What You See Is What You Get

Prior to the 20th Century, millions of people died from diseases that could have been easily cured by an antibiotic like penicillin. For years, the world’s leading bacteriologists had searched for the missing piece to this medical puzzle. Many times they were looking right at it. But they always “saw” the penicillin mold as a pest that contaminated countless bacterial cultures and slowed their progress toward finding a way to save innocent lives. In the late 1920s, a London doctor named Alexander Fleming suddenly began to see this so-called “pest” as exactly the bacterial killer scientists had been searching for. From that moment on, everyone saw penicillin differently. It was instantly transformed from a problem, to a resource. The new challenge then became how to quickly produce it, not to protect ourselves from it. This is one example of the principle, “what you see is what you get.” Something you “see” as a negative can be transformed into something positive by changing how you “see” it.

Active Teaching Process

A customer (Curt) walks into a store and a new sales person (Sarah) and her manager (Jeff) are standing at the register checking an order. Jeff comments quietly about Curt, “He always gives us a hard time”, so they ignore him, trying to avoid conflict. Curt reads this emotional message in their behavior and actually feels ignored. After a few minutes of just standing around, Curt snaps critically, “Hey, young lady! I need some help over here!” Sarah looks at Jeff and thinks to herself,

See – You said he’d give us a hard time!

The See-Do-Get Process is a way of describing how our knowledge and beliefs are shaped by how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. First, we are taught to see the world a certain way and specific behaviors and emotions naturally flow from that worldview because we believe that it is “reality.” When we act these behaviors out in relationships, people read our body language and respond to the message they see in us. Their response reinforces how we see them, how they see us, and over time these responses begin to create patterns-of-interaction in our relationships.

In terms of organizational culture, managers and staff members are actively taught how to see themselves, coworkers, customers, suppliers, competitors, and the external environment in which they are embedded. For example, John starts a new job as an Account Executive in the Sales Department at the SciTech Company and as he begins calling on his new accounts, his manager Sally says, “That’s not how we do it around here. Let me show you how we want you to see our customers, and the people in the Production Department.” Over coffee and while riding to appointments with clients, Sally teaches John how to see the Production Department as a major roadblock to delivering on commitments; the HR Department’s lack of business knowledge as the reason that they can’t attract top talent; and top managers as being out of touch with the day-to-day realities of running the business. The Active Teaching Process is one of the primary ways that organization-wide and work-group culture is passed on to both new and existing employees. So work-groups actively teach employees to see the world a certain way, with the goal that specific actions and interactions will naturally flow from that worldview. When an experienced manager or more seasoned employee models (act out) these cultural norms, new (or less experienced) employees take note of and absorb their actions, interactions, and body language. If the manager or seasoned employee is more or less successful in getting the desired results in terms of achieving their performance goals and objectives, this reinforces the cultural norm in the mind of the new employee and creates a shared understanding that, “this is how things ought to be done around here.”

Think about it – managers come to see employees as lazy. Employees in that same organization learn to see top managers as distant and uncaring. The R&D Department sees the Sales Department as incompetent. The Marketing Department sees the Sales Department as too short-term focused. The Engineering Department sees the Production Department as doing sloppy work, and the Production Department sees Engineering as arrogant. You see your boss as a moron, and then wonder why she never assigns you to more interesting projects or gives you the compensation increases you think you deserve. The See-Do-Get Process applies to everyone, everywhere.

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HBR Editor’s Blog

Every month, the senior editors of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) invite internationally recognized organizational theorists and practitioners to raise issues and answer questions about leadership and management issues on the HBR Editor’s Blog. This month, we provide Pinnacle readers with links to two important and interesting discussions (see below).

Tom Davenport, Rise of the Chief Performance Officer
Vineet Nayar, Looking for a Few Business Heroes

We encourage you to join the conversation on the HBR Editor’s Blog and voice your opinions, commentary, and insights on these and other important topics.

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Breckenridge Institute^®

If you would like information about the Breckenridge Institute’s research activities, portfolio of assessment tools, or consulting services, visit our website at www.breckenridgeinstitute.com. Also visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/markbodnarczuk.

Copyright © Breckenridge Institute^® 2009. All Rights Reserved
Underwater Photo: © Annie Crawley, 2009, http://www.diveintoyourimagination.com

“Culture is more often a source of conflict than synergy. Cultural differences are a nuisance at best and often a disaster”

Geert Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences

Majors PT-Elements™

The Breckenridge Institute® is proud to announce the publication of the Majors PT-Elements™ - an online personality assessment tool that is based on the popular Myers and Briggs personality type theory. Developed by Dr. Mark Majors, the Majors PT-Elements™ is a 127-items questionnaire that helps you or your clients learn valuable information about their psychological type (common 16 personality types). The report provides results on the dichotomies of Energy acquisition and distribution, Extraversion (external) and Introversion (internal); Perceiving or attending to information, Sensing and iNtuiting; Deciding or making judgments, Thinking and Feeling; Orientation to living, Judgment and Perception. The reported result for the individual's 16-type indication is given, as well as results on the 32 Elements sub-scales, which illuminate personality differences within the dichotomy or type. In addition, the all new "Elements of Personality Formation™" statements are included in the report which will help you or your clients understand some of the complex ways that they interact with others, and respond to situations. The Majors PT-Elements™ is now available to qualified users 24X7 anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

DOWNLOAD SAMPLE REPORT

Contact Elin Larson at elin@breckenridgeinstitute.com or
1-800-303-2554 for details about how you can begin using this exciting tool in your organization or with your clients.

Edgar Schein, The Corporate Culture Survival Guide.

This book is a classic - written by one of the founders of the field of organizational culture. While most managers know that their culture vitally affects the organization’s overall performance, many don’t understand what culture is and how it manifests itself in the day-to-day realities of organizational life. Written for managers, not Organization Development professionals, this book is a practical guide and roadmap for understanding how culture works in organizations and how it affects organizational performance. Based on more than three decades of teaching in the classroom as professor at MIT and in the boardroom as a consultant to major corporations, Schein’s work is characterized by theoretical rigor, sound empirical data, and wisdom that comes from the practical experience of working in organizational settings.

The Corporate Culture Survival Guide describes how culture is created, how it evolves, and how it can be changed. On Schein’s view, all that is required for culture to be created is for people to work together over an extended period of time and be more or less successful at what they do. Eventually, these ways of working slip below the surface of organizational consciousness, go on automatic pilot and become organizational culture – “how it’s done around here.” Like any other habitual behavior, organizational culture cannot be created directly because it is a by-product of repetitive ways of working and interaction with the world. So managers can develop new business processes, demand that people adopt new ways of working, or try to stimulate new strategies or ways of thinking, yet whether these changes actually take hold and become culture cannot be directly controlled. Like any other deeply engrained pattern of behavior, once these ways of working solidify they are extremely difficult to alter which is why deep, sustainable cultural change is so difficult to achieve – it’s like changing any other habit.

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