How easy is it to achieve a compliant culture? Anne Bennett and Ann Gammie uncover the realities of gaining compliance

Every CEO today struggles with balancing high performance, innovation and delivering growth with the hard realities of being accountable, complying with regulation and maintaining standards. This creates tensions when relating key messages about motivation, degrees of autonomy and initiative, creativity, risk and collaboration to the workforce. How do you drive home the message about requirements, efficiencies, controls and being compliant?

Compliance is achieved when individuals behave in a required way that also delivers results. If we can facilitate, enable, encourage, incentivise, cajole, empower people to behave appropriately, our compliance prayers will be answered. There are different assumptions and, indeed, models of behaviour that underpin approaches to compliance and commitment, and whether we are aware of them or not, they direct what we do.

There are two schools of thought on this. On the one hand, some believe that everyone has a price and if you just pitch it right, you will get them to do anything. The price may be positive or negative, for example,  “I will pay you X if you do Y”, or “I will keep quiet about your lateness if you just do Y for me.”  On the other hand, and more recently, executives have been exhorted to temper such ‘transactional’ leadership, to focus on transforming the business, usually under pressure, and to enable effort to come naturally from the motivation, skills and ideas of the workforce.

These two models have battled it out to demonstrate what works – good cop, bad cop, or a bit of both? See Table 1 below. As every parent knows, both these versions have relevance. But at a practical level, how does the manager ensure facing everyday challenges secure compliance from his or her team? Let’s look at some of the challenges and answers to the ‘compliance dilemma’.

Approaches to Compliance

Hard reality ad cop ?

McGregor theory X:

People must be made to give their effort as they cannot be trusted to do the ‘right’ thing, so need pushing through carrots and sticks.

Transactional leaders:

• Trade off important values to arrive at compromises;
• Use incentives and deals, controls and processes to manage human behaviours;
• ‘Instrumental’ version of the psychological contract – individuals create social and intrinsic rewards to meet other needs in their hierarchy.

Default is to control/minimise deviation – may constrain creativity, necessary risk-taking, innovation, learning and change.

Good cop achieves sustainable results?

McGregor theory Y:

People are naturally programmed to be fulfilled and give discretionary effort – the manager’s aim is to not impede motivation, but to align it.

Transformational leaders:

• Attract people to a common purpose;
• Support and enable people to identify and commit to the ‘right’ thing;
• Work with the paths of least resistance and empower rather than ration power.

Rhetoric of recent public policies (e.g. taxation, regulation, crime prevention) = ‘enabling compliance’, but limited by capacity to direct resources to the process of cultural change and challenging hierarchies of power and authority.

Promoting patterns and making sense together

Individuals will follow a logic, an ‘obvious’ next step, an intuitive move. This personal sense of what the work goal is, and what the individual’s role and goal are, are rarely articulated and integrated across a team. These universally held, individualised and separate ‘senses of purpose’ are powerful and positive.

Managers of teams or self-managed groups can release a lot of energy and confidence by getting these lines of thought and intuition out in the open. For example, well-run call centres have a facility whereby the teams form around new issues and risks to share their intuitive reactions, marry them with company standards and local goals, and agree appropriate responses.

Patterns can be quickly picked up by large groups, talked about through sharing stories of experience and used to prove that there is a common gain from getting on with the hard work. In a very real way, this kind of action flows from good strategy, building on clarity of goals at every level, as has been effectively achieved in our work with local authorities. With them, ER Consultants helped to make their community vision integral to the relationships at the front line of services.

This kind of shared sense is vital to using patterns to gain compliance. The manager is not simply there to pass on sense, i.e. tell others what’s what, he or she can exchange experiences and jointly make sense along with colleagues until a stronger shared sense is created, and owned, in the team. At the very least, the manager is consciously engaging the team in this process. This means taking action when the team sense or wider organisational sense is woolly or vague.

