by Lisa Riley, Executive Director, The Manufacturing Institute, Shingo Licensed Affiliate
Success is often defined as the ability to reach goals in life or, in the context of this article, in business. Whatever our business goals may be, their success stimulates feelings of delight, which are reflected in attainment, accomplishment, progress, and contentment at work. Post lockdown and more than ever before, The Manufacturing Institute (TMI™) in the UK recognizes that your business culture not only informs but also drives your success.
When it comes to productivity and growth, culture can account for 20 to 30 percent of the difference in corporate performance. So, it stands to reason that feelings compelled by positive culture will inspire success. Likewise, toxic culture will compound failure (Coleman, 2013).
On a macro level, the successful realization of the Shingo Guiding Principles, while financially tangible, are also culturally intuitive. At TMI, we describe this as “that Shingo feeling.” The Shingo Model empowers universal conscious experiences, reactions, and beliefs, which are emotionally tangible because they are felt and are therefore reflected into wider culture and collective performance.
The process of understanding organizational behavior, physical frameworks and systems, and the symbolic quirks and traits that make a business tick and define its personality is as complex as it is challenging and, paradoxically, as practical as leadership allows.
Any combination of psychological, physiological, and environmental circumstances, including powerful all-encompassing frameworks like the Shingo Model, can create positive influence at a micro level. As research suggests, where team members are both familiar with and engaged in vision, values, practices, people, narrative, and place, the culture is noticeably positive and job satisfaction is high.
What the Shingo Model helps unravel and enable is a company’s cultural web. A TMI, we believe this is one of the Shingo superpowers (Johnson & Scholes, 1992).
The concept of the Cultural Web was developed in 1992 by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes. It summarizes the lived reality of working life within an organization. It is a method of exploring the different elements of a company and how these elements shape people’s experiences, which is, incidentally, all captured in the Shingo benchmarking process:
When it comes down to it, the Shingo Model enables a way to understand a company’s present culture and the elements that can help define it moving forward:
In the wake of significant upheaval or the proactive journey to organizational excellence, whatever drives the need for ongoing transformational change is more than a question of understanding why an organization does what it does. It is also a question of why things have happened, and all the behaviors associated with it.
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Cultural Web Model from ‘Fundamentals of Strategy’
G Johnson and K Scholes and R Whittington. Published by Pearson Education 2012.
Every organization has its own single story. The ability to uncover its history and create a positive narrative around it is a core element of culture creation. While the elements of that narrative can be both formal and informal, the more they are identified, re-shaped, and re-told, the more powerful they become because culture is enduring.
There is no room for assumptions or ambiguity. The only thing that uncertainty does is feed strategic drift because business culture is not strategic, it is symbolic. It represents an organization’s appearance and atmosphere; it is something that is created from the top down and should attract all stakeholders—from team members to customers and third parties—with humility.
As the Shingo Model promotes, the results of an organization depend on the way its people behave. To achieve ideal results, leaders must do the hard work of creating a culture where ideal behaviors are expected and evident in every team member. From inspiration to confidence, these feelings play a critical role in the leadership process because, as the saying goes, for better or for worse, “there’s a thin line between love and hate.”
“When you go to places that are excellent, you feel it from the moment you walk in.
It’s not measurable per se, it is a feeling you get right from first the impressions.”
—Adrian Healey, strategic business development director, TMI
In the context of feeling, culture can also be acknowledged as emotion culture, and it can be representative of emotionally intelligent business. Just like societies, organizations have emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems. This also includes expectations about the attitude and feelings people should and should not feel and display, which is linked to behavioral synchrony and is largely dependent upon the evocation of emotion (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995).
When we understand the link between our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, we become more self-award and more other-aware, and we typically we see “that Shingo feeling” guide and motivate culture with more humility and emotion. This can characterise individual morale, organizational morale, and corporate morale. And it can create a feeling that empowers resonance with the work, the workplace, and “that Shingo feeling,” which is culturally contagious.
Ashforth, B.E., and Humphrey, R.H., (1995) Emotion in the workplace: A reappraisal.
Human Relations, 48. pp.97-125.
Coleman, J., (2013) Six Components of a Great Corporate Culture. Harvard Business Review.
[Online] [Accessed on 10th March 2023] http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/05/six-components-of-culture/
Johnson, G., and Scholes, K. (1993) Exploring Corporate Strategy. 3rd ed., New York: Prentice Hall.
