Читать книгу Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change - Stephen Thomas G. - Страница 9
Оглавление2.1 What Is Organizational Culture Anyway?
All companies want to improve and, where necessary, change the things that they feel will lead to better work processes, improved effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately better profits. They go about this task in many and varied fashions. Often managers are replaced with those who senior management believe are more in line with what they want to achieve. Another strategy is to conduct a work process redesign, developing an “as is” process followed by the “to be” model. This redesign usually leads to restructuring, often with layoffs, and the implementation of new and different work processes. At times these companies often bring in high-powered consultants whose job it is to work with plant management to accomplish all of the steps I have described.
In my thirty-three years in industry, I have been involved in numerous initiatives designed to improve how maintenance was conducted. Often these initiatives brought with them statements that what we really needed to do was to “change the organization’s culture.” In most of these instances I was led to believe that those making this statement, senior managers or the consultants that they hired, knew what this meant. After all, these were the people making the “big bucks” so I had every reason to believe that they possessed this knowledge. In general I was wrong.
What I found out through inquiry was that these individuals often had no more clear knowledge of what it took to change an organizations culture than I did. However, in their defense, they knew that to be successful with new change initiatives there was this hidden force known as culture that had to be altered if the organization was to make progress.
Part of the problem with those who claim that they understand the concept of organizational culture change is that they have the same frame of reference as the rest of us. The senior managers have usually worked their way up from junior engineers through other jobs of increasing responsibility in the organization until they reached the senior manager level. The consultants who are hired to support the efforts have the same bias. If they didn’t work their way up through the ranks of a business and then go into consulting, then they still progressed their career from the bottom to the top of their consultant firm.
In both of these cases what people learn along the way is what I will refer to as hard skills. These are skills like planning and scheduling of work, implementing a preventive maintenance program, and others made up of specific tasks that, when properly implemented, change the way work is conducted. These tasks and the change they bring are important; however, a majority of these initiatives end in failure. They fail when management “takes their eye off the ball” and moves on to other work. They fail when the sponsoring manager leaves and is replaced with someone who does not have the same passion for the initiative. They also fail at times due to open and active resistance from the organization.
What is missed in the training of most people, or if they receive training it does not receive the same value, is training in the soft skills. These are skills such as creating a vision, holding people accountable for their goals and initiatives, leadership, communications, and interrelationship building. To change an organization for the long haul and to avoid failure requires that these skills be employed constantly and consistently across the organizational landscape. Why? Because as shown in Figure 2-1, the soft skills are the foundation for hard skill implementation. We all know what happens if a structure is built over a poor foundation.
Therefore, in order to have a successful change of the culture we need to have an understanding of the soft skills and implement them before the “hard skills that we are trying to change. But this only touches the surface of that hidden force known as culture. You can implement the soft skills and even have them fail to properly function due to negative cultural influence.
Figure 2-1 Hard Skill / Soft Skill Pyramid
The seriousness of this issue is why people in the change business, senior managers or consultants, always are referring to the need to change the culture.
Years ago I was involved with the implementation of a Quality Program. It was one of those initiatives sold by a consultant that promised to improve the quality of everything we did in the plant. It had a strong soft skill component and this was followed by the introduction of the hard skills built on the soft skill foundation. The program lasted several years, but in the end it failed. We had attempted to change many things, but we failed to understand and change the culture. In the end, the culture worked invisibly behind the scenes to restore status quo to the organization.
The point is that many claim they understand organizational culture, but when you observe the initiatives being implemented and the failure of a majority of them, it should be clear that culture is not so easily understood nor do most organizations work to alter the culture to achieve success in their change programs. The real model we need to consider has culture as the sub-foundation of soft skills. If we can successfully alter the culture, then we can then build soft skill and later hard skill initiatives on top of it.
Now that we know where culture belongs in the change scheme, we need to get a clearer picture of what it is and how it interacts with the soft skills it needs to support. If we can achieve this picture, then we can successfully build the hard skills on top of the soft skills that are built on top of the cultural change. It is only then that we can achieve the level of change and improvement we seek.
Figure 2-2 Pyramid with culture as a foundation
The starting point of our discussion is to define organizational culture in a way that is understandable. From this we can dissect the definition into its component parts and reach a clearer understanding of each. This should provide us with the starting point we need to discuss why it is important, the types of culture we need to learn to deal with, and how the work culture impacts the soft skills that we need to employ to make positive business change.
In his book Organizational Culture and Leadership, E. Schein defines organizational culture as follows:
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
If you think about this definition, it clearly describes that sub-foundation upon which an organization’s soft and hard skills are built. It also paints a clear picture of how ingrained these basic assumptions are; this picture allows you to understand how difficult they can be to change. Let’s look at the component parts:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions”
The operative word here is that the culture is constructed upon shared basic assumptions. Because they are shared, when you try to change the assumptions you need to change them in everyone.
