Everyone Wants to Be a Pickle

Everyone Wants to be a Pickle

Scott Samdahl

The National Graduate School of Quality Management

EDU 340 (O) 1017 Online BS - Performance-Based Management Introduction

3 February 2018

Everyone Wants to be a Pickle

        In the subject video, Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast | Seven Steps for Developing Organizational Culture, Mr. Miles Anthony Smith is being interviewed by Jennifer Lewis and they discuss how to create a strong organizational culture (Smith, 2013).  Many of the key learnings of this video are subjects or points which were made to me a few years ago when I attended the Air Force Senior Non-Commissioned Officer Academy (SNCOA).  Similar to the interview, we learned about creating a positive culture in the work environment.  The interview progressed through seven steps to developing culture in an organization and how utilizing these steps will influence the strategy executed to meet the objectives of the organization.  The seven steps to developing culture in an organization are recognizing your weaknesses, hiring the right people, equipping your personnel, setting expectations, getting out of the way, showing appreciation and letting people go.  First, we need to understand culture.

When discussing culture, Smith talked about two types, negative and positive.  Negative culture has dysfunction within the team due to greed, lying, pride and gossip. Teams with a negative culture are rarely successful.  This type of a culture prevents synergistic execution of the strategies hindering accomplishment of the objectives.  Individual focused performance based management, in my opinion, is what the maintenance community in the Air Force practices.  It encourages a negative culture.  Ratings on an Enlisted Performance Report and the criteria for most awards are ways the Air Force promotes individualism.  It drives the Airmen to work against each other to show one individual is better than another. Positive culture starts with hiring the right people who display character traits such as truthfulness, sacrifice, generosity and teamwork.  By creating a positive culture among your team, they will want to meet the objectives because they value the success of the organization.  Team focused performance based management enables the team to set stretch goals thus reaching maximum potential.  By using team focused performance based management everyone on the team gains with the success of the team.  Each person on the team has a role and is valued because the entire team must be successful to reach maximum potential.  Smith’s seven steps helps leaders down this path.

The first step Smith discusses is knowing yourself.  Knowing yourself is about realizing and accepting what your strengths and weaknesses are.  We tend to hire people who are most like us.  We build our team with “mini-me’s” thus creating a group of people with the same strengths and ultimately the same weaknesses.  Recognizing our weaknesses allows us to surround ourselves with people who have strengths that offset our weaknesses.   Hiring people who are smarter, more skilled and are able to offset our weaknesses takes a bit of humility however, if we are able to swallow our pride as leaders and accomplish this, our team will be stronger.

Hiring the right people is the next step to developing a positive culture in an organization.  Smith discusses hiring people with good values, quality character and emotionally healthy.  He wants people with a high intelligence quotient (IQ) but also a high emotional quotient (EQ).  People with a low EQ are naturally more dysfunctional and thus will bring this to the team.  He utilizes tools to assess someone’s EQ when trying to hire people.  Although not an ultimatum, it is a factor.  Smith, like my SNCOA instructor Senior Master Sargent Pat Newton, ties this to pickles.  Sargent Newton stated in a seminar, “Every pickle is a cucumber, but not every cucumber is a pickle.”  Knowing where to place your people to take full advantage of their strengths makes them a pickle.  But if you don’t evaluate the strengths properly and don’t place them in an area where they can be successful, they are just another cucumber.

Equipping your personnel with the right tools to perform the tasks assigned is his next step.  Listening to this segment, as a maintainer, I was thinking, “don’t use a screw driver as a pry bar”.  However, he took this a little deeper mentally and discussed using other departments to accomplish certain tasks.  I internalized this and figured out, we don’t launch an airplane without the support agencies on the base.  What resources does the employee need to satisfy the customer?  Gas, parts, food and equipment are some examples of what supporting agencies bring to the fight.  Without these “departments” we would not launch any aircraft, no matter how well we fix them.  

Next up is setting expectations. Good team members desire to know what leadership expects.  They want boundaries.  They need to know where they have authority and where they do not.  As leaders, we tend to skip this step.  We think, “The employee is hired, now they need to go do the job!”  We don’t take the time to set the standards.  If we don’t set expectations, someone else will.  Once expectations are set, get out of the way, which is Smith’s next step.  

Put the ego in check, step back and watch them perform.  Managers tend to have big egos which prevent them from empowering their employees to execute within the boundaries they have set.  When the manager perceives things which aren’t going to plan, they jump back in feeling they can fix it.  By doing this the manager doesn’t build trust or respect and the team doesn’t learn.  As the team learns they will be more successful and the trust the manager gains with them will grow his or her referent power cementing relationships which will make the team want to perform better.