HUMANIZE STRATEGY

Employees' emotional, passionate, and intellectual insights form the heart of a company, driving innovation, differentiation, and resolution. But human complexity also introduces a unique set of challenges to strategy. To harness the power of our human capital, we must embrace the positive human elements while mitigating ego, misguided emotions, prejudice, and groupthink.

In this chapter, I discuss how to overcome the negative side effects of a humanized strategy to

* transform toxic environments to foster intentional company culture,

* create an objective strategy,

* eliminate rigid bureaucracy,

* resolve power struggles,

* eradicate detrimental budgeting practices, and

* focus on what matters.

BUILD AN INTENTIONAL CULTURE

The internet provides customers with a platform to share their grievances, and it also bolsters the employee voice. Fed-up employees frequently express their frustration with their work environments and unveil workplace ordeals via social media, inviting the public and reporters into their enigmatic company cultures. Neither brand status nor size can shield businesses from negative cultural depictions or litigation.

A story about the $10 billion ridesharing app, Uber, bubbled to the top of 2017 headlines when Susan Fowler, an engineer, published a blog denouncing her former employer. The post candidly detailed Fowler's experiences coping with sexual harassment in an aggressive workplace. She described the sexual advances of a "high performer" who was given a "stern talking to" after she reported his lewd conduct. The company "[didn't] feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part." Fowler explained how after interacting with female coworkers, she discovered that hers was not the manager's first reported sexual harassment incident.

Fowler also described the "'game-of-thrones political war" boiling in the company. She depicted the competitive culture where people were shuffled around like pawns, organizational priorities were undefined, and little progress on company-related goals was made. Fowler's blog captured the attention of the New York Times, which disseminated Fowler's sentiments and the newspaper's own findings to a broader audience in the exposé "Inside Uber's Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture." The piece depicted the app's freewheeling, Hobbesian environment, portraying employees' lewd conduct, drug use, and unbridled abuse of power. Uber's culture centers around meritocracy, emphasizing how "the best and brightest will rise to the top based on their efforts, even if it means stepping on toes to get there."

In the article, a few current employees anonymously revealed some shocking cultural concerns. One employee divulged that his manager threatened to beat his head in with a baseball bat. Three female employees reported being groped by a manager at a global staff meeting in 2015. Since Fowler opened the floodgates, Uber has dealt with multiple lawsuits from former employees asserting sexual assault and verbal abuse from higher-ups. Susan's revelations not only exposed Uber to litigation and evoked widespread backlash against the company's culture but also revealed how women are often treated in male-dominant Silicon Valley.

Unfortunately, poor workplace culture extends beyond Northern California tech firms. For instance, in 2015, Amazon received extensive press for promoting a "bruising workplace" where "workers are encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late ... and [are] held to standards that the company boasts are 'unreasonably high.'" As global competition increases, companies shift the burden of enhanced performance and increased production onto employees.

Negative culture doesn't just stem from aggressive behavior and exceedingly high expectations. Every year, the company 24/7 Wall St. aggregates thousands of employee reviews and publishes the report "The Worst Companies to Work For." A variety of companies make the cut for an assortment of reasons. Craft store Jo-Ann Fabrics, Dillard's department store, Dish Network, and Kraft Heinz Company topped 2017's list. In a recent interview, Glassdoor spokesman and list contributor Scott Dobroski explained that the leading indicators of employee satisfaction include "culture and values, career opportunities, and trust in senior leadership." Employees who gave low ratings frequently cited how their employers lacked these core values. One telling comment from an employee at a company that received the second-lowest rating of any US company said, "Corporate leaders don't truly respect or care about their employees. They only care about making money off them."

Cultural warning signs are prevalent, and most of the time, company leadership is aware. Leaders have skimmed employee reviews, witnessed extreme turnover, and even read about their company's cultural slip-ups on social media or in publications. Though many acknowledge that something needs to change, harmful cultures often remain intact. Despite the additional feedback and information that clues leadership in to how not to run a company, employee satisfaction remains dismal, and turnover relentlessly climbs.

Amid a changing landscape and labor gap, cultural adaptation is more critical now than ever. People are the source of your competitive advantage. Employees, not companies, execute tasks, implement strategy, and create value for customers. In my first book, Delivering Value, I discussed how employees' diverse skill sets are the primary resources in an organization. Without people, commerce is...