Is Your Culture TOO Nice and TOO Inclusive?

I have had a couple people write me with topics they would like to see addressed on Management Craft. Two people shared their frustration with their organization's culture of inclusion. This mirrors issues that I have dealt with at a couple of my client companies (so much so that many of my clients might read this and think I am thinking of them).

Sometimes we are too inclusive. Too nice. We let everyone get involved in every decision to the point that decisions are either impossible or take forever.

Inclusion is not right for every situation - or all phases of every situation.
Group decision making does not always lead to better decisions.

There are times to collaborate and participate and times to divide and conquer. Too much inclusion and participation can look like this:

• Decisions take forever and flip flop
• Meetings drag on, little is resolved
• It's hard to get stuff done
• People don't advocate for new approaches because it will be too much of a hassle to work through the process
• People belong to a bunch of teams and spend lots of time in meetings
• There is little accountability for ownership
• Mutual trust is lower than desired

What's the solution? The work environment needs to be tuned up. Participation and inclusion are good things - but not all the time or in every situation. Cultural change occurs with a consistent campaign of communication, demonstration, and reinforcement. Some beliefs might be best supported with education of best practices and daily techniques for acting in concert with beliefs. If all managers, senior managers, and administrative support teams act in concert with these beliefs, things will begin to adjust.

• Time is precious - we all need to respect time and strive for efficiency in getting things done.
• Saying “no” is sometimes the right, best, and most caring response. And it’s expected.
• We need to reduce, not add, to the hassle factor of getting the job done.
• Inclusion is good sometimes, divide and conquer is right other times.
• Everyone has a unique job with particular tasks and projects they ought to own and lead.
• It is not a good use of my time to be involved in every decision and project.

Take the time to openly discuss when it's best to divide and conquer and when the work would be significantly enhanced with participation and collaboration. People may resist stepping away from some tasks - but it's the right thing to do and the more you talk about the value of divide and conquer, the more it will become a viable part of the culture.

Manager ought not involve everyone in everything - that's reckless. Determine the best use of people's time and use both inclusion and focus to deliver results.

I ran a department once that was terribly behind on their projects when I took it over. We needed focus, but they were used to deliberating together over every small thing. I had to put a stop to about half of the inclusion and improve focus with more divide and conquer. I talked to the team, we discussed what was happening, acknowledged that giving up some participation might feel weird but that it was the right thing to do. From then on we would discuss which tasks and projects were collaborative and which needed individual focus. Slowly, the team got used to the mix and we started meeting our deadlines and improved our results. The key was open conversation about what's working and how our value to be inclusive was great, but should not be applied to everything. 

Is your culture too nice? Too inclusive? If so, and if you are a manager, you should be a part of the solution. It's great work to do and will help your company's culture grow.

Comments

[Wally Bock]

Great post, Lisa. Equally important, if you're the manager, is to understand and act on the fact that you are the primary driver of the culture of your work group. There are great work teams with powerful culture embedded in companies with awful corporate cultures. And there are dysfunctional work teams in the greatest companies.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Wally - I agree totally. There can be many cultures or subcultures within an organization and managers do a lot toward creating these cultures - good and bad.

[laurence haughton]

The hardest thing for thinking managers to do is to find the line between enough and too much. Few gurus are any help. They like to be vague and work in general, ambiguous terms.

But we need a yardstick on subjects like "nice" and "inclusive." It's too easy to have a self-serving critique of our own niceness or to blame inclusiveness for the fact that we can't come to a fast enough conclusion.

[Lisa Haneberg]

Good points, Laurence. Sure, being inclusive might not be the only or primary reason for indecisiveness, but an overreliance on participation will certainly affect throughput and results. The key is to find the right balance for the situation.

[Stephen James Joyce]

Hi Lisa,

I just published a new book on collaborative intelligence and would love for you to review it.

My name is Stephen James Joyce, the author of ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch’, I'm a recognized authority on collaboration and my book shares crucial insights on one of the most pressing questions in business to-day: How can we develop a greater sense of collaboration in the workplace?

Collaborative intelligence has become an important issue lately because of the need in business to respond more quickly to a rapidly changing environment. Technology rushes to the rescue. Will a piece of software enable collaborative leadership or enhance employee retention all on its own? Everyday we hear promises about what a piece of ‘collaborative software’ can do for our team. But have we heard this before? “A PC on every desk will lighten your work load”, “becoming networked will enable us to share the work more equally”. We all know that these promises haven’t always turned out the way we thought they would.

If you are working in a team that’s ‘just not working well’ you’ll know what I mean immediately. No matter how sophisticated a piece of software is – there will always be the human factor. At either end of the interaction, there is a person, each with their own likes and dislikes and personal quirks. Collaboration intelligence depends upon the right tools but also the right attitude.

I'm offiering a free downloadable eBook (http://www.stephenjamesjoyce.com/content/view/11/17/) you will learn how to:

• Develop great collaborative leadership
• Reduce the strain of working inside a team
• Achieve more through people and less through politics
• Solve problems with greater creativity /flexibility
• Raise the level of employee retention and stabilize your team
• Accomplish more with your team using less effort
• Increase the leadership skills of the entire team

Collaborative leadership further enhances the sense of connection people have with their team. So developing collaborative intelligence (defined as the ability to harness the energy and intelligence of a group or team) should be the prime objective of any business or team wishing to ‘up their game’. Collaborative software is part of that strategy not the complete solution.

When you develop leadership skills through out the entire team more can be achieved with less effort. Employee retention is raised by higher levels of collaboration within an organization. Nothing succeeds like success. When collaboration and collaborative leadership is high, team members feel much less inclined to leave for another company. As a result employee retention is much higher. Your team has become a ‘team of choice’ and people want to join it.

Experience tells us that breakthrough performance is not just about the skills of individual team members. Special team efforts come from galvanizing each member around a clear and highly challenging objective. This kind of performance does not depend on a ‘secret ingredient’. In fact when a series of specific factors are put in place, collaborative leadership for example, it becomes inevitable.

The result of applying the tools found in this free downloadable eBook is higher collaborative intelligence and in the long run, greater employee retention and team stability. Of course there is the side benefit of a happier workplace.

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