“The group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration”
The next part of the definition explains that these assumptions are not new creations. They have been tested over time as the organization learned how to solve both the internal and external problems that quite often were serious threats to their very existence.
“That has worked well enough to be considered valid”
Furthermore, these assumptions worked well for the organization, which has collectively considered them valid. Think about the problems you will face trying to implement change where the new initiative is in conflict with a basic assumption that has been validated over time.
“Taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”
This last part locks the assumption into the culture because it is taught to all new members as the “way we work around here if you want to succeed.”
This is a very powerful definition if you think about its far-reaching impact on new change initiatives. It essentially says that if a new initiative conflicts with a basic assumption that was learned over time, has worked well enough to be held as valid, and is taught to the new members so that everyone believes it as true, then changing things is going to be a very difficult task.
One of the most difficult changes to make in the area of reliability is to change a work culture from reactive to proactive. Let’s examine some of the reasons that this change is so difficult in light of the definition.
Suppose our change initiative was aimed at implementing a planning and scheduling process that brought with it reliability-based repairs for every job. This implies that in our planning and scheduling process work is not scheduled until planned and ready. It further implies that equipment won’t simply be repaired by throwing manpower and materials at it. Instead, the maintenance organization will take time to understand the reason for the failure, then execute reliability-based repairs so that the equipment doesn’t fail again.
However, our new planning, scheduling, and reliability-based repair initiative is working against a culture that holds the following basics assumptions:
• Maintaining production is what is important
• Maintenance exists to serve production’s needs
• When equipment breaks down it needs to be repaired as quickly as possible
• The maintenance crews need to be available to make repairs, not to do non-value-added work such as preventive maintenance.
How well do you think a reliability initiative would succeed in an organization with these basic assumptions? The answer should clearly be that it would not succeed at all. The new initiative is in direct conflict with what the organization believes to be true about maintenance work. Because they are still in business (at least for now), these assumptions have been validated and taught to new members. They exist as the sub-foundation of the business as described in Figure 2-2.
It should be clear to you at this point that change is very difficult to accomplish when it runs in conflict with an organization’s culture. Yet it can be accomplished.
2.3 Why Is This Definition Important?
In Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, I mentioned the three elements needed for successful change – a vision of the future, the next steps to get there, and dissatisfaction with the current state. The third element of these requirements for change indicates how you can overcome the resistance to change imposed by an organization’s culture. Although I will explain this in detail in the balance of this book, an example will provide clarity.
Suppose we work in the company described above. They have a culture that values reactive repair, little or no planning, and a belief that maintenance simply exists to respond to production’s needs-of-the-day. These are the basic assumptions validated over time. Suppose, however, that these assumptions no longer work, the equipment is always breaking down, and the company is losing money. In this instance, a change to a proactive work process is possible because one could challenge and clearly point out that the expressed value of reactive repair considered valid by the company is not valid. Such a challenge opens the door to new change initiatives and allows for the introduction of new assumptions. This dissatisfaction with the current state sets the stage for change.
2.4 Types of Organizational Culture
There are many types of organizational cultures; each one acts and inter-reacts differently. It is important to understand this if we want to be able to initiate a successful change program because, being different, each requires a different approach.
The differences in cultural type can be portrayed by a quad diagram – a diagram that compares two factors in a matrix format. In this case the x-axis is how the organization acts towards change. The two types are closed and open. A closed organization is slow to change and, in some cases, reluctant or even adverse to change. It believes that what has worked in the past will continue to work in the future. On the opposite side of the spectrum is the open organization. It is very open to change because it knows that to remain static is unacceptable if one wants to optimize or even stay in business.
On the y-axis is feedback. If you remember the definition of culture, it addressed the issue of organizations validating their group assumptions. It is through the validation of feedback process that the organization learns that its behavior is correct and appropriate. It learns this through feedback resulting from its collective behavior. The y-axis shows two types of feedback – slow and fast. Some process changes provide instant feedback. For example, a maintenance organization reacts to a plant problem, fixes the equipment, and receives instant praise from production for rapidly correcting the problem. Other changes, such as seeing the results of a preventive maintenance program, are associated with slow feedback. In these cases, you implement a preventive maintenance (PM) program and often do not see the results for a year or more when your failure-tracking metrics show a steady decline in the failure rate.
Taking these two factors – change acceptance (closed or open) and change feedback (slow or fast), I have developed a quad diagram depicting the various types of organizational culture – Figure 2-3
Let us examine the four types as identified by the numbering scheme in the figure.
