An overly lenient corporate culture is quietly dragging down the company's performance.
Managers do not have to blindly pursue "harmony", but should focus on "getting the right things done": stop putting too much emphasis on catering to everyone's emotional feelings, dare to conduct difficult conversations and make necessary decisions, so as to improve organizational performance. According to our experience, managers who no longer fear hurting others' feelings or disappointing others, and instead prioritize results, can better guarantee the sustainable development of the entire organization.
However, we also find that in many enterprises, the "nice-guy atmosphere" is not just the behavioral style of individual managers, but has permeated the entire organizational culture. In fact, we have observed that: organizations that adhere to the nice-guy culture often sacrifice performance; while organizations with stricter standards are more likely to achieve financial goals and fulfill their missions.
For example, we once served an enterprise where almost all employees met or exceeded expected standards in the year-end performance rating. Under this model, managers do not have to face difficult performance conversations directly and appear very tolerant to employees, but the overall performance remains mediocre in the long run — employees have no motivation to go beyond the minimum standards and pursue better performance. This enterprise, which used to be the industry leader, gradually failed to keep up with more flexible and more aggressive competitors. Relying on innovative products, these competitors continue to seize market share, even if their internal employees still receive high performance ratings.
There is also a partner enterprise, where everyone admits that the sales team has too many products to promote, and many products are already homogenized with very low profit margins. However, senior sales leaders and company executives are unwilling to have direct communication with long-term cooperative customers to persuade them to adjust their procurement structure. In the end, both sales performance and profit margin are unsatisfactory. We have also seen in many non-profit organizations that bloated and inefficient boards of directors almost never require the chief executive officer to be responsible for results. Interpersonal relationships seem harmonious, but organizational efficiency continues to slump.
Nevertheless, it is not easy to transform the organization from blindly pursuing "harmony" to a high-standard performance culture. It is inherently difficult to change the inherent thinking of "fear of offending others", and other people often have the same psychological concerns, unwilling to be tough, strict, or set high requirements. Some people will also question whether strict management methods can really improve organizational operation and performance. In addition, culture is rooted in various business processes: when holding meetings, do people question each other, or only report progress? Can performance management systematically review results and persist in promoting improvements? The hidden bias of "preferring harmony" hidden in such processes is often difficult to detect.
If you judge that your organization's culture has been overly biased towards the nice-guy mindset, the following three sets of strategies have been verified in various organizations: mobilize senior managers, deliver empirical results, and implement high-standard business review meetings. We will explain them one by one.
Mobilize Senior Managers
The transmission of culture relies more on managers setting an example and rewarding positive behaviors, rather than a formal notice issued by the top level. Middle managers will refer to the standards of senior management to judge what real success is, and employees will take middle managers as the benchmark, so the standards will be transmitted layer by layer to the entire organization. Therefore, the senior team takes the lead in completing the transformation from "pursuing harmony" to "valuing practical results", and the influence will not be limited to the executive circle. When managers reuse and consolidate this set of behavior patterns in their own teams, the culture will penetrate from top to bottom at all levels.
We have witnessed the implementation effect in our projects: Gali once worked with her colleagues to carry out leadership projects for 11 non-profit organization executive teams, with the core focus on candid feedback and accountability implementation. After the project, employees of 8 of these organizations had a significantly higher recognition of the accountability mechanism and feedback mechanism, with an average increase of 9 percentage points. Subsequent surveys show that senior and middle managers implement accountability and feedback more regularly, and the overall evaluation of employees on this mechanism has improved accordingly. Relevant practices have gradually solidified into part of the organizational culture.
On the other hand, a survey conducted by Bain & Company on 1250 institutions found that although high-performing leadership teams generally have such characteristics, only one fifth of the teams can persist in practicing them for a long time.
One of the effective ways to promote the transformation of the executive team's behavior is structured peer feedback. Establish a mechanism to let each executive receive candid and confidential feedback from colleagues, clarifying which behaviors help or hinder team effectiveness. Then arrange time for each executive to review the feedback content with colleagues, exchange questions, and commit to making specific adjustments for individuals and the team. If the chief executive officer takes the lead in facing his own shortcomings and sets an example, he can send a signal that the purpose of this mechanism is not assessment and accountability, but collective progress. The whole set of actions will convey a core orientation: result improvement is more important than maintaining superficial harmony, guiding the team to give priority to "getting things done pragmatically" instead of blindly "pleasing others with harmony".
Ron once worked with a leadership team that was caught in the dilemma mentioned earlier: the meeting atmosphere was polite but had no substantial output, thorny issues were only discussed in private, and major differences were often exposed after the decision was implemented. Before the preparation of an off-site seminar, Ron and his colleagues interviewed the chief executive officer and each executive separately, collected confidential feedback, and sorted out various behavioral problems that affected team effectiveness.
Each executive will receive a feedback summary and anonymous opinions. At the off-site seminar, led by the chief executive officer, each executive in turn communicates the feedback received with the entire team. The chief executive officer candidly admitted that she was used to avoiding conflicts and did not define the expected goals clearly enough, and asked her colleagues to help her improve.
