Over the last 2 months, I have been having conversations about playbooks, and best practices for many subject areas that are important for day-to-day running of the business. This was the result of running a small crowd sourcing project to generate outside the box thinking for the whitespace opportunities. In my view, the ideas that float to the top based on voting, ranking, and quality of comments is great for problem solving exercise but not the best to gather best practices for running of business. The reason is customer best practices have context and relevancy based on the size of the customer, industry, culture of an organization, and multiple other factors including the person managing the relationship. These cannot be codified. The unpredictability requires informal mechanisms, most of which can be clearly identified and consciously influenced, and that link very closely with other cultural elements.
A good definition of culture per Merriam-Webster’s collegiate dictionary is – “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, practices that characterizes (human behaviors in) a company or corporation”. This definition puts human behaviors at the center of culture, and human behaviors always involve both rational and emotional dimensions, as well as formal and information components.
According to authors, Jon R. Katzenback & Zia Khan of the book, Leading outside the lines, “the formal is best used for predictable and repeatable work that needs to be done efficiently and with little variance. The predictability and repeatability of the work warrants the effort to develop the infrastructure of the formal organization, which can be documented and constantly improved upon to improve efficiency and remove variation. Conversely, the informal is best applied for issues that arise outside the scope of the formal organization, the surprises that need to be sensed and solved. Increasingly, people who need to do the solving need to be motivated outside the reward system, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and make decisions with little guidance from formal strategies”.
This is my area of passion which is balancing the formal via Management by Objectives (MBO) to drive business forward, with influencing the cultural elements through people engagement and participation. Again, per Jon & Zia – “the ‘best practice’ is a means of improving performance in various functions, departments, and levels of management. To go beyond best practice requires a level of insight, risk taking, and trial-and-error responsiveness that demands understanding and harnessing of the informal. This separates ‘best performance’ from ‘best practice’”.
This is the time of the year, every year, that I spend understanding the formal and informal. I would like to hear from the readers of this blog how you have able to drive change and better results – formal and/or informal.
