A630.RB - A Day in the Life of the Culture Committee

Corporate culture is something that is well established within Southwest Airlines’ reputation.  According to Brown (2011) “a corporate culture is a system of shared values and beliefs that interact with an organization’s people, structure, and systems to produce behavioral norms.” Southwest Airlines highlighted some of their efforts to establish a strong company culture in the video for this module, but they also utilize these cultural norms in many other aspects of their company as well.  On their website, Southwest has a link to numerous videos similar to the one for “Hokie Days” where they are continuing to create a cultural norms of friendliness and appreciation for their employees. 

According to Ginger Hardage, Southwest Airlines’ chief communications officer, three values that motivate the employees at Southwest are a warrior spirit, a servant’s heart, and a fun loving attitude. (Makovsky, 2013) These ideal cultural norms are highlighted and encouraged with the use of the culture committee.  The culture committee is in place as a “elaborate recognition program for all employees who are recognized by customers.” (Makovsky, 2013)  This committee is not set up to be something that happens rarely, it is built in to the culture through many other efforts including video publications for the CEO, newsletter blurbs, and features on the website.  All of these efforts have worked in Southwest’s favor, as they only have a 2% turnover, with many of the original employees still active with the company. 

At the last company I worked for, I saw a lot of company culture campaigns aimed at changing the feelings toward the company.  There was a lot of negativity as many layoffs had recently occurred and many people’s jobs were on the line.  Brown (2011) notes that cultures often clash during downsizing and other restructuring.  These clashes were evident during every effort to increase employee morale.  The company would start campaigns and make big promises, but never made any internal changes.  After awhile, employees became aware of the trend and began to ignore any efforts made on the part of the company.  A more viable effort for my last company would have been to first develop a new, shared mission that recognizes all goals and priorities for the various areas of the company.  Second, developing a model for change after they downsized would have helped with employee morale because the employees would have understood why and would also see a goal to work toward.  Finally, rewarding areas of the company that are succeeding can help to reinforce the idea of improvement and adaptation.  Instead, my previous company would reward individuals who showed no reason for the rewards, making the employees who were working hard feel neglected. 

Overall, people do respond to positive attitudes and effective use of cultural norms.  Having a strong company culture that has cultural norms, as well as changing actions can be beneficial for a company.  My current job would benefit from these practices by encouraging internal leadership and development within the company and also helping to keep employees longer.  We have a high turnover rate at my current job and a lot of it is caused by a lack of a strong company cultural within my branch.  We lack vision, so we have no overall goal or individual goal.  Utilizing these characteristics that Southwest Airlines uses would benefit my current company.

References

Brown, D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development (8^th ed.).  Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Makovsky, K. (2013). Behind the Southwest Airlines Culture. Retrieved August 26, 2015.

A630.2.4.RB - 21st Century Enlightenment

The title for this video, 21^st Century Enlightenment is aimed giving us insight on where we were not long ago, and where we are now.  According to RSA’s Chief Executive, Mathew Taylor, we need to life differently in the 21^st century and to do that, we need to think differently. (2010) We have new insights in human behavior and can now see more clearly what we are doing in the present, and how we can adjust for the future.  According to Taylor, we have new insights thank to the emergence in scientific disciplines and social sciences, which can help us to become more self-aware and self-sufficient.  In the early enlightenment, people believed that which they felt was true because it was spoken as truth at the time, transitioned to discovery and enlightenment.  This further helped to change the way the world and it’s inhabitant’s work with one another.  We are now in a world where change has occurred faster than we have realized, which encourages us to become more self-aware and empathic citizens.

In the video when Taylor discusses the need to “resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar and wrong or false that which is only strange”, I believe he is referring to new change and new ideas and our unique ability to question why. It’s like the idea of wanting something you never have means you have to do something you’ve never done. We need to stop sticking with what we know to be true, which is causing us to remain static and slow, and to start embracing new challenges and ideas that are ahead of us.  I used to work for a very big company that has been around since the 1800’s.  It is one of the oldest companies next to Coco Cola that is still around today.  Back in the day, they were innovative and successful, but once the market changed and our culture shifted, they failed to shift and innovate with it, causing the company to struggle, declare bankruptcy, and attempt to pick the pieces back up.  While on the other hand, their competitors figured out new ways to improve upon their brand and their attitude, making it that much difficult for a turnaround of this company. 

Taylor argues that our society should eschew elements of pop culture that degrade people and that we should spend more time looking into what develops empathetic citizens. The question is whether or not this would be possible.  It’s difficult to say because I feel there is definitely a “counter-culture” forming recently within the past few years, but that in and of itself is in a sense, creating another pop culture or anti-pop culture.  In order for us to be successful at this, we would need to not fight pop culture, but instead marginalize it.  I feel this would be very difficult to do in a world where so much is shared through social media and networking.  Pop culture is no longer designed and picked; now anyone and everyone can work to become a pop culture icon through YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, blogging, tumblr, etc.  There are more platforms to encourage pop culture lifestyles now and it is continuing to grow. While I don’t think this is bad, as it is helping us develop new aspects of our lives we didn’t know we had access to, it can also be a dangerous tool as well because we can now spread more messages that could hurt the opportunity to develop more empathetic citizens.  For every opportunity to help, we have the same opportunity to hurt, so I think the change for my empathy lies in another aspect of our culture and of our lives.

