In Healthy Culture, Healthy Business: Twenty-one Ways to Build a Culture for Success, Alan Weinstein and Don Rust interviewed leaders of twenty-one companies about their culture and business success. Here are the authors’ major findings:
Six components of a healthy culture were identified
Clearly, healthy cultures lead to business success
Best practices were identified for creating and maintaining healthy cultures
Healthy cultures require leadership that is intentional, resolute, and passionate about culture
Eliminating counterculture behavior is essential to a healthy culture
Leadership succession is the greatest challenge to sustaining healthy cultures.
In their book Unleashing Human Energy Through Culture Change: From a Toxic Culture to a High-Performance Organization, Don Rust and Alan Weinstein identify six key factors that led to a toxic, unproductive work environment in General Motors’ largest engine plant, located outside of Buffalo, New York. Those factors were:
Conflict between employees and management, or “industrial warfare”
Employee disengagement from their work, which Alan and Don describe as “industrial depression”
Bully management, a coercive management style that uses threats, aggression, and discipline
An over-emphasis on short-term profits
Lack of job security
Work that is dull and uninspiring, and poor working conditions