Ensuring new executives are committed to the organization’s unique culture
Introducing a new leader into an organization can often result in something like an organ rejection.
In fact, 40 per cent of all new leaders, including those promoted and hired from outside an organization, fail to meet the expectations of management. That’s according to the results of a survey of 826 HR directors, conducted by Right Management in 2003.
Two of the drivers behind this failure were an inability to build effective relationships with peers and subordinates (82 per cent) and a lack of internal political skills (50 per cent). These issues relate specifically to a failure to assimilate successfully or, put another way, an inability to mesh with the existing culture.
We’ve all seen the statistics on the cost of failed hires— an estimate puts it at 1.5 to three times a person’s annual salary. But we also need to consider other impact on the organization, including below-par performance, tactical and strategic errors, decreased employee morale and satisfaction, and increased turnover.
Most importantly, because inconsistencies in leader behaviours and communication never go unnoticed by employees, cultural mismatches often help undermine credibility and trust. So beware. One small misfit can deliver a big dysfunction in a few short months or, in extreme cases, a few short weeks.
Typically, successful organizations have a cadre of compatible and complementary leaders populating their ranks. They’re either hired or developed according to a conscious template of common characteristics and values.
That template operates as the definition of the organization’s preferred leadership brand, which serves to drive the organization’s culture. Diversity of perspective within the leadership profile will enrich the enterprise; diversity of leadership brands across the organization will diffuse and confuse the enterprise.
So fit is important. But when you’re bringing new leaders on board, the goal is to ensure alignment with your culture and the values that define it, not to create a group of leadership clones. This may sound like a tight-rope walk, but there are strategies that can be employed during the selection and on-boarding processes that will help. However, organizations must first be able to clearly articulate their culture in order to develop the appropriate leadership profile. Then hire and promote to fit.
Defining an organization’s culture
Culture is difficult to define. The term refers to how people behave as they engage in the work of the organization. A workplace can be people-oriented or task-oriented, consultative or authoritative, customer-focused or process-focused. The list is endless. But if defining culture is a tricky proposition, it becomes even more difficult to ensure that leaders at all levels of the organization are aligned around it, and living it.
There are many ways leaders manifest alignment — or mismatch — with the organization’s culture. These include:
•what they pay attention to, measure and control on a regular basis;
•how they react to critical incidents and organizational crises;
•how they behave as role models, teachers and coaches; and
•how they allocate scarce resources, recruit, select, promote, retire and expel organizational members.
Cultural assessments or audits generally consist of a series of interviews with senior executives and focus groups with managers or employees. They can also be enterprise-wide surveys. The results of a cultural audit may confirm that you have the culture needed to achieve your business strategy. Conversely, they could indicate extensive gaps in consistency or effectiveness. In that case, get to work and determine the culture required to drive your strategy and take the steps necessary to ensure it’s lived at all levels.
It’s important to note that conducting a cultural assessment — and even more importantly, taking action on results — requires time as well as buy-in from departments other than HR.
The selection process
In the current, fast-changing environment, more organizations are paying attention to their hiring and selection process. The current crisis in leadership ethics is making hiring and promoting the right people ever more critical to the business, with less margin for error.
It will come as a relief to many that the most dependable and essential step in any pre-hire assessment is the behavioural interview.
Unfortunately, while many recruiting managers think they’re conducting thorough behavioural interviews, on closer examination they’re really not. Although hiring managers are fairly successful in asking behavioural-type interview questions related to content skills, most fail to ask questions related to functional, interpersonal or self management skills. As well, interviews depend on the skills of the interviewer. They are about as good as pure chance in predicting overall culture fit and performance.
In recent years, candidates have also become savvier about how to impress potential employers, making it even more difficult to get a true picture of how the prospective hire will perform on the job. Just because the candidate can “talk the talk” doesn’t mean she can “walk the walk.”
Recognizing this flaw, many organizations realize it’s necessary to go beyond the interview. Research shows that adding some form of assessment into the selection process improves the predictability of on-the-job performance. The key is to start with a solid analysis of what characteristics, skills and aptitudes are required for the role and design the assessment battery accordingly.
A caution to any organization exploring the addition of assessments to their selection process: pay attention to legal defensibility. Assessments must not demonstrate bias to a particular group (ethnic, disability or other).
The on-boarding process
Even when due diligence is exercised during the selection process to ensure new leaders align with an organization’s culture, new leaders can still find themselves challenging “sacred cows” — deeply rooted customs, practices or attitudes — without even knowing it.
Just like an anthropologist visiting an unfamiliar society, new leaders need “local” guides to interpret the culture and advise them about how different messages and actions are likely to be heard, interpreted and understood. Possible guides include the new leader’s immediate manager, the team of direct reports, HR staff and other key stakeholders.
By providing the answers to key questions, these internal guides or mentors can be a key resource in assisting the new leader to acclimatize. (For key questions see sidebar page X)
One organization developed a formal mentoring program that had extremely positive results. As with any such program, new leaders were paired with experienced leaders as mentors. Unlike many mentoring relationships, this organization selected mentors based on their success as cultural role models. The program then assessed these leaders to determine personality and work styles. Finally, they paired diametrically opposite individuals so that the mentoring relationship became a learning opportunity for both parties. As a result, each developed a broader perspective and a greater respect for diversity.
Often, when cultural mismatch occurs and leaders fail, HR takes the heat. By getting clear on your organization’s culture and the resulting leadership requirements, using multiple sources of information during selection, and providing cultural “guides” to new leaders, you might just avoid getting burned in the future.
Donna Van Alstine is senior vice-president of Canadian consulting with Right Management Consultants, the worldwide organizational consulting and career transition firm. She can be contacted at [email protected] or at www.right.com/ca.