1. Closed – Slow Feedback
This box represents change adverse organizations. They are highly conservative. As a result, everything that they do is overly analyzed. This process takes a long time and results in slow feedback regarding success of their change efforts. Coupled with slow feedback on any changes they introduce, they get caught up in analysis of the situation to the point that changes are never undertaken. Essentially these groups are in denial. They believe that what they have is what is best. Organizational progress is slow or non-existent, and failure is often the end result.
2. Open – Slow Feedback
These organizations are open to change and successfully deal with the fact that feedback from their change initiatives is slow. They set a vision, develop goals, initiatives and activities, and stay the course over the long haul. An example of this type of firm is one that institutes a preventive or proactive maintenance program, then works hard over an extended time to make it work.
Figure 2-3 Cultural mode
3. Closed – Fast Feedback
In this part of the quad diagram are the companies that are conservative in their approach to change, but when they do undertake initiatives, they seek rapid feedback. These companies need hard evidence that a change program will work before they are willing to attempt it. These are the “show me” firms. However, they do not wait to acquire 100% of the feedback from their efforts. They believe that once value is clearly demonstrated, they can safely proceed. Often this issue can be addressed by pilot programs to test a new idea and gain acceptance. The other aspect of this quad is that the feedback is quick. What this means for the change agents is that they will need to spend a lot of time convincing the company of the need for change. Once the effort has started, however, the rapid feedback will allow for rapid deployment.
4. Open – Fast Feedback
The last part of the quad diagram covers companies that are open to change and seek rapid feedback on the success from their efforts. These organizations recognize that change is sometime accompanied by failure. They are willing to accept that failure is a way of learning and are always open to attempting new things. An example would be a company that moves from a reactive work environment to one of planning and scheduling of the work. In this case, feedback as to the success of the planning effort would be rapid – the plans had value or they did not. In a “learn-by-doing culture” the successful parts of the process would be retained; those that were not successful would be discarded and new ideas tried out.
In their book Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, authors T. Deal and A. Kennedy describe the four components of a corporate culture – values, heroes, rites and rituals, and the cultural network. Their concept that organizational culture is composed of four key parts is a valid one; with some alterations, I will use the four-part model in my discussion of culture and how you can change culture in order to implement reliability-focused change in your organization.
Figure 2-4 below shows how each of these four components are a part of a larger whole which we refer to as our organizational culture. Each of these components plays a key role both independently and dependently as part of the cultural system.
Values
Values are the beliefs and assumptions that an organization believes to be true and uses as a set of guiding principles for managing its everyday business. They are what collectively drive decision making within a company. For instance, an organizational value may be that production is the only thing of importance and, when things break, they need rapid response in order to return them to service. Another example of an organizational value is that equipment should never fail where the failure was not anticipated through proactive maintenance work initiatives. Although these two examples are very different, in each case, the value described drives the collective decision making process for the organization.
Figure 2-4 Four types of culture
Role Models
Role models are people within the company who perform in a fashion that the organization can and wants to emulate. They are successful individuals who stand out in the organization by performing in line with the corporate value system. They exist throughout the organizational hierarchy, from the reliability/maintenance manager through the highly-skilled mechanics. Role models show people that if you wish to be successful you need to follow the values set up for the organization. These role models are then copied by those who work within the business because they show how to perform within the culture. In addition, the role models are used as an example for newcomers to clearly show how to behave if you wish to succeed.
Rites and Rituals
Rites and rituals are the work processes that go on day-to-day within a company. They are so ingrained in how people conduct business that they are not actually visible to those within the company. Rituals are “how things are done around here.” Rites are a higher level of rituals. These are the corporate events that reinforce the behavior demonstrated in the rituals. For example, planning and scheduling of maintenance work is a ritual performed by the maintenance organization to make repairs to equipment that has failed. The associated rite, the reinforcement of the ritual, is the fact that the organization requires a weekly scheduling meeting and adherence to the developed weekly plan.
Cultural Infrastructure
Cultural infrastructure is the fourth part of the organizational culture model. This is the informal set of processes that work behind the scenes to pass information, spread gossip, and influence behavior of those within the company.
These four parts, working in conjunction with one another, make up that rather elusive thing that we refer to as organizational culture. Each of these elements will be discussed in detail in subsequent chapters. The important thing to recognize is what people really mean when they talk about cultural change. They mean that they wish to alter the value system, displace people who are emulated, but are not in line with the new values, change the rites and rituals, and reframe the cultural infrastructure. Think about the implication of this change. It certainly is a major step for any firm to take; which is why it is so difficult to implement and make stick over the long term.
We already know that in every organization there exists a culture unique to that organization. What we need to discuss at this juncture is that within each culture there are sub-cultures that are unique to individual departments or groups. These sub-cultures exist because of that fact that every group within the company has specialized common problems that are faced only by those who are members. As a result, these groups form sub-cultures that enable them to address these problems and survive within their specialized environments.
