Integration

The Integration function is sits in the middle of the Business Alignment Panel because it is present in every other function on the panel. It reflects the basic truth of all organisations: organisations are people making decisions. Whichever axis you choose, Enrichment (yellow), Involvement (pink) or Alignment (blue), it is at the centre. This is because leadership, people and culture are the fabric of an organisation.

There is no shortage of material about these topics, from well researched and established models to passing fads and feel good beliefs. The Integration Hub does not force its user down any particular path. It is up to users and their professional advisors to select the best approach for their organisation. What the hub does is focus on the relationships between these elements and their function in an organisation.


Three Nodes

There are three nodes in the hub that focus on the leader, people and culture. Getting these right produces an organisation with healthy relationships that function effectively.

Leaders

Leaders are anyone who has responsibility for influencing decisions and outcomes in the organisation. Most leaders have formal roles in the management structure but there are also informal and temporary leadership roles, such as leading projects, meetings and committees as well as peer, technical and mentoring roles.

People

Here people refers to anyone who is a part of an organisation. This is usually an employee but can also include volunteers or contractors working within the organisation. Each day people make decisions about their work, their attitude, customer needs and technical issues. The processes of decision making and the relationships between people are where organisations succeed or fail.

Culture

Culture is simply what people in the organisation think is normal. As such, it is often invisible until challenged by events, critics or reformers. It is all pervasive and people conform to it, usually unconsciously. It can't be changed by edict, only by practice, though decisions, goals and procedures can facilitate or block culture change.

Three Responsibilities

The relationships between leaders, people and the culture they maintain are where organisational effectiveness is created or undermined. There are three key responsibilities that go with these relationships.

Style

It is important that leaders and people adopt a style of working together that is constructive. This style has to work within the organisational culture and bring out the best in everyone and their performance. There is plenty of material around about leadership with different models of how its done. Here it is important to note that the growing body of research evidence supports an adaptable approach to leadership and some of the common approaches are not as absolute as their proponents assume. Another important note is that the focus on style is the responsibility of both the leader and the people seeking leadership. Feedback from people is important. Leaders are not different to people, they have a different role. People have to take responsibility for working with their leaders so the organisation can get the best outcomes.

Responsibility

Everyone in the organisation has responsibility for the culture of the place. The everyday decisions establish and reaffirm what is normal. When people take responsibility for how their actions impact on the place they can make decisions that build a healthier organisation. People also have to be willing to challenge the assumptions operating in the organisation. Since people’s natural tendency is to conform to what is normal, culture perpetuates itself through that conformity. As such, culture teaches people how to behave in the organisation more powerfully than any role description, procedure or code of conduct. People taking responsibility for normal practices in the organisation is critical for its success.

Norms

A key way leaders influence culture and establish healthy, normal patterns and assumptions in the organisation is through the norms they establish. Norms are the principles or guidelines people refer to as they decide what to do in situations. Clarifying and improving norms is a key leadership responsibility. Leaders can provide norms in what they say but do it most effectively by modelling them in what they do and how they do it. Actions will always speak louder than policies or presentations. If they contradict, actions will win every time because they demonstrate what is normal, whereas words express ideas.

Well Being and Positive Teams

The three nodes of leader, people and culture and their relationships are what leaders, teams and organisations can focus on when they want to build healthy, effective organisations. With this framework they can draw on the extensive range of theory, case studies, models and resources available for each of these areas.

The goal of this is to generate a productive wellbeing at the heart of the organisation. Wellbeing is the balance between the personal value of a life well lived and the corporate value of productivity. The sister resource to the Performance Panel that focuses on wellbeing is Positive Teams. It focuses on the practical steps people can take to build wellbeing in their organisations.

This example highlights the persistence of culture and the role of leaders and people in maintaining or changing it. It is drawn from experience with actual organisations.

An organisation had a CEO that was known for his ruthlessness. He would brutally penalise people when he thought they got things wrong, criticising them severely and not trusting them in future. He required detailed, frequent reporting from his executives, pushing down through the organisation a culture of fear and worry about every detail, whether they were important or not. His attitude towards the products and services were frequently opposed to the best technical advice his staff offered and they were expected to comply with his view, regardless of its merits. A culture was established in the organisation where the norms were fear, mistrust of leadership and professional deviance as staff tried to reconcile their professional view with the approach of the organisation.

The CEO was replaced and the new leader had a markedly different approach. He was interested in best practice, healthy organisations and performance based on merit. He progressively overhauled the leadership throughout the organisation, removing leaders wedded to the old way of doing things and promoting many young, motivated professionals with a strong performance ethos and customer focus. He instituted a new corporate unit to focus on building leadership, teams and a fresh culture across the organisation.

Five years later this CEO was replaced by his successor who continued the work of renewal. He invested in training and development for leaders, pay for their graduate studies. He travelled around the organisation to meet and listen to staff. He worked with his executives to remove silos and build a unified executive team focused on the whole organisation. These executives in turn invested in their managers to help them grow and develop. The managers cared deeply for their staff, taking on extra work themselves to ensure their teams could get home at reasonable hours and build a healthy work and life balance. Programs were put in place to uproot corrupt practices and reinforce health and safety, including stamping out bullying.

