Page 141 - Make Work Great

When Growth Is Diffi cult

patterns of overtness and clarity. Remember the distinction between
being selective and being exclusive. Don’t become judgmental, don’t
treat them badly, and don’t become cliquish in your handling of them.
Don’t exclude them, but don’t select them either. Do what you do,
and let them do what they do. Conduct business as you must, but
don’t waste any culture-changing energy that could be better spent
elsewhere in your crystal.
What if this diffi cult person is your boss, your employee, or your
customer? How can you possibly hope to change the culture around
you if you can’t even change that one person? The answer is time.
Consider the scenario represented in Figure 6.1. You have made no
changes with your “impossible” person, but you have managed over
time to successfully add three other members to your cultural crystal.
One of those members has even successfully added a single member
of his or her own.
Notice what has happened. Although you haven’t improved your
interaction with the impossible person, he or she is now receiving role-
modeled examples of your new cultural patterns from four different
individuals. By focusing your attention elsewhere, you’ve begun to suc-
cessfully “wrap” your new culture around that one diffi cult person.
Imagine a chunk of granite protruding from the surface of a lake
that’s in the process of freezing over. Granite is a different structure,

Effective Behavioral Change
One particularly effective approach to promoting behavioral change
in both animals and humans is the act of ignoring undesired behaviors
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while consistently rewarding desired ones. The crystal-wrapping
approach presented here amounts to a system-level implementation
of that same strategy: you are providing positive reinforcement in the

form of enhanced mutual benefit to those people who are able to
attach to your crystal and not wasting any energy trying to penalize or
change those who are unable to do so.

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