Pain or pleasure?

 

I love observing patterns in language - as you will have discovered from my previous blogs.

 

I'd like to share one such pattern I observed in one organisation because it might just help you notice your own organisational culture and therefore help you improve your influencing.

 

The reason for the lull in blogs in December was I was involved in delivering category and supplier management workshops for Future Purchasing * in 3 countries over 3 weeks. It involved spending 12 days with the pharmaceutical client delivering the training to over 70 procurement team members.

What I noticed was the frequency that people used "Pain" to describe or define their objectives.

• Find the pain points for the stakeholder
• What's the pain
• Help them avoid the pain
• Feel their pain

Of course I've heard it used before but not with such frequency.

Step back a minute and of course it should come as no surprise that a company that's aim is to alleviate pain should find alleviating pain coursing into every aspect of what it does.

The benefit of understanding this potential pattern is to then use it when selling ideas within the organisation. Perhaps use of 'health' might motivate their stakeholders to listen to them, however I certainly recommended they use 'pain' more in their language and to notice the impact doing this had.

I then wondered how this might be represented in other industries:

• Transport - destinations and on time or to schedule 
• Financial services - investment and security ?!?
• Education - learning and results 
• Retail - meeting needs 

What words do you hear a lot at work and do they reflect the end product in anyway. Do let me know as I'd love to explore this further. 

Alison Smith
Inspiring Change inside and out - when what you're doing isn't working

* I'm an associate of Future Purchasing - so for more on the category and supplier management work I do with them please visit the website.

What's the organisation's operating metaphor?

Johnstone, Scholes and Whittington describe organisational culture being made up of 4 layers: Values, beliefs, behaviours and a paradigm of 'taken for granted assumptions'. It’s this paradigm or world view that is represented by the cultural web which consists of:

• stories
• routines and rituals
• symbols
• power structures
• control systems
• organisational structures

Observation of each of these for a given organisation will provide an insight into the paradigm or world view of that organisation. It’s this paradigm I'd like to explore today - more specifically the operating metaphor that describes this paradigm.

the rest of this post has moved to my new website.

Organisational culture, CSR strategies & ethics

Yesterday I hypothesised that to inspire leaders to support sustainable and responsible actions these actions needed to be linked to organisational survival. That is so long as someone felt they had a choice they might opt for a different less sustainable and responsible one.

In the blog I suggested that to use 'survival' as the motivation for support for a corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy would require understanding the organisational culture.

One model I think enables a better exploration of organisational culture and the potential areas to be considered is Johnson, Scholes and Whittington's cultural web as shown above.

The cultural web is a means of documenting the 'taken for granted assumptions' of an organisation. It's this culture that drives strategy and therefore it's this culture that you can use to get support for the CSR policies you're wanting to implement.

• Stories - what stories are continually told about and within the organisation, who are the heroes and the villains, how is success defined, what about failure, what character traits do they support, what character traits do they disapprove of? How can these patterns hidden within the stories told by employees be used as you develop your strategy for CSR? 
• Symbols - status symbols, language and jargon are all characteristics of this element of the cultural web. Use of appropriate language and threat of loss of status may play a part in a CSR strategy. 
• Power structures - which individuals, departments and business units are the most powerful. Stakeholder mapping will help you understand how to best manage the complex relationships that exist within your organisation and how best to facilitate support for your strategy.
• Routines and rituals - if you try to implement a strategy that is counter to 'the way we do things round here' you're increasing the chances of failure. How can you support 'the way we do things'  in your strategy, its implementation and how you sell it to others? 
• Control Systems - what do the measurement and reward systems in place say about the organisation? How can your strategy support these? 
• Organisational structures - you can spend a lot of time winning over managers who have no say what so ever in the decision to support, or otherwise, your strategy. I'm not saying talking to other managers isn't important, especially if their support will be needed to implement any strategy. However you do need to focus your effort on those making the decision. 

Like any model I suspect the benefit when using the cultural web comes in identifying the one thing that's been ignored whilst developing the strategy. That is we're likely to have considered many of the above unconsciously without referenced to these six headings. Although we may view them differently when using 'survival' as the criteria for obtaining motivation.

Would undertaking an analysis of the cultural web for your organisation identify alternate means of obtaining support for your strategies? As it will certainly be easier to understand if this works when applied to a real situation do please let me know how you get on. 

Alison Smith
Inspiring change in procurement - inside and out

Personal and organisational survival

In an earlier blog I argued that many ethical decisions are compromised because personal survival is placed as higher importance than ethics. I can get on my soap box about integrity and doing the right thing, but we're hard wired to survive and need a huge amount of will power to override our internal programming that prioritises personal and family survival.

With thoughts of that blog still in my mind I attended the CIPS Supply Management awards. The overall winner was a team successfully raising the awareness and changing behaviours with respect to sustainable purchasing. 

Before the dinner I spoke to one of the other nominees for the award. As we spoke I realised that for that organisation the choice to support sustainability was clear cut and the right decisions were being made. Then the realisation dawned that the right doing arose because the organisation felt its survival was conditional on not doing the opposite. Brand and customer loyalty would be seriously jeopardised if they didn't get sustainability right - ROI, profit and competitive advantage would all be detrimentally impacted too. 

I wonder therefore how the internal programming to survive can, and is being used by procurement teams to inspire more businesses to do the right thing? That is how can we link sustainable action to survival of our own business and how can we link sustainable action to survival of our suppliers' businesses.

Perhaps more importantly what does that look like in terms of specifics:

• Certainly following through on not dealing with suppliers who don't take the necessary action (all talk and no action is a strategy that's bound to fail if survival is being used as the motivation).
• I also suspect culture will play a big part in how to tell the story to leaders within an organisation to enable them to accept the urgent need for changes in direction. 

Another blog last week suggested having empathy also supported right doing. I wonder how powerful a strategy that uses empathy and personal survival might be in removing the resistance to more sustainable and responsible actions in business? I suspect that's the topic for a future blog.

Alison Smith

Inspiring change inside and out

Picture courtesy of Pixabay