Strategic Employee Recognition: by Derek Irvine

We all face change in the workplace. Whether it’s a major change (merger or acquisition) or a more minor change (to shift schedules, team make up, reporting lines), the impact can be the polar opposite of what was desired when the change was instituted. So what’s the best way to manage that change?

I believe it’s through your company culture. As this IndustryWeek article notes:

“Culture is all about people. Importantly, research has shown that it’s the people component that makes mergers work … or fail dismally! Make no mistake: culture counts, but not only In M&A deals, joint ventures, and outsourcing partnerships. Culture management is also critical to maximise the everyday output of work teams and to minimise productivity-killing conflict that's so prevalent in many companies' day-to-day operations.”

In an article on the importance of morale and engagement, what intrigued me most was a statement on execution that applies to far more than just efforts to improve morale or increase engagement:

“It’s not your plans that are important; it’s whether you can implement them. A good strategy is a fine thing, but it is useless unless you can make it happen. Making it happen depends to a large degree on your people, and therein lies the power of morale.” (emphasis original)

This is the inextricability of strategy from execution. You cannot consider one without the other.

A highlight in HR Magazine outlined the characteristics of good strategic objectives. Two thirds of clarifying questions offered dealt with action – what are you doing or what will be done by others to make the objectives a reality. For example:

What’s your philosophy of leadership? Hands off? Micro-management? Numbers-based (just deliver the results)? People-based (keep employees happy)? Some combination of the above?

When asked that question in a recent New York Times “Corner Office” column, the CEO and chairman of Saks, Stephen Sadove, had this to say:

A Bnet post titled “Why ‘Corporate Culture’ Is a Myth” caught my attention. The author makes imprecise distinctions between “culture” and “values”:

“The values of a group might be honorable — or not. Unlike the mushier name culture, with its connotation of a cozy melting pot or a delightfully harmonious salad bowl, values includes more than what is outwardly professed, endlessly parroted and tritely canonised on T-shirts and coffee mugs. It also encompasses what is implicit, often deliberately buried and denied. People may talk your ear off about their culture, but values can be seen in real-time … as evidenced by real actions.”

Have you ever heard the aphorism to truly understand something you have to look at it another way? Well, sometimes you have to turn it upside down.

Paul Hebert, a blogger I always learn from and author of the i2i blog, recently posted an interesting perspective on corporate culture. In discussing corporate culture, Paul presents the usual pyramid of a broad employee base on the bottom, a smaller layer of middle management, and the smallest group – senior executives – at the point on top. The problem with this view, Paul argues, is the appearance that senior execs are less important to driving company culture.

To fix the perspective, Paul turns the entire pyramid upside down, with the broad base of employees at the top, middle managers in between, and the small point of senior execs on the bottom. Paul’s point: