Want Organizational Agility? Change the Management Culture from Competition to Collaboration (Part 2)

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   Product Management  

In Want Organizational Agility? Focus on Adaptation and Resilience, I focused on management’s adaptability and resilience. This article is about the management culture that enables organizational agility.

In that first article of this series, I offered two examples where the world changed on March 15, for either a small project or a large program.

Then I asked this question: What do you do, and how fast can you change?

That all depends on how well your managers can collaborate.

Too many managers have their own goals, which are unique to them. When managers deliver those goals, they get their expected compensation. And if the managers do not meet those goals? Their salary and bonus suffer.

Worse, when managers have individual goals, they do not collaborate. Instead, they compete with each other.

Why does this happen? It’s about a culture of resource efficiency applied to managers. That’s a culture problem that creates competition, not collaboration.

Let’s start with culture.

A Working Definition of Culture
I use this adaptation of Edgar Schein’s definition of culture:

• What we can discuss
• How we treat each other
• What we reward.

Think about how your organization discusses work. Do they focus on the activities and outputs of each person, alone? Many organizations do.

As a result, managers reward what they …

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