Are Your Leaders Deluded?

As reported in the Economist last fall, corporate culture expert Dov Seidman’s firm LRN and Boston Research Group conducted a study that demonstrated that leaders’ rosy view of their organizational cultures is not in line with employee beliefs.

The research, National Governance, Culture, and Leadership Assessment, included data from 36,000 employees in 18 countries and was detailed in The How Report: New Metrics for a New Reality: Rethinking the Source of Resiliency, Innovation, and Growth.  The report identified three archetypes describing how businesses generally operate:  Blind Obedience (43 percent), Informed Acquiescence (54 percent) and Self-Governance (3 percent). 

Gulfs in Opinion a Mile Wide

The companies in the tiny self-governing category have astronomical advantages over competitors, including more innovation, stronger employee loyalty, higher customer satisfaction, stronger financial performance, higher resiliency in the face of a crisis and lower levels of misconduct.

Unfortunately, when it comes to whether or not a company is truly self-governing, there is a major gap between the views of C-suite executives and those of their employees: in the U.S., leaders identify their organizations as self-governing eight times as often as the overall workforce (24 versus 3 percent).

There are other gaps too.  For instance, 27 percent of executives believe their employees are inspired by their company, but only 4 percent of the employees agree.  And 41 percent of managers say their firm rewards performance on values rather than financial results, but only 14 percent of employees think this is true.

In other words, C-suiters think they’ve positively revolutionized corporate culture, and their employees, well…don’t.

To find out how you can course correct, check out my Culture Beat column on the AMEX Open Forum.