Why Americans Really Hate Their Jobs

Given Luman International’s work with hundreds of organizations over the past 30 years, we weren’t the least bit surprised by Gallup’s 2013 “State of the American Workplace” report. It turns out that you get what you design your culture to give you, and too many cultures are designed to give you unhappy people.

Only 30% of surveyed employees are “engaged and inspired.” This is pathetic, especially so in a free country where people can live, learn, and work wherever they want to. 70% are doing stuff they don’t like to do or even hate to do? Only 3 in 10 really care? That means that if you have 10,000 people, except for how it inconveniences them 7,000 of them really don’t care if your organization lives or dies.

It turns out that you get what you design your culture to give you, and too many cultures are designed to give you unhappy people.

But even that 30% stat is misleading, because engagement is only slightly better than the low bar of “employee satisfaction.” You can be engaged with your work but not passionate about the organization, you can be inspired to do things that make you feel good but which are misaligned with your organization’s direction.

Luman recognized long ago that you can be both engaged and inspired and still not be creating value or delivering results – the best and ultimately only real way to achieve passion in the workplace.

And it goes downhill from there. 52% have the “so-so’s” – they can take your workplace or…not. They’re willing to move it forward if it isn’t too hard, and willing to tell you to shove it if it is. The way too many organizations try to address this? With trinkets – 1501 ways to reward employees, recognition programs, or benefits like gyms, daycare centers, cafeterias. All of these may be fine ideas, but none of them are going to create passion and commitment.

Or money, of course. Some of the unhappiest, least passionate people are making the most money. Money is not only not the answer, it can become a big part of the problem. How? Miserable, destructive, morale-killing people just won’t leave, because they’re making too much money. These aren’t golden handcuffs, but just handcuffs. And you’re organization is chained to them.

There is one more group, the 18% who are “actively disengaged.” They actually do care about your organization more than the 52%. The only problem is that what they care about is tearing everything down.

The only thing that works – that gets you out of the 30% trap, that gives you a shot at having 95% who are truly passionate and committed – is to design a culture around key elements that are doable by real leaders in real situations. We have identified 10 of those keys, which we teach in our course Building a Passionate Organization™. The course is interesting and incisive and way out of the box, and even comes with CEUs. If you implement these far-reaching principles and practices, you can win over all of the 52%, and convert or marginalize the 18%.

Last but not least, if you design these 10 key elements into your culture, your employees can become one of Gallup’s biggest exceptions.

Merging Cultures Would Be Easy…If It Wasn’t for the Cultures

Let’s face it: Merging organizations is really, really hard. There are so many issues – strategic, structural, process, financial, technical, policies, procedures – to sort out, to work out, to optimize.

And often, those are the easy parts.

In our experience with mergers – of teams, departments, divisions, and entire organizations – the cultures, no matter how vibrant, often carry the seeds of organizational disarray. Culture is an organization’s DNA, the thing that makes it what it is and that allows it to function. Culture is intangible, often invisible, but never ever insignificant. Get it right, and you can have 1 + 1 = 3 or 4 or 5. Get it wrong, and you can have 1 + 1 = really?

A current example of this was the merger of Apple culture with J. C. Penney culture. It came in the form of a wunderkind from Apple, Ron Johnson, who was brought in to “Apple-ize” Penney’s. He used a powerful personality and a lot of confidence to cram that excellent but alien culture into an old company with a very powerful culture of its own. The result? He didn’t even last 2 years. Sadly, J. C. Penney might not last 2 more.

Culture is intangible, often invisible, but never ever insignificant.

Watching culture clashes was a part of what led us to develop the concept of cultural design™. You can design principles and practices into the cultural merger that takes the best of both and blends them into an effective whole – preferably something even better than either one was alone. Success isn’t just a matter of having smart, high-quality leaders, but having leaders who know that culture is designable and mergeable.

You can have a combined, solidly integrated culture. We have 10 CEU-accredited courses to help you do it, and assessments to make sure that you have no illusions, delusions, or contusions as you do. You can create a new, living culture out of the DNA of two fine organizations. You just have to remember that in the matter of cultural mergers, all undesigned efforts will be memorable, for all the wrong reasons.

