Archive for September, 2011

The Organizational Trust Index as a Window into Organizational Culture

September 3rd, 2011

Trust is the foundation of all human interactions, and the cornerstone upon which high-performing organizational cultures are built. The Organizational Trust Index was developed by the Breckenridge Institute as a method for measuring the level of trust in an organization and the degree to which an organization’s culture is either motivated by trust or driven by fear. Managers have two choices. They can either consciously build organizational trust, or they can allow day-to-day issues, ineffective communication, and misperception to erode trust and develop a fear-based culture. The six perspectives of the Organizational Trust Index(TM) can help managers evaluate the level of trust in their organization, determine the degree to which their culture is either motivated by trust or driven by fear, and provide a step-by-step process for building a culture that is based on trust.

Trust is often thought of in terms of individual people and one-on-one relationships, for example we trust our co-workers, direct reports, or our boss. But organizational trust means that we trust the organizational structures, systems, and culture within which we work. Unlike trusting individuals, the interdependent actions and interactions of structures, systems, and culture can reach a level of combinatorial complexity where the system takes on a life of its own and almost no one can change it. As one manager remarked to a direct report’s request for more resources to better serve customers, I know you’re disappointed in this decision Jane, but our system just doesn’t allow us to do what you want. The degree to which managers or staff members either trust the structures, systems, and culture within which they work, or fear them, is a window into the underlying patterns of behavior, belief structure, and tacit assumptions of an organization’s culture. The Organizational Trust Index(TM) consists of six perspectives Truth, Integrity, Power, Competency, Values, and Recognition.

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Four Ways of Working as Generic Cultural Norms

September 1st, 2011

Michael Hammer states that, Most companies today – no matter what business they are in, how technologically sophisticated their product or service, or what their national origin – can trace their work styles and organizational roots back to the prototypical pin factory that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. This new way of working was based on the principle of dividing an enterprise-wide business process of making pins into specialized workers who each performed a single step in the pin-making process. This kind of division of labor (fragmentation of work) into separate tasks increased the productivity of pin makers by a factor of hundreds. Over time, work was broken into smaller and smaller pieces, with groups of people who performed similar functions. Not surprisingly, workers who were successful at performing a given function were natural drawn to these tasks because they had the skills, preferences, and natural talents needed to perform that kind of work. The success created by Adam Smith’s insight powerfully shaped and reinforced this way of doing work in companies, and the roles of individual workers in accomplishing that work. Functional groupings have become collective ways of working that form the organizational design in most modern corporations. In fact, the practice of designing organizations around similar functions has been so engrained into our global culture that most people have never worked in an organization that wasn’t structured around functions. Consequently, many managers and staff members mistakenly believe that organizational structure and organizational functions are synonymous – but they’re not.

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