Her candidness immediately set the tone for communication, and others were more willing to frankly talk about the problems existing in themselves and the team. The original 90-minute agenda lasted for 3 hours. Executives questioned each other and promised to implement specific behavior adjustments.
During the rest of the seminar, the team delivered these improvement commitments, and the efficiency of promoting business topics far exceeded the past. Although the team occasionally returns to old habits, it has formed a unified communication consensus and trust foundation, dares to point out inefficient behaviors, and urges each other to take responsibility. Many executives later replicated this model in their own teams. One of the executives received feedback that insufficient synchronization would affect the decision-making and key discussions of other departments. He not only made adjustments himself, but also required the subordinate management team to implement them synchronously.
Deliver Empirical Results to Intuitively Show the Changes
Another powerful starting point for cultural transformation is to turn the concept from an abstract idea into practical proof that this method is feasible. In short, use quantifiable performance changes in the short term to prove that "less harmony and more pragmatism" can create value. This requires data to support the viewpoint, and carry out small-scale pilots at the same time. After the pilot is successful, drive others to change their working methods.
Herman Miller is a typical case. The basic model of its award-winning Aeron ergonomic chair allows users to adjust it according to their body shape and usage habits. In addition, the company originally provided 19 customization options, covering materials, colors, and various functions, with multiple choices under each item. For a long time, the culture of this enterprise advocates meeting the diverse choices of customers as much as possible, and product SKUs continue to expand. But this has a negative impact on the supply chain: although sales have risen, costs have increased and profit margins have declined. The new vice president of product management later shared this experience, mentioning that this office chair can theoretically be combined into 140 million different configurations. The production side needs to have the manufacturing capacity of all styles, and the financial side also needs to complete the pricing and settlement of each configuration.
In order to break the deadlock, this vice president needs to reverse the inherent perception of the marketing team — "customer-centric = providing as many choices as possible". She sorted out the data and measured the additional cost brought by the massive customized combinations; the data shows that among all configurations, only 4000 models are ordered frequently, of which only 400 models contribute most of the sales volume. This data convinced the marketing team to halve the number of custom categories. After the adjustment, product sales did not decline, and profit margins gradually increased. The success of this pilot made the mindset of "questioning the idea that the more, the better" spread to other product lines, and the overall product profitability improved accordingly.
Implement High-standard Business Review Meetings
To ensure that the transformation is continuously implemented, the new mechanism must be integrated into the core business processes, especially the result review and decision-making links. In most organizations, such processes will subtly strengthen the nice-guy culture. The most typical one is that the review meeting only conducts reports throughout the process, lacking substantive debates, which we call "fait accompli meetings".
In such meetings, participants nominally discuss and finalize matters, but from the very beginning, everyone defaults that the result is already determined. A typical scenario is that non-profit organizations report budgets to the board of directors: the board of directors directly votes on the document, and most people do not even read it carefully, because they "trust the professional team". In enterprises, it is common in business reviews: teams or individuals report project progress, key indicators or plan suggestions to executives. Such content is often repeatedly rehearsed and polished through multiple rounds of pre-meeting communication. During the formal report, once executives raise questions, it is easy to embarrass the presenter. If managers avoid sharp questions, the review meeting will be reduced to a "project review show" instead of a candid and constructive discussion around core projects. To change the fait accompli meeting, the meeting agenda should focus on key unresolved questions that will affect subsequent decisions and performance.
Similarly, the board governance of some non-profit organizations is accustomed to gentle, consensus-seeking communication, prioritizing maintaining harmony rather than rigorous research and judgment. A mature board of directors will embed the governance mechanism into the meeting agenda and the work of special committees, adhering to the principle of "trust, but verify". Excellent chief executive officers will also take the initiative to accept the board's review and collaborative thinking, rather than deliberately avoiding it.
Gali once served a non-profit organization whose long-serving chief executive officer was about to retire. Instead of following the conventional plan to form a huge CEO selection committee to meet the demands of all parties, the board of directors was led by the co-chair to form a small special team, whose members are good at evaluating management talents. The team formulated clear discussion guidelines to encourage full debate; replaced informal chats with standardized interviews and clear evaluation criteria; at the same time, widely collected opinions from stakeholders through surveys and communication, but did not allow external voices to interfere with the committee's independent judgment. The entire selection process has strict standards. In the end, the committee did not recommend multiple candidates for alternative, but only nominated one person they identified as the absolutely most suitable candidate. The board of directors passed it with a unanimous vote. The new chief executive officer led the organization to raise a record-breaking amount of funds and implemented a very forward-looking new strategic plan.
The three sets of strategies work best when implemented in a coordinated manner: senior management takes the lead in demonstrating to create an atmosphere of candid communication; early pilot results confirm the value of speaking out and being pragmatic; the new fixed process integrates such behaviors into daily work. In the end, the organization will be more capable of fulfilling its mission and achieving long-term goals.
Ron Ashkenas, Gali Cooks | Article
Ron Ashkenas is the co-author of The Harvard Business Review Manager's Handbook (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018) and an honorary partner of Schaffer Consulting. Gali Cooks is the President and CEO of Leading Edge.
This article is from WeChat official account "Harvard Business Review" (ID: hbrchinese), Author: HBR-China, Edited by Zhou Qiang, 36Kr is authorized to publish it.