Dynamic direction

Daily direction is about engaging people in achieving focus and results. The task is not so much about securing compliance as ‘developing a common sense’ of what is needed today and each day.  Some of this common sense is gradually moderated through discovering the degrees of tolerance (by manager or colleagues or ‘system’) of deviations from required activity, behaviour, outputs. The responses of people and systems help to co-create sense, what really matters, what really works. This process challenges the rhetoric of senior managers when the current culture may contradict what they espouse. For example, “we say we are about quality, then they do things on the cheap”, “they want us to go the extra mile, but the system won’t let me take this initiative”. 

Managers become the holders of the required norm, the perceived blocker to creativity or independent thinking. In fact, they will often need to channel and receive these ‘deviations’ to ensure that the overall direction remains coherent and realised through the experience of implementation taking the paper plan and finding out how it works in reality.  So, looking at the process for handling customer complaints, we saw each individual case going through different hands, thus eliminating any one person or network from having the overall picture that makes sense of why decisions are made and why responses to the customer are as they are.

At the other end of the scale, we see dynamic direction in action where front-line staff have budgets and the discretion to decide their use when dealing with dissatisfied customers. From these examples, we can see that compliance is not about repetition; it is about rigor in the management of exceptions.

Managers need the emotional competence to be really in touch with how the daily direction of activity is affecting their team. Using emotions more consciously helps everyone to better express where and when problems, tensions, under performance or loss of momentum are happening. When managers are more direct, they focus resources and efforts tightly around certain priorities, which compete with or detract from other important or vulnerable areas of the business. 

In reality, we have seen urgency or competing agendas be appreciated and supported corporately without necessarily having to shift blocks of resource, or dampen efforts overall in order to cope. There is often more understanding among the workforce about felt-needs and felt-priorities from which managers can release more discretionary effort in support of the commonly identified agenda.

Micro sense-giving

Managers can give sense to others through developing finely tuned antennae and self awareness, to confidently pick up signals and confront them through action and discussion. There is constant sense-checking and an ability to question, test, admit errors and revise judgements, and to do this openly so that others can track the process and stay actively involved in it.

The collective sense making will always have differential impact on individuals – this is where it is vital to maintain a sense of what the individual’s ‘backstory’ is – where they have come from, what history and current issues affect them and what they care about. Respecting these things is the fastest way to release committed effort, often at times when much more is being demanded from the person by life.

For example, a technical team had not confronted or questioned their direction for some time but when challenged on where they might improve the quality of their operation, it became clear that they had not been comfortable with their workload or priorities. They initially struggled with being given permission to review what they delivered for whom and what value it added, but once they had grasped the issue, they redefined their added value to the organisation by specifying a new set of deliverables and related resource utilisation.

One point at which collective sense and individual contribution come together is at the point of decision making. The manager may be faced with apparent ‘done deals’, where there is no scope to negotiate, to moderate, to challenge or take ownership of the plan. Taking each scenario at face value would be a fundamental management error – the test, goal, perhaps the excitement, will come in working through diverse human beings to make sense – what does this mean, uniquely, for us?

Taken together

This is a very active form of securing compliance; through management using energy, wit and antennae waving to create just enough opportunities and channels for dialogue so that people do not avoid, withdraw effort or lose their motivation. There is a natural contribution arising from individuals whatever their position in the hierarchy or team. When your management culture fully values and uses this force, you will rise to any challenge, including the need to comply. Seeking the minimum effort only is one sure way to get that, and only that.

Achieving Compliance

In summary:

Work at maintaining explicit links between (keep making sense of) actions and behaviours with:

• internal and external performance;
• changing/emerging issues and opportunities;
• currency of pressures and demands. 

Pursue with vigour the views and understanding of others. Keep checking and balancing, get people engaged in offering their gut-reactions and local knowledge.

Make clear that tensions and trade-offs are okay. They are a key part of what we all have to deal with at different levels, but how well we share understanding of the bigger picture influences how well we respond to them.

Help people build their capability to think through situations, to develop a wider understanding, to use their intuition and wit, to explore perspectives.

Pay attention to the carrots and sticks, rewards and recognition, measures and deliverables that are used to signal to people what ‘value’ they add to the organisation – even minor mis-alignment can deflect effort.

Notice how people are responding and reacting, Check their energy levels and find out what affects their enthusiasm.