"Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord."
This is exactly what companies are expecting from their followers. They are making their followers feel obligated to being loyal and have taken it out of context, just as readers of the cited scripture do. What happened to the rest of the scripture which states in Ephesians 5:21 "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ?" The command advises a two-way relationship and that part of the scripture appears to have been ignored. Companies that serve their
followers will receive superior service from them if they cultivate a serving relationship.
How are results-oriented companies able to compete in a world full of results oriented businesses? They recruit followers as potential future leaders and direct them to be compliant toward a desired goal. The follower's career path is based on the direction of the customer. The training plan is already created and the only thing the follower has to do is select "I commit" to the appropriate training plan. The follower either complies or doesn't have a job with this type of company.
When the goal is to do what is best for the customer, the company conveys behaviors they require to achieve success in a high performance culture. This type of culture is one in which performance goals and commitments are blatantly clear. A high performance culture, according to Reid and Hubbell (March/April 2005), "is based on discipline. This discipline promotes decisiveness and standards of excellence and ensures direct accountability." I currently work for an organization that cultivates a high performance culture. Each employee is provided with a two page template of performance goals. In previous organizations I've worked for, the leader would collaborate with me to determine my performance goals.
In my current organization, my leader emailed me a mandatory set of goals for my review. I deleted those I didn't agree with, put them in my final document and emailed the final document to her. Upon her receipt of my performance plan, she contacted me and stated that the goals were formatted so that they would fit neatly into my document. I was quite shocked by this. Where was the collaboration? Apparently this was a one-way relationship and I am expected to agree with the policies.
In a high performance culture the leader and followers are expected to buy into corporate shared values and policies and are expected to apply these values to work life and interactions with others. Sometimes the values are rejected but many times are accepted as normal behavior. Another way to explain this type of organization is a concept called a Psychic Prison or Plato's Cave.
Gareth Morgan (2006) describes people who are together in an underground cave so that they cannot move. There is a fire burning and they can only see shadows of people and objects on the wall. To those on the inside of the cave, what they see and hear in the cave is reality, but when an outsider comes in, he finds it difficult to accept these conditions and has pity on his fellow cave dwellers/co-
workers. When he tries to share the knowledge of the outside world, it may cause the cave dweller/co-worker to hold on tighter to their familiar ways of seeing things instead of embracing the new knowledge.
A results oriented corporate culture gets that way because it has nurtured its followers through various leadership styles and it encourages submission. Sometimes these strong cultures with powerful visions of the future and expected commitments, can lead to their downfall. The company I work for is the cave and I am the outsider. The cave dwellers are expected to consistently work extra hours at home in order to complete the mandatory company administrative tasks
because they need to be able to bill the customer 100% when they are at work.
When I questioned a leader about this and asked how this was possible considering obligations in the home, the leader told me that "this was reality" and anyone that wants to work for this company has to accept the reality as it is. I cannot assimilate. In trying to understand this particular company and its culture, I began reading the biography about the founder of the company. It all began to make sense. As I began to establish relationships within the organization, I began to share the information from the book. A follower was just as curious as I and I gave him the book to read. He is sharing it with other cave dwellers. Why am I with this company? I am here to open the eyes of the cave dwellers and provoke
others to work together to change this false sense of reality
This is exactly what companies are expecting from their followers. They are making their followers feel obligated to being loyal and have taken it out of context, just as readers of the cited scripture do. What happened to the rest of the scripture which states in Ephesians 5:21 "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ?" The command advises a two-way relationship and that part of the scripture appears to have been ignored. Companies that serve their
followers will receive superior service from them if they cultivate a serving relationship.
How are results-oriented companies able to compete in a world full of results oriented businesses? They recruit followers as potential future leaders and direct them to be compliant toward a desired goal. The follower's career path is based on the direction of the customer. The training plan is already created and the only thing the follower has to do is select "I commit" to the appropriate training plan. The follower either complies or doesn't have a job with this type of company.
When the goal is to do what is best for the customer, the company conveys behaviors they require to achieve success in a high performance culture. This type of culture is one in which performance goals and commitments are blatantly clear. A high performance culture, according to Reid and Hubbell (March/April 2005), "is based on discipline. This discipline promotes decisiveness and standards of excellence and ensures direct accountability." I currently work for an organization that cultivates a high performance culture. Each employee is provided with a two page template of performance goals. In previous organizations I've worked for, the leader would collaborate with me to determine my performance goals.
In my current organization, my leader emailed me a mandatory set of goals for my review. I deleted those I didn't agree with, put them in my final document and emailed the final document to her. Upon her receipt of my performance plan, she contacted me and stated that the goals were formatted so that they would fit neatly into my document. I was quite shocked by this. Where was the collaboration? Apparently this was a one-way relationship and I am expected to agree with the policies.
In a high performance culture the leader and followers are expected to buy into corporate shared values and policies and are expected to apply these values to work life and interactions with others. Sometimes the values are rejected but many times are accepted as normal behavior. Another way to explain this type of organization is a concept called a Psychic Prison or Plato's Cave.
Gareth Morgan (2006) describes people who are together in an underground cave so that they cannot move. There is a fire burning and they can only see shadows of people and objects on the wall. To those on the inside of the cave, what they see and hear in the cave is reality, but when an outsider comes in, he finds it difficult to accept these conditions and has pity on his fellow cave dwellers/co-
workers. When he tries to share the knowledge of the outside world, it may cause the cave dweller/co-worker to hold on tighter to their familiar ways of seeing things instead of embracing the new knowledge.
A results oriented corporate culture gets that way because it has nurtured its followers through various leadership styles and it encourages submission. Sometimes these strong cultures with powerful visions of the future and expected commitments, can lead to their downfall. The company I work for is the cave and I am the outsider. The cave dwellers are expected to consistently work extra hours at home in order to complete the mandatory company administrative tasks
because they need to be able to bill the customer 100% when they are at work.
When I questioned a leader about this and asked how this was possible considering obligations in the home, the leader told me that "this was reality" and anyone that wants to work for this company has to accept the reality as it is. I cannot assimilate. In trying to understand this particular company and its culture, I began reading the biography about the founder of the company. It all began to make sense. As I began to establish relationships within the organization, I began to share the information from the book. A follower was just as curious as I and I gave him the book to read. He is sharing it with other cave dwellers. Why am I with this company? I am here to open the eyes of the cave dwellers and provoke
others to work together to change this false sense of reality
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