A New Game: Shifting The Leadership Culture To Close The AppsCultural Change That Sticks. In the early 2. 00. Aetna was struggling mightily on all fronts. While on the surface revenues remained strong, its rapport with customers and physicians was rapidly eroding, and its reputation was being bludgeoned by lawsuits and a national backlash against health maintenance organizations and managed care (which Aetna had championed). To boot, the company was losing roughly $1 million a day, thanks to cumbersome processes and enormous overhead, as well as unwise acquisitions. Many of the problems Aetna faced were attributed to its culture—especially its reverence for the company’s 1. Once openly known among workers as “Mother Aetna,” the culture encouraged employees to be steadfast to the point that they’d become risk- averse, tolerant of mediocrity, and suspicious of outsiders. The prevailing executive mind- set was “We take care of our people for life, as long as they show up every day and don’t cause trouble.” Employees were naturally wary of any potential threat to that bargain. When Aetna merged with U. S. Healthcare, a lower- cost health care provider, in 1. But instead of adapting to U. S. Healthcare’s more- aggressive ways, the conservative Aetna culture only became more intransigent. Aetna’s leaders could make little headway against it, and one CEO was forced out after failing to change it. What Aetna’s management didn’t recognize was that you can’t trade your company’s culture in as if it were a used car. For all its benefits and blemishes, it’s a legacy that remains uniquely yours. Unfortunately, it can feel like a millstone when a company is trying to push through a significant change—a merger, for instance, or a turnaround.
Rarely, if ever, has minor hockey experienced such a wave of change, from how the game is played to how it is addressing issues that have been draining away the sport. The game plan was not a narrative but. The culture. This research sought to answer the questions, “Why does the leadership gender gap persist in Corporate America? How does the corporation bring gender parity to the. Cultural inclinations are well entrenched, for good or bad. But it’s possible to draw on the positive aspects of culture, turning them to your advantage, and offset some of the negative aspects as you go. This approach makes change far easier to implement. In late 2. 00. 0, John W. Rowe, MD, became Aetna’s fourth CEO in five years. MS Visio Freezes At Startup . Employees skeptically prepared for yet another exhausting effort to transform the company into an efficient growth engine.This time, however, they were in for a surprise. Rowe didn’t walk in with a new strategy and try to force a cultural shift to achieve it. Instead, right from the start, he, along with Ron Williams (who joined Aetna in 2. With other members of the senior team, they sought out employees at all levels—those who were well connected, sensitive to the company culture, and widely respected—to get their input on the strategy as well as their views on both the design and execution of intended process changes. These conversations helped Rowe and his team identify Aetna’s biggest problem: A strategy that focused narrowly on managing medical expenses to reduce the cost of claims while alienating the patients and physicians that were key to Aetna’s long- term success. At the same time, they surfaced Aetna’s significant cultural strengths: a deep- seated concern about patients, providers, and employers; underlying pride in the history and purpose of the company; widespread respect for peers; and a large group of dedicated professionals. These insights led Rowe to rethink his approach to the company’s turnaround. He declared that instead of just cutting costs, the organization would pursue a strategy he called “the New Aetna.” It would build a winning position in health insurance and a strong brand by attracting and serving both patients and health care providers well. That was an appealing proposition but would require significant restructuring; no one’s job was guaranteed. In other words, it was the kind of change that Mother Aetna traditionally resisted with every passive- aggressive move she could muster. But this time, without ever describing their efforts as “cultural change,” top management began with a few interventions. These interventions led to small but significant behavioral changes that, in turn, revitalized Aetna’s culture while preserving and championing its strengths. For instance, the New Aetna was specifically designed to reinforce employees’ commitment to customers—reflected in the firm’s history of responding quickly to natural disasters. Rowe also made a point of reinforcing a longtime strength that had eroded—employees’ pride in the company. When, in an off- the- cuff response to a question at a town hall meeting, he highlighted pride as a reason employees should get behind change, he received a spontaneous standing ovation. So while the plan for change challenged long- held assumptions (among other things, it would require the elimination of 5,0. They had been heard and appreciated, and they came to accept the New Aetna. And Aetna’s financial performance reflected that. By the mid- 2. 00. Its operating income recovered from a $3. From May 2. 