The Diamond of Excellence Leadership Certification

This is Luman’s 29th year of working with leaders at all levels to create realistic, passionate, smart organizations that deliver consistent results.

And in that sentence you find an encapsulation of the Diamond of Excellence.  Who else is teaching leaders how to build “facing and defining reality” into its cultural DNA?  Or how to go beyond motivational tricks and techniques to building a team that is truly passionate and committed?  Or how to produce decisions and actions over time that are smarter than the smartest people in the room?  Or – the bottom line – how to create a cultural design that yields not good performance, not high performance, but what we call pure performance?

“We wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm…”

From the beginning of our work, and through collaborating with tens of thousands of leaders from hundreds of organizations and dozens of industries, we purposed to create material that had as perfect a blend of effective principles and efficient practices as could be achieved.  We wanted something that worked consistently with actual human beings trying to collaborate, one of the hardest things people can attempt.  We wanted to offer material that could bring out the very best of human nature in a team environment.  And we wanted to get away from personality-driven, fad-of-the-day teaching that yields only short-term enthusiasm that is the equivalent of cotton candy – it tastes good, but pretty soon you’re feeling empty and just a little bit queesy.

Continue Reading…

Sprint, Poster Child for Dysfunctional Culture

Sprint became an early and dominant player in telecommunications.  They seemed to have it all going for them, as they built a headquarters campus roughly the size of Paris.  It turns out that they should have spent that money on fixing their culture and its strategy (culture’s natural outflow).

Since 2007, when the current CEO took over to “fix” the company, the S&P has lost roughly 18% of its value.  Sprint has lost 80%.  Their current “strategy” involves paying $600 for IPhones (over $30 billion worth) and selling them for $200, which should give them a breakeven point around the mid-point of the century.  The board, we’re told, wrestled with this.  The real question is, “Why weren’t they laughing?”  They do have a parallel strategy – suing AT&T over its potential merger with T-Mobile.  You know when your approach to competition is to use the federal government as a hammer on your peers that you are at the ugly end of your life.  As a bonus, they’ve managed to get the approach to lawsuits changed, so the government can now allow, invite or encourage competitors to join in anti-trust suits.

What went wrong?  The same thing that continues to go wrong.  James Carville told Bill Clinton that “It’s the economy, stupid.”  In organizational life, “It’s the culture, ….”  Sprint is notorious for paying people a lot of money to do nothing, creating a non-competitive, entitled culture.  At the same time, it managed to change course and lay off so many people so many different times that it created a personally competitive, fearful culture.  A lot of people with no real voice, fighting to be the last one standing.

Culture is king.  If it is designed well, it can lead to great things as you go about Building Passionate, Thinking, Pure-Performance Organizations.  Smart, experienced people – of which Sprint has had very many – can commit, trust, challenge, innovate, and talk about the truth, all on the way to building something that doesn’t make incomprehensible decisions and take wildly unproductive actions.  I have met many current and former Sprint employees, and I almost always think 2 things: 1) What a potential powerhouse, and 2) What a waste.  Good people get locked into the pay and benefits, even as they get locked into a cultural death spiral.

What’s the solution?  It’s all about what we call Cultural Design.  We have spent nearly 30 years looking at hundreds of organizations and thousands of leaders up close and personal.  We’ve seen what works and doesn’t work to produce a culture that not only yields pure-performance but does it in a sustainable and continuously renewable way.  The Sprint board made the mistake of thinking it was all about marketplace strategy and having a strong CEO who likes to be on television.  But it isn’t.  It’s all about a culture that is so strong, so dynamic, so honest, so intelligent, so focused on results that if there’s a way to win it will find it.

Sprint is a current extreme example of dysfunctional culture, but great leaders realize that the default position on culture is dysfunctional.  Without design, without building in the 40 attributes that define a truly winning culture, as a leader you get whatever human nature can serve up – seldom at its best, often at its worst.   With good design, as long as you have a real market to serve, good results are as sure as the turning of the earth.

Note: Italicized terms are trademarked property of Luman International.  All rights reserved.