Practical steps for an impactful culture
Strategy and vision married to a healthy culture were the formula for success for Satya Nadella since he became Microsoft’s CEO in 2014. Nadella took the helm facing a challenging environment of evolving and more restrictive regulation, economic and political uncertainty, technological change, and intense competition. Recent new products were not major successes. PC sales were declining in favor of tablets and phones, and the Bing search engine was not competing effectively with Google Search. Moreover, the internal and external challenges combined with a hierarchical, rigid and detrimentally competitive culture resulted in low morale.
Confronting these challenges, Nadella articulated a Microsoft strategic vision as the chosen platform for the technologies of the future, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, cloud computing, robotics, big data, and the internet of things. But just as importantly, he knew that strategy alone would not be enough. A change in organizational culture was needed, and it must come from the top. Nadella aptly states: “The C in CEO is for curator of culture.” Nadella recognized that Microsoft needed a critical shift to a robust empowering culture characterized by cooperation, collaboration, listening, learning, and harnessing individual passions and talents.
Building on the work of Stanford psychologist, Dr. Carol Dweck, Nadella worked to transform thinking to a “growth mindset” from a “fixed mindset”. A fixed mindset is a belief system that sees one’s traits as fixed and native ability as immutable. A growth mindset appreciates that talent, ability and even intelligence can increase through curiosity, learning, and discipline. Potential for talent can be developed in everyone, so managers look for, expect, and then work to grow and harness abilities in all the employees.
Your credit union can take practical steps to employ a growth mindset that increases your leadership capacity. As Nadella points out, it starts at the top with senior management providing clear, consistent communication and leading by example. Reward systems, evaluation methods, and the design of learning programs all support the view that employees possess growth potential and are an apt target for talent development. Programs reinforce and nurture identification of leadership and encourage smart risk-taking and fast failure that provide useful lessons and advance organizational goals. Leadership capacity expands when people not previously on the radar are identified or step forward to move into leadership roles.
In-person meetings and real human encounters serve to build collaboration and trust. We know from our programs on best practices for meeting management that behaviors for effective meetings must be learned and become habits. Meeting best practices are rarely deployed without leadership attention and direction, yet they are vital to positively impacting the culture and increasing productivity. Best practices include: establishing ground rules, like starting and ending on time; including only those people needed for the meeting; and assuring equality of people’s participation. People should feel comfortable saying, “got it”, when they caught a point, avoiding repetition and over-explanation, thereby allowing more voices to be heard. A purposeful agenda with a desired outcome must drive each meeting, and they conclude with an action plan. These seemingly simple meeting behaviors cause dramatic productive shifts towards a healthy empowering culture of accountability, growth and development.
