You Cannot Regulate Your Way to Culture Change

Recently someone at work circulated an interesting article from Forbes magazine entitled, “Five Signs You’re in Denial About Your BrokenCorporate Culture.”  In the article, author Liz Ryan highlights some symptoms of organizational culture gone awry, including this: “New policies spring up to make it even harder to get anything done.  Suddenly you need a manager’s approval just to get a replacement ID badge or new stapler….”  I think we can all relate to this, and in response to the article someone wondered aloud what would be the impact on our organization's culture and business process if we were to eliminate every self-imposed policy we have in place. 

I actually know the answer, and it is not what you might expect.

From 2014 to 2016 I served as Chief, Talent Management for a federal government agency with around 9,000 government employees.  This gave me oversight of all recruitment, hiring, and career development process, including implementing a new talent management program to better develop and utilize our workforce.  These are issues that are governed by a myriad of complicated, and sometimes-inexplicable policy directives.  During this time I heard a TED Talk on the TED Radio Hour that changed my entire perspective on policies.  [Phillip Howard’s talk entitled, “Is the Law Making Us Less Free?”]  The talk pointed out that laws and policies often lead us to making the wrong decision, and yet rarely prevent people from taking advantage of loopholes for their own personal gain.

Inspired by what I heard, I vowed to use my position to lead us out of the morass of policies that had developed over time, and that resulted in impossible-to-navigate processes (that people often worked around) and poor outcomes for both our workforce and the mission.  For example, in 2013 the corporate board governing assignments outside of the DC area granted an exception to the agency's policy of "no back-to-back external assignments" 85% of the time—a sure sign of a flawed policy.  I vowed to use my authority to make decisions on hiring and career development based on the circumstances of each individual situation and not what someone believed the policy dictated.  I banned the use of the word “precedent” in my office so that we remained focused on the facts of the individual situation, and to avoid the pitfall of making a safe decision at the expense of making the right decision.  As we built out our Career Services program to bring in synch our hiring, career development, promotion, and reassignment processes, I tried to establish “guidelines and philosophies” instead of using rules and policies to govern these new processes. 

I learned three things about my organization from that experiment:

1.     Our workforce is obsessed with knowing the rules.  Rather than seeking to understand overarching guidelines and philosophies that would give flexibility to the career services and managers, our workforce loudly and publically demanded to know what would be the rules and procedures.  This constant questioning forced us to declare all kinds of policy rules that now serve as irritants to the workforce. 

2.     We have many leaders who believe they are obligated to say “yes” to an employee on something they do not support unless there is a policy they can cite to deny the request.  These leaders fear the wrath of a grieving employee, or just simply do not want to be the one to make a hard (and possibly wrong) decision.  This points to a need for better leadership development and top cover, not more (or more explicit) policies.

3.     You cannot abolish the word “precedent” at our organization.  Our absolute sense of fairness leads to a consistent application of “what we do for one we must do for all,” even if the situations are markedly different.  Fearful employees feel free to grieve any decision based on their perception of inequality or assumed motive.   And fearful leaders hide behind policy rather than explaining to an employee why they allowed something for someone else and not for them.

I believe we can, and should, evolve to become more like some of today’s modern companies that are stripping away policies and rules in favor of using organizational purpose and trust to inspire employee behavior and guide management decisions.  Check out Netflix’s corporate value statement [Netflix Culture: Freedom and Responsibility] that highlights “employee freedom” as a cornerstone of its management culture.   It is summed up in this simple statement, “With the right people … instead of a culture of process adherence we have a culture of self-discipline, freedom, and responsibility.” 

It will take a concerted effort on everyone’s part to create an organizational culture that looks more like that of Netflix or Google.  Being a part of the federal government, we must be realistic that rules and policies are a natural part of our lives.  But every rule and policy is derived from a higher-level directive that (save illegal, immoral, or unethical activities) gives a significant amount of leeway to  apply situational leadership.  But we will need to introduce a few more words into our vocabulary to make this work; things like self-discipline, shared purpose, accountability, and patience.  We should value fairness (everyone gets what they need) over equality (everyone gets exactly the same).  And most important, we must resist the urge to demand more rules and policies to compensate for a lack of purpose or trust in the organization.