These sub-cultures have unique traits but always include the dominant or core culture of the business. The simple reason for this is that a sub-culture without a foundation based on the business’s core culture could not long survive.
For example, take a machinery organization whose membership has a value system that believes strongly in reliability-based repairs. This culture supports the approach to equipment repair that requires an analysis of breakdowns and the development of a repair strategy that will return the equipment to service such that the cause for failure has been addressed and corrected. As a result, their leadership – the role models of this culture – provides the necessary time for the machinery engineers to do the proper level of analysis and development of corrective action plans – their rituals. This is wonderful in a reliability-based work culture; this machinery sub-culture will receive the support needed to be successful.
However, suppose this sub-culture is trying to survive in a reactive work culture. In this environment, production wants the equipment repaired and returned to service as soon as possible. There is no time for analysis and development of sound reliability-based repair plans. The directive is “fix it now and fix it fast!” How long do you think the reliability sub-culture would survive? In fact how long do you think the role models of the machinery group who were strong advocates of reliability-based repairs would stay employed? The answer is probably not very long. The reason is that the sub-culture is out of sync with the core culture of the business. This extinguishment of the sub-culture would also take place if the core was reliability-focused and the machinery organization was in a “fix it now and fix it fast” mode.
Sub-cultures, when they are able to exist, take on the same four traits as the core culture. They have a sub-set of values, role models, rites and rituals, and a distinct cultural infra-structure. It is logical to suspect that these sub-cultures will develop because departments or groups within a firm have their own set of issues; they need to develop the sub-culture to be able to successfully address these issues.
Figure 2-5 Four Elements of Culture vs. The Eight Elements of Change
When one group within a company is not as successful as the others, it is often because the sub-culture is out of sync. You see this quite often when a new leader takes over the organization or the organization is acquired by another firm. In each of these cases, a new culture is brought into the work environment. Some departments recognize the difference and adjust to get back into sync; others do not make the adjustment. Those that don’t are the ones that usually get into culture / sub-cultural conflict.
2.7 The Eight Elements of Change
In my book Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, I introduced the eight elements of change. These elements – leadership, work process, structure, group learning, technology, communication, interrelationships and rewards – are the key elements that if addressed collectively will enable a firm to undertake and be successful in implementing change.
However, as I learned more about cultural change in an organization, it became apparent that these elements each had one or more of the four components of culture embedded within them. This meant that not only were the change agents responsible for addressing all eight elements within their change initiative, but they needed to be very aware of how each of the eight elements impacted the four elements of culture.
Figure 2-5 below shows this relationship. The eight elements of change are listed vertically and the four elements of culture are listed horizontally. This creates a matrix that depicts all of the possible combinations in which the eight elements of change impact the four elements of culture. I have placed an “M” in each spot of the matrix where one the eight elements of change has a major impact on one of the four elements of culture and a small “m” where the impact is not a strong.
Let us look at one example so that I can demonstrate this relationship. Although this chapter only provides this one example, Chapters 9 through 16 discuss each of the elements in detail and show not only how they impact organizational culture, but also what you need to do with each so that you can effect positive change in your culture.
In Figure 2-5, the matrix indicates that leadership has impact on values, rites and rituals, and role models, three of the four elements of culture. Suppose that the plant in our example wants to implement a comprehensive reliability program. From a leadership point of reference, it needs to determine how to influence the culture and more specifically the three components in question if it wants the change to be successful. This can be accomplished by altering the present value system to one that reflects the change the plant wants to implement. Furthermore, the plant needs to put people into key positions that are reliability focused. These role models provide the plant personnel with visible day-to-day work performance targeting reliability as opposed to whatever model was in place prior to the change. Finally, the work processes or rituals need to be changed to reflect the reliability initiative. This can’t be a one-time event, but rather a radical overhaul of the old process. The change of the rituals must be accompanied by a new set of reinforcing rites. In this fashion, we have addressed one of the eight elements and shown how, in order to refocus our work culture, leadership needs to be applied to three of the cultural elements.
If we don’t apply the elements, what is likely to happen? In our example, the value system will remain unchanged, the processes or rituals that are how business is conducted on a day-to-day basis will remain unchanged, and quite possibly the people who remain in leadership positions will be those who are role models for the old processes, not the new.
This analysis can be carried out for each of the eight elements of change. The value that this delivers is twofold. First, it helps you think about the effort as it relates to the eight elements of change. This forces you to focus on the soft skills required by the change process. Second, it allows you to look at the eight elements of change in the context of the four elements of culture. By addressing change at this level, you do more than simply change the work process. You also change the culture that supports it, thereby delivering sustainable long-lasting change to your company.
