As I’ve said earlier, what gets measured and rewarded gets done. If our leadership teams are not careful about what they reward employees to accomplish, either intentionally or unintentionally, then unexpected results will certainly occur. Of course, unintended consequences may plague us no matter how carefully we consider our plans.

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Employees watch where their leadership team spends its time and the corporate monies. It is critical to the credibility of the corporate team that ALL the signals they send are in fact in concert with the messages of the Ethics Process, the Mission and Vision statements, and the stated management objectives given to the employees to implement and achieve.

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This topic is one that seems never to go away or have a lack of seminars, conferences, and coaching opportunities. I doubt there is anything much new to say that will be helpful beyond my observation that motivation comes from within, de-motivation is what the leadership team must focus on removing. What we as leaders can do is inspire our colleagues and employees to see the vision of where we want to go with our company.

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Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been abused, misused, and demonized. Sadly, there are many managers and leadership teams that have missed the point of the original concept of business reengineering as put forth by Michael Hammer and James Champy in their 1993 book Reengineering the Corporation (Reengineering the Corporation, Michael Hammer and James Champy, 1993, ISBN 0-88730-640-3)

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Inherent in all of this work to shape leadership and corporate culture is the trend toward flattening the organizations we build. Middle management is feeling the pinch on this most as they struggle to add value to the organization. With the advent of the knowledge worker, the move to more information intensive work rather than hands on manufacturing, the American middle manager is an endangered species.

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Businesses comprise people and processes. Employees come to the business with their own goals, aspirations, moral values, unique talents and abilities. For the organization to survive and thrive, it must have a well articulated vision and mission to assure all are working in the same direction. Once that vision and mission is articulated, they must not become dogma but instead must be somewhat malleable to respond as the market, environment and organizational knowledge changes.

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Whenever I think about an example of how a “real company” might implement ethics as a business process, I think of Edwards Life Sciences in Irvine, California. Edwards was spun-off from Baxter Medical in 2000. Since then the CEO, Michael Mussallem, has been implementing a program he refers to as “actively managing the corporate culture.” 

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As you read this, you are exhaling atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen that just an instant before were locked up in solid matter; your stomach, liver, heart, lungs, and brain are vanishing into thin air, being replaced as quickly and endlessly as they are being broken down. The human skin replaces itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six weeks, and the skeleton every three months.

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Some years ago I posted a version of this essay on my company web site. Within one month, that article was driving over 50% of the hits on the web site. Several directory listings picked up the article and that drove even more folks to our site. Then I started receiving e-mails from managers interested in this topic as well as many students in MBA programs researching corporate ethics. And, this is a timely subject based on the news headlines and the questions employees, customers, and investors are all asking our corporate leaders. So I’m taking this opportunity to re-publish the article.

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What do I mean by “shaping your leadership and corporate culture?” The culture of a corporation comprises all the formal ethical, decision making and business processes that go into building the business model by which products and services are provided to the customers. But more importantly, culture comprises the non-written and unofficial codes of operation within an organization. Simply put, culture is “the way we do things around here.”

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