00. 1 to January 2. Aetna’s story (which we have drawn from a draft of an unpublished book by Jon Katzenbach and Roger Bolton, a retired Aetna senior executive) isn’t unique. We’ve known for a long time that it takes years to alter how people think, feel, and behave, and even then, the differences may not be meaningful. When that’s the case, an organization with an old, powerful culture can devolve into disaster. This has happened at organizations like Washington Mutual, Home Depot (before its recent turnaround), and the U. S. Marine Corps during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Happily, it’s also possible for a culture to move in the right direction, as we saw at Aetna. After all, cultures do evolve over time—sometimes slipping backward, sometimes progressing—and the best you can do is work with and within them, rather than fight them. In our research we’ve found that almost every enterprise that has attained peak performance—including the Four Seasons, Apple, Microsoft, and Southwest Airlines—got there by applying five principles. Such companies see culture as a competitive advantage—an accelerator of change, not an impediment. In this article, we’ll walk through the five principles, using examples from our research and client experience. Following them can help an organization achieve higher performance, better customer focus, and a more coherent and ethical stance. Match Strategy and Culture.Too often a company’s strategy, imposed from above, is at odds with the ingrained practices and attitudes of its culture.Executives may underestimate how much a strategy’s effectiveness depends on cultural alignment. Arcade Games Free Download . Culture trumps strategy every time. A strategy that is at odds with a company’s culture is doomed. Culture trumps strategy every time. Some corporate leaders struggle with cultural intransigence for years, without ever fully focusing on the question: Why do we want to change our culture? They don’t clearly connect their desired culture with their strategy and business objectives. Many times we’ve walked into organizations that presented us with an entire laundry list of hoped- for cultural traits: collaborative, innovative, a meritocracy, risk taking, focused on quality, and more. The list is too vague and too long to tackle. It sounds great but provides nothing in the way of differentiation. Contrast such nebulous aspirations with those in an organization in which a few cultural traits truly do match and support the strategy, like the Mayo Clinic. Focus on a Few Critical Shifts in Behavior. Studies show that only 1. We don’t alter our behavior even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we should. Change is hard. First observe the behavior prevalent in your organization now, and imagine how people would act if your company were at its best, especially if their behavior supported your business objectives. Ask the people in your leadership groups, “If we had the kind of culture we aspire to, in pursuit of the strategy we have chosen, what kinds of new behaviors would be common? And what ingrained behaviors would be gone?”Say your organization is a former utility or government agency interested in becoming a better service business. If it excelled at service, how would people treat customers differently? What kinds of interactions would be visible in any new offices you opened? How would employees propose new ideas or evaluate one another? How would they raise difficult issues or bring potential problems to others’ attention? And how would employees react when they actually saw colleagues doing things differently? When choosing priorities, it often helps to conduct a series of “safe space” discussions with thoughtful people at different levels throughout your company to learn what behaviors are most affected by the current culture—both positively and negatively. This is what Aetna did. It was also the approach taken by a national retailer that was looking to build a culture with a strong customer focus. The retailer’s leaders enlisted the help of internal “exemplars”—people who were known for motivating their teams effectively. A group of senior executives interviewed them and isolated a set of crucial motivating behaviors, such as role- modeling good customer service. Store managers received training in the behaviors, which were also translated into specific tactics, such as ways to greet customers entering the store. The stores that have introduced the new behaviors are already beginning to see results, including improved same- store sales in key product areas and fewer customer complaints. The behaviors you focus on can be small, as long as they are widely recognized and likely to be emulated. Consider the response one company had to the discovery that a major source of employee frustration was its performance- review process. The company used a 3. So management introduced a simple behavior: asking people who were providing input whether they had ever given the feedback to the person being reviewed. As a result of this straightforward question, colleagues began to share constructive criticisms with one another more often, resulting in fewer demotivating surprises and a better dialogue about performance.
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