Can Your Corporate Culture Withstand The Dilemma Test?

Posted on July 24, 2024 by Nate Regier / 0 comments
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In this excellent Harvard Business Review article, professor and business advisor Erin Meyer argues that corporate culture is defined by how employees handle dilemmas. It’s great to craft aspirational mission, vision, and values statements, but the real test is in how these values get lived out when decisions aren’t easy or clear.

Meyer states, “One of the biggest mistakes companies make when articulating their desired organizational culture is to focus on abstract absolute positives (integrity, respect, trust, and so on). When you articulate your culture using absolute positives, it makes a statement, but it’s unlikely to drive the day-to-day decision-making (and therefore the behavior) of your workforce.

Meyer offers six rules for building a culture that can withstand the dilemma test. Here are three that I found particularly important in the context of work we do with leaders around cultures of Compassionate Accountability®.

  1. Build your culture based on real-world dilemmas: Test your values against real dilemmas that employees will face. Debate and resolve these dilemmas in a healthy way.
  2. Move your culture from abstraction to action: What do your values look like in action? Determine the actual behaviors that indicate you are living your values in real-life situations.
  3. Don’t be a purist: Sometimes your values simply cannot be followed perfectly. Recognize this and be willing to engage the difficult space where there isn’t a 100% right solution. Through this, leaders often find even better solutions.

So how do you actually have these conversations? How do you talk about the difficult stuff and stay focused on what matters? How do you balance psychological safety with attention to results? This is where most leaders we work with come up short. They simply don’t have the tools to walk into these difficult conversations and talk about dilemmas in a way that doesn’t degenerate into drama. They’ve tried prescriptive templates and brutal honesty, but it isn’t working.

That’s where The Compassion Mindset comes in. The Compassion Mindset is a choice to view self and others as valuable, capable, and responsible. Think of it like three switches that need to be turned on in order to practice Compassionate Accountability.

Why Compassionate Accountability is the next leadership superpower.

Three switches of the compassion mindset

Dilemmas are best tested with the Compassion Mindset activated.

Everyone is Valuable

This means we separate the person from the situation. Dilemmas are hard. So we hear each other’s feelings and perspectives. We value their lived experience without diminishing their value as a person. By allowing all perspectives into the room, we can see better understand how people are doing.

Everyone is Capable

Everyone can contribute in some way to finding a solution. No dilemma is simple or easy. So we solicit input, hear ideas, listen to understand, and get curious instead of judging. We invite input and ask people to share their ideas. We treat mistakes as learning opportunities.

Everyone is Responsible

Everyone is 100% responsible for their own feelings, thoughts, and actions. No more, no less. And we are accountable to each other for how we live out our shared values. Ultimately, we cannot point fingers, and we have to step up and work together to find a solution. Then, we back each other up and follow through.

Like Peter Drucker is famous for saying, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” It doesn’t have to be that way. When your culture is dilemma-tested using The Compassion Mindset, culture and strategy become one.

Would you like to install The Compassion Mindset in your organization? Would you like to equip your leaders with actual communication tools to have difficult conversations about the everyday dilemmas they face? We can help.

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