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Cultural Coherence (The Power of Focus)

Picture for a moment the effect of a magnifying glass on sunlight: how it gathers the sunlight and concentrates it on one spot to produce a searing heat ray. (No doubt, as children many of us used such a lens to burn our initials onto garden furniture - much to the annoyance of our parents.) The diffused radiation from the sun is transformed in its effect by the presence of the lens - by its being focused.

And a business can reproduce that effect by taking diffused elements of how it manages its people and focusing them all on its key goal or goals. We referred in our earlier article to the importance of having clarity around what the business is trying to achieve and gave a number of reasons why – well here’s another. When we’re clear about what we’re trying to achieve, we can focus all the levers we use to motivate and direct the behaviour of our people.

So what are those levers? Well, we’ve banged on about them before in previous articles and reports, but we’ll repeat them because we think it’s an important message. They are

• Reward – what’s rewarded and how
• Recognition – what’s recognised and how
• Communication – of the company’s vision, values and aims
• Clarity of individuals’ roles and objectives and their match with the corporate aims and objectives
• Measures – what’s measured
• Reporting – what’s reported
• The skills and knowledge people are given to do their jobs
• Local leadership – the guidance and coaching given, compatibility of values, the example set, localised reward and recognition (both formal and informal)
• Systems and processes the people are being asked to use – how well they support the company’s aims

This probably all sounds very obvious, but we can’t stress enough that when we carry out coherence reviews for clients, we invariably find ‘disconnects’ and factors that instead of enabling the desired behaviour are acting as an inhibitor. In a sense this is not surprising, companies are complex mechanisms (and swamps and alligators come to mind). But another reason takes us right back to the earlier article; many companies do not establish clearly enough what their prime objectives are. It’s difficult to be focused if you don’t know where to aim the magnifying glass.

There are two other points to note.

First, what matters is the impact of the various factors on the people in the business. So it is necessary to check their impact on the people in question. It doesn’t matter if the management team thinks it has designed the greatest bonus scheme ever, what matters is its actual influence on the people it is aimed at.

Second, if a business is trying to change the way its people act, it will also need to change some of these influencing factors to achieve coherence. In particular, if the company sends people on a training course and when they come back nothing else has changed, their behaviour will almost certainly revert to what it was before. (Yet how often do we see that happen in practice.)

So, the message is that clarity and commitment on their own are not enough. The way the business is led and managed must support its aims by encouraging and supporting its people to display the right behaviour.

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