Building A Winning Culture In Government. Patrick R. Leddin

both today and tomorrow as the pressures in the competitive cauldron become more and more intense. This book is a road map for such an operating system.

       Chapter 2

       The Paradigm: Leadership Is a Choice, Not Just a Position

      A New Paradigm: Everyone on Your Team Should Be a Leader—And It Is Your Job to Get Them There

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      “Leadership is a team sport, and teams require collective leadership.”

      –Dave Ulrich

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It Starts With Culture

      Think of a top-notch organization you know—one you wholeheartedly tell others to work for, or whose story you share with friends at dinner. Why do you recommend it? What makes it so unique? Or, to put it more forcefully, why is that organization so remarkable, and rare, that you tell stories about it? What causes you to feel so strongly about the organization?

      After thirty-plus years of partnering with some of the greatest public- and private-sector organizations and leaders worldwide, we know that top organizations share the most powerful, hard-to-replicate, and sustainable competitive advantage: a winning culture.

      We define culture as the collective behavior of your people—what the majority of your people do the majority of the time; the nature of the language and relationships; and the spoken and unspoken values, norms, and systems at work. Winning cultures are filled with superb people who deliver as promised time after time. In the public sector, a wining culture means that customers go to you not just because they must, but because they know you can effectively provide services or support. They give them someone and something to trust. Winning cultures are unique, deliberately designed and maintained, and rare.

      Definition:

      culture: the collective behavior of your people—what the majority of your people do the majority of the time; the nature of the language and relationships within the culture; and the spoken and unspoken values, norms, and systems at work.

      “Winning cultures are filled with superb people who deliver as promised time after time.”

Culture That Stays on Track

      In the 1830s, Charles Pearson proposed a rather ingenious, and arguably mad, idea for public transportation. Some fourteen years later, a tunnel began to weave its way under the streets of London. Nine years after that, the first segment of what would become London’s Underground opened for business. Although the system’s original visionary, Charles Pearson, was no longer alive to make the journey, some 30,000 Londoners climbed aboard the Metropolitan Line during its first day of operation.

      “Winning cultures are unique, deliberately designed and maintained, and rare.”

      Since its opening day in 1863, the Underground has grown to 11 lines, 249 miles of track, and some 270 stations. Transportation for London (TfL) operates the “Tube,” as it has come to be called, and in 2014, it carried a record 1.26 billion travelers, marking an increase of over 33 percent in the last decade.

      Keeping pace with the rapid growth of both the city population and passenger numbers is a significant challenge for TfL. Imagine trying to renovate stations, replace aging trains, build new control centers, and upgrade network signals while transporting four million people. One leader said that modernizing the Tube is similar to “doing open-heart surgery whilst the patient is playing tennis.” Those of you in the Washington, D.C., metro area during the update in 2017 can likely relate.

      So how does an organization accomplish such a mammoth task without disrupting commuters and frustrating thousands of employees? TfL decided that the answer resided in its ability to build leadership capacity and establish core values. In other words, they needed to deliberately develop a culture that would meet the demands of their ever-expanding mission.

      In 2006, TfL began training managers on the organization’s core behaviors of accountability, fairness, consistency, collaboration, and directness. After two years, the general manager of TfL’s Bakerloo Line, Lance Ramsay, believed that to truly achieve the culture he envisioned, he needed to empower his organization’s team members as well.

      Ramsay, a TfL employee since 1983, knew how things operated in the Underground. The Tube’s history was heavily influenced by the military and its command-and-control culture. Ramsay determined that his 800 Bakerloo Line team members would benefit from FranklinCovey’s proven process of behavior change. FranklinCovey began by training Ramsay’s leadership team in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People® and certifying internal Bakerloo Line facilitators and champions at all levels of Ramsay’s organization.

      Just as an individual’s character is tested in crisis, an organization’s culture is exposed under intense pressure. The Bakerloo Line was tested from 2008 to 2013 as it experienced rapid growth coupled with major events ranging from the 2012 Summer Olympics to the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Throughout this period, the Bakerloo Line not only kept up with the demands of continuous system improvements and unprecedented growth in passenger numbers, but they increased their performance:

       Passenger wait times dropped by 37 percent.

       On-time schedule operation increased from 94 percent in 2008 to 97.8 percent in 2012.

       Delays over fifteen minutes declined by 61 percent.

       Customer satisfaction improved to an 83 out of 100.

      Beyond the metrics, Bakerloo Line team members said that the culture change has improved union negotiations, senior-leadership communication, and accountability throughout the organization. As manager Dave Proffitt said, “I think we’ve almost grown together, and we are far more open…there is a very high degree of trust within the room. We’ve all done it together, and have been mutually supportive.”

      That feeling of mutual support, cooperation, and leadership at all organizational levels has become the Bakerloo Line culture. Ramsay knows that the efforts of his team to deliberately develop a winning culture is key to keeping their organization on track as the turnstiles turn more frequently and train capacity continues to soar.

A Culture That Is Derailed With Bad Leadership

      Let’s look at a different kind of culture and the behaviors, language, and results it can produce.

      Jan and her sister were in the garden enjoying a cup of coffee, when her sister’s husband, Tom, joined them. As he sat down, he glanced at his phone. “One year, three months, two days, six hours, four minutes, and exactly thirty seconds until I retire.”

      “What are you talking about?” Jan asked. Tom was bright, capable, and had years of great work ahead of him. Or so she thought.

      “I’ve got an app on my phone that counts down to the moment I retire.”

      Jan thought this must be a joke. “You’re not going to retire, Tom,” she said. “With your background, your organization will hire you back as a consultant—and pay you five times as much.”

      “No,” Tom said. “You don’t get it. When the countdown ends, I can retire with all my benefits. I’m not working for that organization one second more.”

      “Why not?”

      “My organization used to be a great place to work,” Tom said. “I loved everything about it; but two years ago, things really changed. We got a new boss, and he told us how things were going to be from now on. Some of us had been around for a few years, so we asked, ‘Do we have any say in this?’ I also remarked, ‘We have appreciated the loyalty we have felt from the organization over the years. Should we continue to expect that?’ And he gave us a look—let’s just say it’s a look I’ve gotten familiar with. The new boss then said, rather curtly, ‘If you want loyalty, get a dog.’