In fact, 40 per cent of all new leaders, including those promoted and hired from outside an organization, fail to meet the expectations of management. That’s according to the results of a survey of 826 HR directors, conducted by Right Management in 2003.
Two of the drivers behind this failure were an inability to build effective relationships with peers and subordinates (82 per cent) and a lack of internal political skills (50 per cent). These issues relate specifically to a failure to assimilate successfully or, put another way, an inability to mesh with the existing culture.
We’ve all seen the statistics on the cost of failed hires— an estimate puts it at 1.5 to three times a person’s annual salary. But we also need to consider other impact on the organization, including below-par performance, tactical and strategic errors, decreased employee morale and satisfaction, and increased turnover.
Most importantly, because inconsistencies in leader behaviours and communication never go unnoticed by employees, cultural mismatches often help undermine credibility and trust. So beware. One small misfit can deliver a big dysfunction in a few short months or, in extreme cases, a few short weeks.
Typically, successful organizations have a cadre of compatible and complementary leaders populating their ranks. They’re either hired or developed according to a conscious template of common characteristics and values.
That template operates as the definition of the organization’s preferred leadership brand, which serves to drive the organization’s culture. Diversity of perspective within the leadership profile will enrich the enterprise; diversity of leadership brands across the organization will diffuse and confuse the enterprise.
So fit is important. But when you’re bringing new leaders on board, the goal is to ensure alignment with your culture and the values that define it, not to create a group of leadership clones. This may sound like a tight-rope walk, but there are strategies that can be employed during the selection and on-boarding processes that will help. However, organizations must first be able to clearly articulate their culture in order to develop the appropriate leadership profile. Then hire and promote to fit.
Defining an organization’s culture
Culture is difficult to define. The term refers to how people behave as they engage in the work of the organization. A workplace can be people-oriented or task-oriented, consultative or authoritative, customer-focused or process-focused. The list is endless. But if defining culture is a tricky proposition, it becomes even more difficult to ensure that leaders at all levels of the organization are aligned around it, and living it.
There are many ways leaders manifest alignment — or mismatch — with the organization’s culture. These include:
•what they pay attention to, measure and control on a regular basis;
•how they react to critical incidents and organizational crises;
•how they behave as role models, teachers and coaches; and
•how they allocate scarce resources, recruit, select, promote, retire and expel organizational members.
Cultural assessments or audits generally consist of a series of interviews with senior executives and focus groups with managers or employees. They can also be enterprise-wide surveys. The results of a cultural audit may confirm that you have the culture needed to achieve your business strategy. Conversely, they could indicate extensive gaps in consistency or effectiveness. In that case, get to work and determine the culture required to drive your strategy and take the steps necessary to ensure it’s lived at all levels.
It’s important to note that conducting a cultural assessment — and even more importantly, taking action on results — requires time as well as buy-in from departments other than HR.
The selection process
In the current, fast-changing environment, more organizations are paying attention to their hiring and selection process. The current crisis in leadership ethics is making hiring and promoting the right people ever more critical to the business, with less margin for error.
It will come as a relief to many that the most dependable and essential step in any pre-hire assessment is the behavioural interview.
Unfortunately, while many recruiting managers think they’re conducting thorough behavioural interviews, on closer examination they’re really not. Although hiring managers are fairly successful in asking behavioural-type interview questions related to content skills, most fail to ask questions related to functional, interpersonal or self management skills. As well, interviews depend on the skills of the interviewer. They are about as good as pure chance in predicting overall culture fit and performance.
In recent years, candidates have also become savvier about how to impress potential employers, making it even more difficult to get a true picture of how the prospective hire will perform on the job. Just because the candidate can “talk the talk” doesn’t mean she can “walk the walk.”
Recognizing this flaw, many organizations realize it’s necessary to go beyond the interview. Research shows that adding some form of assessment into the selection process improves the predictability of on-the-job performance. The key is to start with a solid analysis of what characteristics, skills and aptitudes are required for the role and design the assessment battery accordingly.
A caution to any organization exploring the addition of assessments to their selection process: pay attention to legal defensibility. Assessments must not demonstrate bias to a particular group (ethnic, disability or other).
The on-boarding process
Even when due diligence is exercised during the selection process to ensure new leaders align with an organization’s culture, new leaders can still find themselves challenging “sacred cows” — deeply rooted customs, practices or attitudes — without even knowing it.
Just like an anthropologist visiting an unfamiliar society, new leaders need “local” guides to interpret the culture and advise them about how different messages and actions are likely to be heard, interpreted and understood. Possible guides include the new leader’s immediate manager, the team of direct reports, HR staff and other key stakeholders.
By providing the answers to key questions, these internal guides or mentors can be a key resource in assisting the new leader to acclimatize. (For key questions see sidebar page X)
One organization developed a formal mentoring program that had extremely positive results. As with any such program, new leaders were paired with experienced leaders as mentors. Unlike many mentoring relationships, this organization selected mentors based on their success as cultural role models. The program then assessed these leaders to determine personality and work styles. Finally, they paired diametrically opposite individuals so that the mentoring relationship became a learning opportunity for both parties. As a result, each developed a broader perspective and a greater respect for diversity.
Often, when cultural mismatch occurs and leaders fail, HR takes the heat. By getting clear on your organization’s culture and the resulting leadership requirements, using multiple sources of information during selection, and providing cultural “guides” to new leaders, you might just avoid getting burned in the future.
Donna Van Alstine is senior vice-president of Canadian consulting with Right Management Consultants, the worldwide organizational consulting and career transition firm. She can be contacted at [email protected] or at www.right.com/ca.
