Stitching Together a Winning Organization
How ZMET can get management and employees on the same page
by James Forr
This is a Q&A that I conducted with Jim Wardlaw, Chief Change Agent at Stitch Brand & Culture, a consultancy whose mission is to help organizations embrace change by becoming more agile, collaborative and creative.
Stitch is partnering with Olson Zaltman, and using ZMET to understand the unspoken, sometime unconscious forces that influence corporate culture and climate.
Q: Jim, how did you get into this area of research and expertise?
A: I first became interested in climate work at a marketing communications firm that I owned. We specialized in service brand management. We found there was a critical relationship between the brands we were developing and the ability to inculcate on-brand behaviors into the organization. If the organization didn’t fully embrace the promises of the brand, the client was likely placing the customer experience at risk. This is when I first learned of ZMET and considered its potential for understanding culture.
Q: So years later you founded Stitch to focus on organizational climate and culture. How does your process work?
A: We approach the understanding of climate as a system involving environment, people and process. You just can’t impact the organization in a lasting way without addressing all three. The first of three assessments we employ was developed by Goran Ekvall, who did extensive work with “suggestion systems” for Volvo — what we know more commonly as the employee suggestion box. He discovered that organizational climate had a lot to do with how many suggestions (ideas) were developed between Volvo’s plants and that leadership was as much as 80 percent responsible for creating this climate.
Ekvall’s work has been shown to be a very powerful measure of organizational health, and when you think of creative climate as the climate for problem solving this makes sense. Healthier climates solve problems, tolerate change, manage risk and initiate action more effectively. The assessment is comprised of 50 multiple-choice questions and three open-ended questions that dig into the dimensions that represent the work environment for collaboration and creativity. We are finding that the measure of creative climate is a very powerful proxy for organizational health.
The second assessment we use is designed to diagnose creative thinking styles. It helps us determine how individuals prefer to operate during the creative problem solving process. Some people prefer to generate a lot of ideas. Other people prefer to develop or implement. It is a tool that helps individuals and teams work more effectively together, introduces tools for addressing areas of lesser preference, and allows leadership to better understand the distribution of thinking styles within their organizations.
The last element in our process is not a tool but a technique. We teach employee teams the “Buffalo School” of creative problem solving to discover potential solutions to areas of weakness in the climate and/or challenges they may face.
Combining these three elements is really powerful. We take employee teams and put them to work generating solutions — and we give them the strategy and tactics to be successful. And engaging employees in the process helps them generate a level of ownership so they are creating solutions that lead directly to a more favorable working environment for themselves. A lot of organizations are looking for a high level of buy-in and that is simply a byproduct of getting them more involved.
The real beauty of this is that we give management a clearer lens through which to diagnose problems in the work environment. Now they have a sense of priority and clarity around what is hindering or helping their creative climate, which ultimately leads to higher satisfaction among employees, greater productivity and more successful initiatives.
We give management a clearer lens through which to diagnose problems in the work environment. Now they have a sense of priority and clarity around what is hindering or helping their creative climate
Q: You collaborated with Olson Zaltman on a project for a telecommunications company in Buffalo. What did you learn about that client by incorporating ZMET into your process?
A: The added dimension of ZMET helps us get deeper into the organization and really devise strategies that can unlock potential. In this particular study, ZMET gave us some deeper information about why we saw what we saw because, frankly, this client had cultivated a very successful creative climate. But when we did the ZMET work we saw a new model emerge. The CEO had done a fantastic job of creating this really rich work environment. The metaphor of “home” was consistent across the interviews. People felt connected there, they treated each other and their customers like family, and it was a safe place created by design by the CEO.
Where it got more interesting is when we compared the employees’ point of view with the perspective of the CEO himself. He emerged very clearly within the employee interviews as a patriarch, someone who had invested in these people when maybe others wouldn’t have been willing to. There were many comments about him “seeing something in me” or “taking a risk on me.” Most employees felt kind of beholden to him.
That was a powerful insight because he had created this remarkably safe place and had gotten rid of people who challenged his authority. So it became much like how you might have a safe place at home where dad takes care of everything. It was a work environment where people felt safe but they were a little unsure of themselves, a little unsure of their future, so they looked to this strong patriarch to solve all the problems. And you can imagine the frustration of the leadership team in an environment like that. They had inadvertently created a weak team by wanting to create a strong sense of family.
Q: How did your climate and culture tools dovetail with ZMET?
We discovered that while the tools gave us wonderful lens through which to understand “what” was happening, the added, deeper understanding of ZMET allowed us to understand “why.” ZMET gave us a sense of the “local” dynamics of the organization — what drove this particular organization. Really incredible. We knew that in this whole organization, there was just one single Ideator, meaning someone who has a high preference for generating ideas — and guess who that was, the CEO. The rest were folks preferred to clarify, asking lots of questions up front before addressing the challenge, or to implement, skipping over the problem-solving process and rushing to the work on the back end.
They had inadvertently created a weak team by wanting to create
a strong sense of family.
That sounds well and good until you hear the complaints of the leadership team. “We don’t have people developing new solutions and coming up with new ideas. We’ve flat lined.” Frankly, that was the result of leadership getting rid of people who fit a particular profile. More specifically, the CEO didn’t really care for folks who challenged his way of thinking, those strong ideators and developer who disrupt and innovate.
Q: So this isn’t all just fluffy, feel-good stuff — there are business results that accrue?
A: Yes. In 2010 IBM interviewed 1,500 CEOs around the world and they found that creativity is one of the most important leadership attributes they are looking for. CEOs are calling for it, but very few organizations know how to achieve it. Forrester Consulting took that one step further. They interviewed 324 decision makers around the world and found that 82% of those people believed there was a strong connection between creativity and desired business results, but only 11% of those same people saw their companies as creative, and 61% didn’t really have a sense of how to judge creative capacity. The Forrester study also found that companies that saw themselves as creative were 3.5 times more likely than their peers to achieve revenue growth of 10% or more.
There is also some landmark research done by John Kotter and James Heskett that shows that companies that actively managed their work environments outperformed those that didn’t. The number are truly remarkable. Those who actively managed climate saw a 4:1 improvement in revenue, 12:1 in stock valuation, and 756:1 in net income. These were companies that proactively created a climate that was productive and saw some pretty dramatic bottom-line results. So we really have to get into the psyche of the organization and cultivate environments where people are willing and agile and courageous and can embrace change and deal with it effectively.
Q: What were the outcomes ultimately with your client?
A: We were very excited to see that conflict in the organization improved by an almost 7.5% reduction in terms of pre- and post-results. We saw trust and openness within the organization increase by 7%. And this was before they actually were able to deploy many of the recommendations from the teams. Just the act of engaging employee teams in problem solving around work environment saw immediate results. Plus, there was a terrific amount of anecdotal feedback that the organization was embracing this new way of thinking, so we would only expect these numbers to improve more dramatically as time goes on.
Most importantly, we knew where things were but we really didn’t know why, and ZMET helped us really get at that. Frankly, the CEO was dumbfounded by it initially, but the insight gave him a new perspective on his business and a deeper understanding of the psychological drivers within his organization. You just can’t get that level of understanding with other tools.
Moving forward the CEO and leadership team are more mindful of their influence, behavior and hiring practice. They just recently hired three new staff members and are beginning to seek out people who are more assertive, more direct, more idea-oriented. We plan to reassess creative climate late this year to gauge additional progress.
For more information about Stitch Brand and Culture and its process, please visit stitchtlc.com or contact Jim Wardlaw via email at jimw@stitchtlc.com
James Forr is a director at Olson Zaltman
