Gretchen Anderson is director at the Katzenbach Center working with client teams across the globe and is co-author of the brand new book The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters. In Critical Few, Gretchen identifies four critical elements in a company’s culture that can catalyze true evolution: traits, keystone behaviors, authentic informal leaders, and metrics that encourage a self-reinforcing cycle of lasting change. By identifying and focusing on these, leaders can set a clear direction, inspire their people, and evolve their work cultures.
Top Takeaways: Leadership and Company Culture with Gretchen Anderson
- Energize your company’s culture by choosing what really matters
- Four critical elements in a company’s culture that can catalyze true evolution
- Traits
- Keystone Behaviors
- Authentic Informal Leaders
- Metrics
- What motivates people to do their best work?
- How does your Company Culture support what you are trying to do?
- Lifecycle of companies is shorter, and change happens so fast which puts pressure on your organizational culture
- Operating with less clues due to technology, but still needing human contact
- Deep human longing to be a part of something bigger than ourselves
- Isolated but connected – communicating audibly but not visually
- PWC Survey shows 80% of respondents feel their company must evolve culturally in order to be successful and retain the best people
- 23% business leaders tried to change their culture but couldn’t
- The way to evolve culture is to start with behaviors – influence or evolve behaviors, Tangible, practical, observable
- Pick a couple of habits and stick with those – if you try to change everything you actually change nothing
- Evolve your culture to better align with your strategic intent
- Example – Company decided to never send an invite to a meeting without specifying what the decisions/outcome to be made in the meeting
- Cultural change must be grounded in the way people do their work
- Difference between critical traits and critical behaviors –
- Traits are cultural tendency (consensus driven environment) starting point
- Actions are behaviors that can evolve – a bridge from the traits to where you want to evolve
- Choose behaviors that have a basis in reality
- Easier to find pockets of people/influencers within the organization to evolve than it is to impose it from the outside (Authentic Informal Leaders)
Listen to the Audio
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Learning From Leaders:
Current Book: Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Leadership Superpower: Good at getting people excited about the sense that work can be fun – uses Carrot not Stick
Motivational Mantra:
[shareable]Listening is an Act of Love[/shareable]
Book Most Often Gifted: HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict (HBR Guide Series) by Amy Gallo
Additional Items Mentioned
Katzenbach Center: www.strategyand.pwc.com/katzenbach-center
The Critical Few: Energize Your Company’s Culture by Choosing What Really Matters by Jon R. Katzenbach, James Thomas, & Gretchen Anderson
