Currently relationship management, across all it’s various attributions, is poorly understood and even more abysmally executed. If the current understanding of relationship management is simply to monitor and respond to negative commentary on your reputation, your brand, your business or your services, or to follow up and cross sell when the customer or client has fallen off your radar, this is no better than shutting the stable door long after the horse has bolted it. It’s about listening, responding, reciprocating, acknowledging, modeling ethics and values, everywhere you are or your business is active.

The value of building and maintaining a reputation built on the seven principles of human givens (accountability, boundaries, respect, responsibility, honesty, support and trust) means creating cooperative alliances and rewarding relationships. This cannot be short cut, avoided, undeserved or manipulated. We are each being held to account on our behaviours in regard to our commitments and on this we stand or fall in peer assessment.

There is no excuse now, given the quantity and quality of tracking technologies and social media assets, not to create a formidable and very manageable strategy to build and sustain quality relationships and use all positive testimonials, word of mouth recommendations and quality referrals to build personal and professional capital as well as business advantage. To fail to implement such a strategy is to be asleep at the wheel in a fast moving and competitive world.

Today we are not only witnessing, but actively and consciously driving a new e evolution as we migrate to various community portals on the web and develop new behaviours in communicating. The ramifications of these different methods of interacting are driving significant cultural memes to emerge, new lexicons and radically different styles of engaging. The simplest evidence is, of course, the email. ‘But I sent you an email’ my 86 year old mother will complain, (she is on Facebook too). New technologies work for everyone who can afford the devices or access to them. They are ciritcal components of most any job. Not to understand the purpose and practice of ‘blogging’ will practically render you luddite:

Culture is embodied in the phrase “this is the way we do things around here”. More precisely, “what people perceive they have to do to fit in, be accepted and rewarded around here”. Culture is the sum of the behavioural norms of the workgroup, team, division or organisation. It is relatively common to have different cultures between teams or divisions within the one organisation. These are referred to as sub-cultures and they can range from being marginally different from the culture of the overall organisation to being quite radically different. This has implications for not only understanding an organisation’s culture but also for managing it effectively.

Why is culture important?

Have you ever tried to stay within the speed limit when everyone around you is driving at speeds well over the speed limit? The behavioural norms of a group can strongly influence the behaviour of the individual. Culture defines the behavioural norms (accepted behaviour) in a group, team, division or organisation. In turn, behaviour underpins the performance (what gets done, when it gets done and how it gets done) of the organisation and perceptions (reputation) of that organisation.

A Framework for Managing Culture

While managing culture requires a range of approaches and cannot simply be managed by dictating theculture you want, it is essentially about managing messages. The objective is to ensure messages are consistently conveyed through aligned behaviours (especially of key people), systems and symbols.

What is accountability?

The key concept is the notion of having a sense of ‘responsibility’ and a willingness to be ‘answerable’ to others and is the difference between a group and a team. In our experience, the most important factor in developing accountability is the quality of leadership and management (and this is the only aspect leaders or managers are really in ‘control’ of). Good leaders and managers generate high levels of accountability in their people.

Whilst organisations should plan to recruit the right people in terms of their willingness to be team players and be accountable; recruitment is only the starting point. The real key is what leaders and organisations do from that point onwards. Good recruits can be ‘lost’ in poorly lead organisations with unsupportive cultures. Many managers see accountability as being attributed to an individual’s values, therefore they blame the individual and underestimate their own role in creating an accountability culture. In doing this, a great opportunity to build a high performance organisation is missed.

Responsibility is not blame

It is important not to mistake responsibility for blame as they are diametrically opposed concepts. Where one exists the other will not remain.Responsibility is the ability to make a response,it is future and action focused. Blame is past focused and is more about the ego – isolating people, teaching them a lesson, point scoring or making them feel guilty/bad than it is about accountability. Guilt and fear is not a good basis for developing accountability.

A Framework for Building an Accountability Culture

We see the steps in building an accountability culture as
being:

1. Building trust as the foundation:

The four key elements of trust are

• Openness/transparency (giving and accepting feedback, transparency in decision making)

• Reliability (doing what you say you are going to do)

• Congruence (saying what you mean)

• Acceptance (acceptance of others and acceptance of differences).

2. Engage your people: meaningful involvement with alignment. Remember you can’t truly and sustainably motivate another person but you can engage them. It is through engagement that motivation will grow.

3. Ownership: once the first two elements are in place people start to ‘take’ ownership – they start to think and act like owners. (As this happens the future possibility for selling down equity, as part of the firm’s succession plan, becomes a reality).

The level of accountability is directly related to the level of trust, engagement and ownership that exists within an organisation. Certainly work at improving all levels simultaneously; however remember higher levels in the pyramid cannot progress any faster than the base they are built on, there are no short cuts. Without trust and engagement no performance measures and rewards will be particularly effective over the medium to long term – you cannot buy accountability. The key to building a culture of accountability is to find a way to lead people without ruling them.

Note: This article appears in the Institute of Chartered Accountants magazine “Charter” in October 2007.

