Page 184 - Just Promoted A 12 Month Road Map for Success in Your New Leadership Role

Assessing Your Organization’s Health 169

A marketing manager brought into a family-owned oil distributorship to
increase sales suggested to the president (who was the founder’s son-in-law)
that his wife (the founder’s daughter, who had worked there since she was a
girl) was not organized and in fact disrupted office effectiveness. The mar-
keting manager also suggested that one of the salespeople, who was the
founder’s son, was not productive and should be fired. He suggested that the
company had hired too many friends and neighbors and that some should be
let go because they were not productive. His observations were correct, but
nonetheless within three months it was the marketing manager who was fired.
He had missed the informal politics (the wife and son’s real power) and, per-
haps, misunderstood the culture (hire family and friends, help people we like,
work with people we trust). The owners didn’t really want the company to get
big or highly efficient; they just wanted to be a little more profitable, a little
bigger, and hire a few more friends.

Climate and Culture
Are the department’s or team’s goals in sync with the organizational climate
and culture, and is the department’s culture aligned with the best way to serve
customers? For example, a bottom-line-oriented hospital management cor-
poration decided to conduct research for pharmaceutical companies. How-
ever, when it comes to drug research, cost is not the highest concern for most
pharmaceutical companies. Given the medical risk to patients, government
regulations, the company’s sense of ethics, the impact that negative publicity
can have on a company’s reputation, and the cost of product liability, most
pharmaceutical companies value quality and speed far above cost. In general,
they believe that researchers concerned about the bottom line will cut corners
and eventually get the companies into trouble. The obvious clash between the
hospital company’s cost conscious culture and the quality goals of pharma-
ceutical executives is based on the cultures and values of each. What does each
value? What is important to each? Can the two work well together?
Cultures differ in other ways. Financial institutions can often be bureau-
cratic and tend to be conservative. Direct e-mail insurance companies tend to
be very entrepreneurial, marketing oriented, and aggressive. When one buys
out the other, there is bound to be a clash of values and culture complete with
whining, complaining, and general disagreement. Cultures have to be shaped
and cultivated; this is a process requiring hard work, dedication, and time.