, turning strategy into action. Results can be measured in team effectiveness, company alignment, revenue growth and share price.
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I recently read an HBR article discussing why the traditional approach to leadership development doesn’t always work.
It stated that instead of traditional methods, the best way to identify, grow and retain leaders to meet today’s demands is to “Let them innovate, let them improvise and let them actually lead.”
Over the past 30 years, as we’ve partnered with clients facing a vast range of challenges, we’ve seen the truth behind this – that people learn best by actually doing. That’s why business simulations are such a powerful tool: they allow people to do and lead within a risk-free environment, and condense years of on-the-job learning experience into a few days, or even hours.
We also know that learning is not just a “one and done” situation – it is a continuous experience. In many cases, a learning journey, which blends a variety of learning methodologies and tools over time, is the most powerful means of shifting mindsets, building capabilities and driving sustained, effective results.What a learning journey looks like depends entirely on the context of your organization. What challenges are you addressing? What results are you driving for? What does great leadership look like for your organization?
To bring this to life, imagine the following approach to a blended learning journey for aligning and developing leaders – in this scenario, within a financial services firm: Financial technology has “transformed the way money is managed. It affects almost every financial activity, from banking to payments to wealth management. Startups are re-imagining financial services processes, while incumbent financial services firms are following suit with new products of their own.”
For a leading financial services company, this disruption has led to a massive technology transformation. With tens of thousands of employees in the current technology and operations group, the company will be making massive reductions to headcount over the next five years as a result of automation, robotics and other technology advances.
This personnel reduction and increased use of technology is both a massive shift for the business as well as a huge change in the scope of responsibility that the remaining leaders are being asked to take on moving forward. As such, the CEO of the business unit recognizes the need to align 175 senior leaders in the unit to the strategy and the future direction of the business, and give them the capabilities that they need to effectively execute moving forward.
To achieve these goals, BTS would build an innovative design for this initiative: a six-month blended experience, incorporating in-person events, individual and cohort-based coaching sessions, virtual assessments and more. Throughout the journey, data would be captured and analyzed to provide top leadership with information about the participants’ progress – and skill gaps – on both an individual and cohort level, thus setting up future development initiatives for optimal success.
The journey would begin with a two-day live conference event for the 175 person target audience, incorporating leader-led presentations about the strategy. The event would not just be talking heads and PowerPoint slides, but rather would leverage the BTS Pulse digital event technology to increase engagement and create a two-way, interactive dialogue that captures the participants’ ideas and suggestions. Participants also would use the technology to experience a moments-based leadership simulation that develops critical communications, innovation and change leadership capabilities, among other skills.
romAfter the event, participants would return to the job to apply their new learnings. On the job, each participant would continue their journey with four one-on-one performance coaching sessions, in addition to a series of peer coaching sessions shared with four to five colleagues. They also would use 60-90 minute virtual Practice with an Expert sessions to develop specific skill areas in short learning bursts, and then practice those skills with a live virtual coach. Throughout the journey, participants would access online, self-paced modules that contain “go-do activities” to reinforce and encourage application of the innovation leadership and other skills learned during the program.
As a capstone, six months after the journey has begun, every participant would go through a live, virtual assessment conducted via the BTS Pulse platform. In three to four hours, these virtual assessments allow live assessors to evaluate each leader’s learnings from the overall journey and identify any remaining skill gaps. The individual and cohort assessment data would then lead to and govern the design of future learning interventions that would continue to ensure the leaders are capable of implementing the strategy.
As you can see, this journey design leverages a range of tools and learning methodologies to create a holistic, impactful solution. It’s not just a standalone event – each step of the journey ties into the one before, and the data gathered throughout can be used well into the future in order to shape the next initiative .
Great journeys or experiences like this can take many forms. In addition to live classroom and virtual experiences, there is an ecosystem of activities, such as performance coaching, peer coaching, practice with an expert, go-dos, self-paced learning modules, and more, that truly engage leaders and ensure that the learnings are being reinforced, built upon, practiced and implemented back on the job. We find that these types of experience rarely look the same for every client. There are many factors that determine which configuration and progression will make the most sense. There is one common theme that we have found throughout these highly contextual experiences, however – that the participant feedback is outstanding and the business impact is profound.
Leading with Purpose, Part 1
Most CEOs I speak with are not 100% at peace with their company’s purpose. As the market, their people and their business evolve, so will their purpose. As some of the best companies of past and present show us, there is strength, and even magic, in a great company purpose. What is also clear, however, is that this magic does not come from just having a “purpose” or “vision,” but rather from how well a company is executing against their purpose.
When Southwest Airlines (which has been profitable for 45 consecutive years, and on FORTUNE’s list of World’s Most Admired Companies for 24 straight years) was first starting out, their mission was to make flying affordable.1 They rallied their people on the idea that a grandmother should be able to affordably buy a ticket, at the drop of a hat, to get on a flight to see her new grandchild. This simple mission led to the “Southwest Effect,” which transformed the airline industry, and continued to be a lens with which the Southwest leadership team made key decisions.
Today, Southwest’s vision has evolved: “To become the world’s most loved, most flown, and most profitable airline.” And they are executing on this vision. They continue to drive superior shareholder returns against all industries on the S&P 500 (as they have for the past 44 years), and in 2018 were named the top low-cost airline in JD Powers customer survey reports for the second year in a row.
As the Southwest example highlights, great company purpose combined with a leadership team who will build the work-flows, culture, processes and metrics to live up to it can be an enormous employee motivator. But we have also experienced, both at BTS and with our global clients, that a good company vision and purpose on their own are not sufficient – employees need them to be even more personal to them as an individual. I remember a lunch I had twelve years ago with a 24-year old new hire who was my direct report. After some small talk he looked at me and said, “Why are you here? Why have you spent seven years with the same company?”
I’ll never forget that lunch. It was the first time I had been asked the question, and it was the beginning of a new decade where our employees were much louder and more active about wanting to reflect and spend time on our mission and purpose, linking it to their personal values and the impact they strived to have in the world. Luke, that 24-year old new hire, has made me and our company better as a result of his question.
In the last decade, there has been a growing emphasis in the business world on finding a deeper motivation to unlock greater meaning at work. For some this may sound ‘fluffy,’ or as one executive we spoke to commented, “Is this just the next version of the pursuit of vision and values? It sounds great on paper but too often makes little real difference as it tends to stay on the wall, rather than live in your heart.”
Yet your people spend the majority of their life at work and with colleagues. At its best, a sense of purpose is a way of bringing meaning to their work and understanding the contributions they are making to the company, as well as greater society. It makes sense, then, that employees who are clear on their personal and professional purpose end their work day invigorated and proud of what they’re doing instead of exhausted by mindless work that is bereft of real meaning.
According to a recent PWC study, 79% of business leaders believe that purpose is central to business success – but only 34% use their organization’s purpose as a guidepost for their leadership team’s decision-making. Signs that your workplace may be lacking organizational purpose are distracted employees and a lack of comradery. These are significant factors – so why don’t more organizations devote time to developing clear purpose and values? Well, developing organizational purpose is no easy task, and much of it starts with your own personal purpose. If you’re unsure of what exactly your own personal purpose is, have no fear – in the next two installments of this blog series, we will offer simple steps to help you uncover your personal and organizational purposes and get closer to leading through the lens of purpose.