His book ‘Knowledge Networking: Creating the Collaborative Enterprise is acknowledge by Dave Snowden as ‘One of the best collations of knowledge management practice available in one place. David has been present at the birth of knowledge management, has witnessed much of the early experiments and knows most of the early pioneers ‘.

In this article he observes the critical elements of trust from a knowledge management perspective and gives a list of prerequisites to enable trust to develop.

“The largest challenge is our culture. People are protective of their departmental boundaries.”

“How do you shift from a position of ‘knowledge is power’ to ‘knowledge sharing is power’?”

“Why should I give freely of my hard won knowledge? What do I get in return?”

All are typical comments I hear from people in companies trying to improve their knowledge sharing. In general, people like helping other people. It makes them feel good and allows them to demonstrate their expertise. Why is it then, that there is this reluctance when the same individuals are in a corporate setting? One of the underlying reasons is a certain lack of trust:

Do I trust that this knowledge will used properly?

Do I trust the recipient not to grab it and use it as his/her own?

Do I trust the organization to recognize and reward me for my contribution to the corporate good?

The following list represents ideal behaviours to fostering trust:

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate – short and frequent communications help the process of dialogue and trust building.

2. Offer some knowledge freely and without strings – give away some knowledge that has some value to you, and will be of significant benefit to the recipient, such as some key contact names or key source material (after all, by sharing you have not lost this knowledge, you have just made it less exclusive).

3. Make a small commitment and meet it – if you say “OK, I’ll send that on to you”, do so. Its amazing with busy professionals how many small things fall through the cracks, whether through lack of time or disorganization. Better not make a commitment at all than make one and miss it.

4. Don’t over commit – a frequent problem of the professional perfectionist. I’d rather hear “no” from a colleague, rather than “yes”, followed by repeated missed deadlines.
5. Disclose your values in carefully managed phases – you don’t want to give somebody your life’s history or prejudices, but you do need to make clear what is driving you to behave in certain ways.
6. Make your expectations clear – if you are seeking specific knowledge or help on a problem, be as explicit as you can. That helps the other party the ability to give a definitive response.
7. Remind colleagues gently if they have not met their obligations or your trust – don’t make a big deal out of it, but don’t ignore it either; use it as a signal to show that you care, and to help them gauge their behaviour to you.
8. Be prolific with your thanks and praise – people appreciate recognition, even if they are only doing their job. Recognition is in short supply in many workplaces.
9. Socialise – even informally by email over the network. Informal conversation and identification of shared interests beyond the immediate business tasks, helps builds closer bonds.
10. Demonstrate interest and commitment to the other person. Do things for them that will help them succeed.

Organizational values define the acceptable standards which govern the behaviour of individuals within the organization. Without such values, individuals will pursue behaviours that are in line with their own individual value systems, which may lead to behaviours that the organization doesn’t wish to encourage. Frequently, most organizations derive their culture from a top down model, but what happens in more flat cycle, chaordically driven environments?

In a smaller, co-located organization, the behaviour of individuals is much more visible than in larger, disparate ones. In these smaller groups, the need for articulated values is reduced, since unacceptable behaviours can be challenged openly. However, for the larger organization, where desired behaviour is being encouraged by different individuals in different places with different sub-groups, an articulated statement of values can draw an organization together.

Clearly, the organization’s values must be in line with its purpose or mission, and the vision that it is trying to achieve. So to summarize, articulated values of an organization can provide a framework for the collective leadership of an organization to encourage common norms of behaviour which will support the achievement of the organization’s goals and mission.

Five ways to live out values

However, just as with a mission or vision statement, it is one thing to have a written guide to an organization’s values that remains on the wall, or in a folder, but it is quite another thing to have living values which shape the culture – the way that things get done. So here are five suggestions to ensure you have living values:

1. Communicate the Values Constantly. Values should fit with the organizations’ communication, both internally and externally. If we say that we’re fun, team-oriented where everyone counts, then having a traditional style with a photo of the CEO may challenge this. Refer frequently to the values in talks and sermons, in articles in internal/parish magazines. Acknowledge and thank those people who have achieved something which particularly emphasises the values.

2. Enroll New Folk. The values should be explicitly available as new members join an organization. If your organization is a business, this can be a part of the selection process.

3. Revisit and Refresh the Values. Revisit your values periodically – allowing members to update them. This has the power of enrolling those who have joined the organization recently, and avoids the stated values no longer reflecting the business culture.

4. Confront Contradictory Behaviour. Ensuring that we give feedback to those who don’t live out the values of the organization. If people are allowed to live out contradictory values, then over time there is a clear danger that these will usurp the desired values, particularly if it is the more dynamic, dominant individuals who are espousing the contradictory values.

5. Periodically Check out with Feedback. Ask people what they think are the values of the organization – not only members, who may be influenced by the stated values, but outsiders – observers, customers, former members.

Pause for Thought : Do you have a statement of values. If not, let your organisation come up with them, rather than driving them yourself.  If you do have a statement, is it a living expression of current, real values in the organisation or an expression of past desires?   Review the five pointers above to see how well the organisation is living the values.

This article is courtesy of The Teal Trust.