At the end of the video, Taylor talks about atomizing people from collaborative environments and the destructive effect on their growth. What is the implication of these comments for organizational change efforts?  I am a big believer that the more people the better ideas and chances for success.  When you think about big companies, like we discussed in the module this week about Google, they focus on the need to small, interrelated teams within the company, all working together and thriving together.  They are successful for a reason and I think for us as a society to gain progress, we need to work as a society to get that progress because what is progress, really, when it can look 1,000 different ways to 1,000 different people, suddenly our definition and our goal seems impossible.  By working together, we can develop and grow together in our own ways, but still remaining a cohesive unit.

One of the biggest takeaways for me from this exercise is the notion of recognizing that you are in control of your own thoughts, abilities, happiness, and path.  This is very relevant for me right now as I have been struggling with determining what the right choice is for me both career, education, and personal life.  There are so many paths that are open and available to us, we shouldn’t feel that we need to stick with the one that is familiar.  I feel like we will only be looking back asking “what if?”

References

Brown, R. D, (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th edition.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Taylor, M. (2010). The 21st Century Enlightenment. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo&feature=youtu.be

A630.1.4.RB - Board of Directors

After viewing the Youtube video, A Tale of Power and Vision, reflect on your organization or a past organization. In a well-written post to your Reflection Blog, describe a situation from your organizational life that was similar to the situation from the video. Access the blog instructions by clicking on the blog icon. Describe the situation in detail making sure to discuss how the organization was able to work through the difficulties to enable real change to occur.

If you can't think of a similar situation, then reflect on the different organizational agents from the video: pessimists, pragmatists, visionaries, power players, and the crowd. Consider whether the attitudes represented by each of these agents are necessary and healthy within a normally functioning company. Try to think of both positive and negative aspects of each agent.

The situation presented in the video A Tale of Power and Vision (Kohn, 2007) depicts situations that many organizations face.  The video highlights the reaction of people in companies who are facing changes.  Some of the employees represent pessimism and pragmatism, while others represent and supper the power of change by being the power and vision.  I have been exposed to these situations in several of my past experiences; some worked out for the best, while others consistently resisted change and never really improved from that moment. 

The first example that comes to mind when thinking about situations depicted in the video is in reference to my time at my previous employer, Fruit of the Loom.  When I graduated college, I was hired on at Fruit of the Loom at their headquarters in Bowling Green, KY.  Prior to working there, my knowledge of this company was indifferent, but I always assumed they were successful as they have been around longer than most companies around today.  Once I began working at Fruit, I quickly realized that there was a lot of negativity and push back for changes that were happening to the company.  Ever since they went into bankruptcy back in the early to mid 2000s, the company has been working hard to recover, so change is inevitable.  The specific area that I worked in was facing a great deal of change.  They had been geographically moved to a new location, away from the other people they worked with, and their previous team had been laid off, leaving many of the remaining employees bitter. 

Change, especially when a company hits rock bottom, is inevitable.  In order for change to be success and work, people need to be prepared for it.  As Brown (2011) notes, organizations are not static and function within the context of their influences.  In the case for my previous employer, they were shaving areas that seemed unnecessary to the growth and improvement of the company and hoping to create a new vision by developing new teams of people with various expertise.  At the time, this seemed like the only way to develop a successful turnaround, however, the push-back from the employees and the pessimism of some ended up creating a toxic work environment filled with negativity and lacking vision and perspective. 

In our class discussion this week, we focused on the norms of companies and the methods of determining and figuring out what those norms are.  The culture of an organization is crucial to understand when developing a plan for change.  Brown (2011) states that norms are organized and shared ideas regarding what members should do and feel, how this behavior should be regulated, and what sanctions should be applied when behavior does not coincide with social expectations.  These norms are broken down into two different categories including pivotal norms, which are norms that are essential to accomplishing the organization’s objectives and peripheral norms, which are norms that support and contribute to the pivotal norms, but are not essential to the organization’s objectives.  (Brown, 2011) These norms are critical to the success of organizational change and culture.  This can be easily understood when looking at Fruit.  The problems that occurred when the changes started to take place were a direct response to the lack of understanding of the different cultures within the company.  The ‘change-makers’ in the company established a vision, but did not execute it properly because they failed to communicate with and understand the culture of each area of the company.  With a company as big as Fruit, it is important to recognize each area and determine the specific, unique needs of that department.  In the case of my department, which happened to be the creative department, our cultural norms and specific needs were overlooked, leaving a group of highly disgruntled, pessimistic employees who gave constant push back to the upper management.  While the department did not handle the change well, the company did not handle the pessimism well either, creating an environment that was not beneficial for anyone.  This is very similar to the video in that once a decision has been made, people began to categorize themselves as agreeing with the changes or disagreeing with the changes. 

Overall, when I think about the atmosphere at Fruit of the Loom, I think that all the ‘players’ within the company, the pessimists, pragmatists, visionaries, and power players, all played an important role in the continuous development of change.  Without the pessimists and pragmatists, valid points could be overlooked, problems my go unnoticed, and naivety may take over.  Having a healthy dose of both can help establish a nice balance within a company if the change makers recognize and understand the organizational culture and the norms of each section of the company.  If the pessimists and pragmatist can effectively communicate their issues and the visionaries and power players are willing to listen, an effective course of action can take place leading to an eventual positive outcome.  Kohn (2007) stated at the end of the video that a better future is possible if we build a community power and have a vision for what to do with it.  Developing a strong organizational community through organizational culture and norms and having the visionaries and power players to facilitate that change is key to a successful implementation of change.

References

Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Kohn, S. (2007, November 5). A tale of power and vision [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZVIWZGheXY