HBR reports that out of 7 indicators, the one most strongly correlated with 10-year returns is employees' comfort in speaking up, even when they have negative things to say. Corporate Executive Board study shows companies in the top quartile in openness of communication delivered an average total shareholder return of 7.9% over a 10-year period, compared with 2.1% at companies in other quartiles.

I bought my first Mac in 1984. I didn't want the low end machine with 128K - no, I went all out with the 512K RAM model. We loved our Macs. We had Apple computers and notebooks for over 15 years. But in the 90's my son asked for a PC so he could play cooler computer games. I'd been using PC's at work for over a decade and it seemed to me that Apples were less powerful from a business perspective.

So we switched, gradually at first, eventually replacing our old Macs with new PCs. The problem, of course, was that the PC's crashed while the Macs had never done that. They froze up, had to be re-booted and at times developed maddening viruses. (I have nothing against PCs today - we actually use both systems.) Without ever intentionally knowing it, we lost our reliable operating system and replaced it with one that was a big headache. Because the underlying operating system could crash, we could never be sure that the program we were using would perform for us reliably.

Does that ever occur in organizations? Consider this question: "Does your organization have a high performance cultural operating system?" What we mean by a high performance operating system is that no matter what you are strategy you are trying to execute, what major project you need to bring online, what program you need to implement or improvement you need to make, it will occur because you have an underlying high performance cultural operating system.

High performance cultural operating systems can be built and they can also atrophy. In 1999 I welcomed a new colleague from Boeing who was a highly capable Organization Effectiveness consultant. We worked together on creating collaboration and dialogue across organizations. She confided in me that the reason she left her organization was her concern that the organization was losing its competitiveness because of the culture. The lack of collaboration showed up in hidden agendas, organizations competing internally, and the refusal to engage to work on business issues.

I trusted my colleague deeply and have followed Boeing's performance relative to its main competitor, Airbus. Both are large organizations with extremely complex products and difficult product development and execution challenges. From 1989 to 1999, Boeing had over 50% more orders and delivered 3 times as many planes as Airbus did. From 2000 to 2011, they had 13% less orders and actually delivered fewer planes. This year Boeing has had 1/3 of the orders of Airbus and delivered only 78% of the airplanes as their competitor, Airbus.

To be fair, both companies have experienced massive problems in developing and delivering to market existing and new airplanes in a very tough economic climate. And the exact causes of corporate performance are often unknown. But I would venture a guess that if you surveyed employees at Boeing and Airbus by asking " Does your organization have a high performance cultural operating system?" the scores at Airbus would be higher.

Employees behave differently in organizations that do not have a high performance cultural operating system. Employee act in silos and avoid conflict rather than surface and resolve problems. People end up protecting their turf and the organization finds it difficult to hold people accountable in meaningful and productive ways. Status quo behaviors drive status quo performance.

The most pernicious part of this scenario is that the culture and behaviors that impede high performance are found below the surface. The resistance that occurs from below overwhelms efforts to pursue a new strategy, implement a new process, install a new system or operate from a new structure.

We help organizations surface these below-the-waterline dysfunctional behaviors. If we know the status quo monster, then we can identify effective behaviors that form part of a high performance cultural operating system.

Handling Make-or-Break Conversations

Joseph Grenny's latest BusinessWeek column features new research VitalSmarts conducted on life-changing conversations and highlights results and content from Crucial Conversations Second Edition.

The research reminds us that we need to take control of a contentious conversation before it loses you a client, spouse, or job. Click on this LINK to learn how to do this and why it is so critical.  

In Memoriam

9/11 puts the work we do in perspective. I found myself that day in Vienna Austria, training country representatives from Israel, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the former Soviet Union how to help groups reengineer their business processes. Towards the end of the day a participant interrupted my teaching by handing me a large Post-it note that read "The World Trade Center has been bombed and 40,000 people are dead." I had no idea what to think so I read the note to the class and asked if they had heard anything about it. Some reported they had received text messages confirming an attack. (Yes, texting was already going strong in Europe in 2001).

We had almost completed the workshop, so without uttering another sentence I told everyone that class was over. I arrived back at my hotel room in time to watch the hijackers' horrific attack on the second tower. I became glued to CNN and the BBC that week in Vienna (the only English stations besides HBO), interrupting reports from abroad with bike rides and walks in the city and along the Danube. What became painfully obvious to me then still rings true today: while the work we do at times dramatically helps people, teams and organizations, that work pales in comparison to what is truly important in our lives. And we hope that friends, colleagues and clients have no doubts that this is the case as they observe how we work with them.

Building Community

At LeadershipSmarts our goal is to create sustainable leadership and genuine change. We have partnered with thousands of you over the last 5 years in Alberta. We recognize the inherent difficulty in developing new skills and practices that create better results. To that end, we will be launching 2 new communities this fall:

Crucial Skills - for people who have attended one of our Crucial Conversations, Crucial Confrontations or Influence course.

Training - for those facilitating those courses within their organizations.

Look for further details and an invitation to join these communities this month.  

Changes

Our Monthly Newsletter will focus on topical content areas and the community mentioned above. We will feature much of the Newsletter content on our Blog, starting in October. The headlines and beginning of the piece will be found here, with the rest of the column found on our blog. You'll find an example of a shorter piece directly below.

We are also changing the nature of our Executive Breakfast Seminars to focus on an overview of our skills and processes. These breakfasts will be coming to Calgary and Edmonton in early October.   

Adversity: What's the Problem with Problems?

"Houston, we have a problem." Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert wanted Mission Control to know they had huge obstacles to overcome as a result of the explosion and resulting loss of heat and water in the spacecraft. In life and death situations, problems are surfaced and dealt with real time. Contrast that with people at the water cooler who have been overheard saying, "They don't want to hear or even know about it." But "it" is precisely what leaders must hear and must know.