The catch is, that after ten years of reform and new leaders focused on merit and supporting staff, when staff were surveyed they still had a low opinion of the place and believed they could not trust the organisation’s leaders. The culture, with its norms and assumptions was still perpetuating itself. What the senior leaders could not control were the stories over the lunch breaks and the peer to peer influence as new people joined the organisation. Actions by the leadership were interpreted through the assumptions created by the original leader. People assumed there was a trap involved.

Eventually the organisation started to get results with the staff but this happened unevenly across the organisation. Where it succeeded was in the places that the executives got the managers and supervisors involved. They engaged in many frank and at times acrimonious workshops and meetings. They persisted in this to get the concerns up and dealt with. Also, the fact that the more courageous managers would confront the senior leaders and not suffer retribution was an opportunity for the senior leaders to demonstrate through action, not only words, that the culture had changed. Within a couple of years those parts of the organisation that invested heavily in managers and supervisors got the benefits. Those managers cultivated teams that were energetic, focused on the organisation’s priorities and adaptable to organisational changes as they occurred. These were the benefits of leaders developing a style that worked with their people, setting healthier and more productive norms and teams taking responsibility for how they did things in the organisation.

Reinforcement actions are events or processes to strengthen your people and organisation. They help people learn and develop effective outcomes for the organisation.

The example provided above illustrates how developing leadership, people and culture is a process that requires all levels of the organisation. Here are some reinforcement actions that can help that process:

Leadership Development Programs

Leadership programs can take many forms. Since leadership is an activity, we recommend programs based around actual organisational challenges. This offer multiple benefits, such as peer support dealing with issues and higher learning and retention due to the relevance of the content. Such programs need to be linked to the strategic priorities of the organisation and its cultural goals.

Organisational Development Programs

Organisational programs can help roll out priorities across the organisation. They need to be linked to business and performance plans. The weakness of many programs is that they are generalised and operate as something separate to people’s current priorities. The goal is to change the organisation, not scatter about a range of ideas or capabilities. The best results will come when development is tied to actual performance.

Team Development Initiatives

Organisations exist at a team level, where individuals cooperate to make things happen. Team development is necessary on a case by case basis, to help people grow professionally beyond their core technical skills, so they can work effectively in teams and deal constructively with customers and stakeholders. Work at this level can have the strongest impact for turning organisational culture around or reinforcing new directions.

Individual Consultations

Sometimes is it a particular leader, team member or small group that holds the key to better performance and wellbeing in the organisation. Individual consultations, whether advisory, coaching or developmental, can help key people develop their abilities to perform. They can also provide added support for key initiatives or change projects.

Change Management

The success of a project is more likely to be affected by the change process than the project management method. The reason is that projects change how people do things so they need the confidence to support the change and a new set of assumptions and norms to adapt to their new reality. Any new business proposal or project is an important opportunity to review the organisational culture and ask how people need to function if the change is to succeed.

This performance exercise can help you to start reviewing the way you and your organisation are performing in leadership, people and culture.

Style (Leader and People)

Leader

• How do leaders change and match their style to fit situations, priorities, personalities and staff needs?
• How do leaders communicate with people to get the best understanding, buy-in, feedback and response?

People

• How do people engage their leaders to raise issues, solve problems, set priorities and manage expectations?
• How do people take responsibility for communication with their leaders and each other, acknowledging, clarifying and checking messages and actions?

Responsibilities (People and Culture)

People

• How do people act and take responsibility for how things get done, issues get raised and problems resolved?
• How do people work together and deal with each other to encourage trust, cooperation and reliability?

Culture

• What are the spoken and unspoken rules and practices that guide how people operate in the organisation?
• How do people pay attention and take responsibility for their influence on others around the organisation?

Norms (Leaders and Culture)

Leader

• How clearly do leaders name goals, set expectations and give feedback so people know how they are meant to operate and get encouragement to do so?
• What do leaders do to make sure systems and procedures match and reinforce the behaviour, practices and outcomes they aim for?

Culture

• What are the spoken and unspoken rules and practices that guide how people operate in the organisation?
• How are people listened to and managed when they deviate from normal practices? How is it decided whether they are constructively challenging norms or undermining healthy practice?

The design of the Integration Hub draws on the wide array of research and practice around leadership and teams. It also includes sociological and philosophical work around the ways people function in groups.

Leaders are important but only in how they relate with and guide people. The model is influenced by Heifetz's work that recognises the limits of the heroic approach to leaders. It focuses on how leaders mobilise and strengthen groups to achieve their goals. So in the Integration Hub people are seen as partners to leaders, each with their respective roles. This draws on the work of others, such as Carr, that illustrate the reciprocal benefits of healthy leader - people relationships.

The focus on culture is important because the common trait in people, as work by Foucault, Chikudate and others show, is to conform to what is normal. If an organisation loses its vigilance around what has become normal then it loses its self-determination. A cascading sequence of assumptions will take over the way the organisation functions. It is important to note, as people like Gadamer observed, discovering the pre-established interpretations of how things are is often an unpleasant and disturbing experience. This is why the role of leaders and confident team relationships are important for building and maintaining a healthy organisation.