The Winning Culture

How do you measure success?

This is probably one of the most important things we consider in an organization.  

Following is an excerpt from a recent article appearing in the Durango Herald.  

http://durangoherald.com/sections/News/2009/11/14/Westberg_resigns_her_health_post/

“In off-the-cuff remarks after she turned in her goodbye letter, Westberg said she was proud of her accomplishments.  In recapping the last 20 years, she recalled that in 1989 the department had 28 employees, 31 programs and an annual budget of less than $600,000. This year, the department has 91 regular employees, operates 70 programs and has a budget of $6 million.”

Obviously, this person is measuring success as the size of budget and the number of employees.  This is often the case with the bureaucratic culture since that is often how a person is judged.  

I would suggest that there is a better way.  That is to measure success on the basis of the organization’s success in meeting its goals and objectives.  In other words, is the organization realizing its mission?  If this were the criteria, the person might be measuring success of the county health department by a simple question, “is the county more healthy today than when I took over?”  

In the same way, school systems should be asking the question, “are our children being educated better?”  Our military should be asking, “are we safer today?”  Our corporations should be asking, “are we serving our customers better?”  In short, every organization should look back at its mission statement and ask the simple question, “are we accomplishing our mission?”  

Using this measure of success is far more difficult. One cannot prove a cause and effect relationship.  There are many reasons why a county might be more or less healthy.  There are many reasons why children are better or worse educated, or a nation more or less safe.  Because it is impossible to prove the cause and effect relationship, the bureaucratic culture often moves to  measure an input, (budget or employees), rather than the output, (health or education). 

 Unfortunately, it is a vastly inferior way to measure success.

Watch who we hire

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,572605,00.html

This story is certainly a perfect example of the need to to extensive interviewing to make sure that we hire for people skills in addition to technical skills.  Both are certainly important, but it's the people skills that are difficult to understand and measure.  Bureaucratic organizations primarily hire on technical skills.  Collaborative culture organizations will set a proper "bar" for technical skills.  But then they will interview for and hire for people skills to make sure that they have good team players as part of the team.  I have no idea of the culture of the Orlando company, but even without that knowledge, it's good to remember this important aspect of the collaborative culture.

Vision statement

durangoherald.com/sections/News/2009/11/04/Residents_asked_to_rate_countys_vision_statement/

Check out the above story.  LaPlata County, AZ is working on a vision statement.  At this point it is 9 pages long!  This is totally true of the bureaucratic culture.  

Or successful organizations have to develop a vision statement that is less than 9 lines long, not 9 pages.  The key is agreement.  The process is not easy, but it absolutely needs to be done.