How Do I Build It? Shaping Successful Organizational Culture and Strategies

Acknowledgements

Nothing is done in a vacuum and even more nothings are done without others.

This book is the result of every faculty member who taught and mentored me; every client who has ever trusted me with their organization and followers; and every follower I’ve ever had who trusted me not to lead you off of a cliff.

It’s the result of the countless, amazing, and patient mentors and coaches I’ve had during my 50+ years of employment.

This one is also especially the result of Dixson, Emily, Mommy, Rones, Shawn, and Thom (in alphabetical order).

Foreword

Dr. gossom and I have known each other for over 15 years. In 2017, at a talk on her first book, Why Are They Following Me? she touched on at least 6 topics used in a corporate leadership and career planning class I started teaching to mid-career employees in 2001 and planned to propose teaching to Honors College students at Auburn University. I was so impressed by her talk, I asked Dr. gossom if my course was approved, would she talk to the class? She agreed. The course was approved in 2020 and she has spoken to the students each semester and wowed them.

Having worked for a large, global corporation for over 25 years and helped lead several global reorganization efforts, How Do I Build It? identifies and addresses the fundamental topics at the core of building a sustainable organizational culture. She also covers strategy and provides lagniappe with How To steps at the end of each section.

This book is direct, on point, and readable. The experienced insights she provides should be taken to heart to be successful at the challenging task of sustainable organizational change. Actively maintaining a strategic plan to guide the growth of employees and the organization is one of the keys. By instilling this organizational culture in followers and having them decide to make the change and own it, creates sustainability and new leaders.

How Do I Build It? begins with the end in mind. Patti Thor said, It is not that successful people are givers; it is that givers are successful people. Be thankful for the opportunity.

Joseph Sam Johnson

Leadership and Career Consultant

October 2024

Introduction

Over the years, I’ve found that organizations are similar to making great cookies. You have to select quality ingredients. Have a variety of ingredients, which sometimes means shopping in places you’ve never been before. Take the time and have the patience to carefully follow or modify the recipe. Leave them alone while baking and don’t peek!

I created a Smurf cookie recipe for our son. He loved them! They were really good warm, okay cold, and awful once they got hard. Building an organization is like those Smurf cookies – when things are kept fresh, new, and challenging, they’re successful; when routines are established and things stay the same – they’re just okay; and once an organization becomes hard, stale, and stagnant they become awful places to work. There are many safe organizational cultures where nothing is questioned, no one disagrees, and everything is hard and stale.

In the first book of this leadership trilogy, Why Are They Following Me?, the focus is on the people who choose to follow, giving them a vision, helping them define strategies for achievement, embracing and including the diverse aspects of the people in the organization, expanding the tent to add different perspectives, and ensuring that your character is that of a leader people want to follow. The second book, What Am I Supposed to Say?, focuses on you, the leader. It provides guidance for personal and professional wisdom in responding to the wide range of situations and circumstances we encounter in our leadership roles as we seek to transform ourselves and others. This book, How Do I Build It? focuses on shaping an organization where people are successful at solving problems, adapting to external change, and integrating new members and concepts so that they will build a culture that is sustainable. It also includes a How To … at the end of each section, giving

you tools and strategies that can be used to begin reshaping your own organization.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Illinois State University, especially the College of Education, Department of Special Education, and the Department of Psychology, provided the foundation I would need for everything that came after my graduation. As an undergraduate, Professor Jane Lee and others taught me to conduct an assessment, identify gaps between where the child was currently performing and the desired performance, develop and design strategies and initiatives to formulate a plan that would begin to fill the gaps, implement the plan, then evaluate the subsequent effectiveness of the plan. Professor Diana Starzinger taught me that it requires 7-21 repetitions for behaviors to become learned, so telling someone how to do something once, or even twice, never works. She also taught me that it takes 3-to-7 times as long to unlearn established behaviors – that’s a lot of repetition. In Statistics, Professor Elmer Lemke taught me to pay attention to details, how to problem solve and come up with creative and original solutions, and how to critically think my way through any situation or problem. Serving on the Student Code Enforcement and Review Board drove home the importance of gathering and using data and facts; rather than emotions, to make difficult decisions. What does any of that have to do with organizational culture and strategy?

Admittedly, I didn’t recognize the similarity until Mike Raglan offered me a position at RSI (Resource Systems International, a Simon & Schuster consulting firm) as an organizational consultant and trainer. He actually chuckled when I told him that I was a special education teacher and didn’t know anything about working with corporations or providing needs assessment or curriculum development and training for them. joyce, Mike said, what do you do when you get a new student? I described the assessment, development, implementation, and evaluation process for him. Exactly what we do with organizations, he chuckled. Just think of the organizations as schools filled with special needs children who are behaving badly, and you will have organizational consulting mastered, he concluded. No matter the type of organization, or the industry – they all have the same thing in common, people. Some 40+ years later, I still think about that conversation with Mike and the amazing foundation provided by my alma mater, and I realize that they both were right … I had everything I needed. All of the experiences, workshops, courses, and degrees that followed simply built upon a foundation that was already solid.

I started my first supervisory position, being responsible for a department, in 1988, at the same time I was enrolled in the Adult Education and Supervision master’s degree program at Georgia Southern University. There, I was introduced to Malcolm Knowles and the principles