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Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Fundamental Cultures of Working Part 2

Last time I talked about the command and control culture, the next culture is competence. The downside of the competence culture is that if only a few of your employees are competent then what happens if one or more of those employees move on. Another downside is that if your employees are competing against each other it can be very difficult to get them to communicate and help each other.

The downside of the cultivating culture is that employees are mostly concerned with their own interests. Deliverables and deadlines are not high on the list of importance. Teamwork only happens if helps the individual.

The collaboration culture is about teamwork. Teams work together to come up with ideas and solve problems. The team utilizes the wisdom of all team members to make the best decisions.

The book talks about how a collaborative culture can build a sense of community where people are motivated to move past conflict into productivity, move past indecision into action, move past defensiveness into trust.

If you can't tell from reading my post so far, I am very biased towards a collaborative culture. The book says that if you want to have a collaborative culture then it is good for the manager to be passionate about collaboration.

The manager tries to build a highly integrated and self organizing team that can find its own path to success. The team should come to value participatory decision making, self-discipline, and self-organization.

To me this sounds like a big project to take on. I am excited to try it though. I believe the effort I put in will be worth the pay off and then some.

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