Sophie Bechu, Executive Vice President of Operations for Philips, talks with Vanguard Network founder Ken Banta about company culture and behaviors that matter

Sophie tells Ken about five behaviors needed for operational success and discusses how behaviors drive culture and how culture drives performance. They also discuss accepting and learning from failure and important factors for personal success. Their exchange was edited for flow and clarity. Listen to the original podcast here 

Ken Banta: We thought we’d focus today on culture, and on what makes a culture effective. You’ve said that you like to focus on behavior, and that behaviors are what often matter most, especially in very large organizations where you can’t keep an eye on everyone. You need to have a shared set of behaviors—including, I think you’ve said, when people aren’t watching. How do you get that to happen across an organization? 

Sophie Bechu: I think I was talking specifically about  behaviors that matter — you need to look at that first. And then for those behaviors that matter, where or how do you define mastery, and how to define stages of maturity? It’s useful to think about what this mastery looks like, particularly at other companies (since we tend to be optimistic about our own establishments). 

So we spend a lot of time as a management team looking at other companies that demonstrate these types of behaviors, and then establishing those stages of mastery and trying to position ourselves in relation to them. The realization each of us comes to is that this is very difficult. Living a behavior every day is an enormous commitment of energy, because you can easily  go back to your old self and ways of doing things. And the role modeling that you do is critical, because letting go of focus on the customer, on quality, on integrity, can be very detrimental. 

Let me give you a small example. One day I was in a conversation and somebody said, ”I see you’re visiting this customer, we need to make things right with them.” And I thought, you should be thinking, “making things right is the right thing to do regardless of who visits.“ Little moments like that show the effort it takes at every turn to live and model behavior that makes a difference. It’s often not obvious, and it’s not easy. But it’s clearly important to getting to where we want to be—a shared understanding of how we do things together, in pursuit of shared goals. As I said, behavior drives culture, and culture drives performance. 

Ken Banta: And what are an example or two of behaviors that you see as very important, or that the organization sees as very important to success?

Sophie Bechu: We define five value-driven behaviors. One is customer first, which was essentially new for us—not that it wasn’t there, but it wasn’t there as explicitly as it is now. I find the enormous value of this behavior is that it forces us to look outside, in a way that drives us to unite around the customer much more than we had. Then it’s quality and integrity always—you’ve got to work with both together, because you don’t want to repeat the Kobe Steel or the Volkswagen diesel issues. With quality and integrity, you do the right thing always. Team up to win, because in a large company, the capabilities are always in very different positions, so you cannot succeed on your own. And how you get that team to win is critical. Take ownership to deliver fast. That’s one of the bigger ones, because, again, in a matrix environment, you can always lose the accountability. So regardless of the matrix, if what is at stake matters, you should take ownership—so how do you do that? And then eager to improve and to inspire, because we need to take people forward to be the best they can be. So those are five behaviors that can really shape your organization in powerful ways. 

Ken Banta: Organizations find it relatively easy to celebrate successes, but as we know, very often you need to fail a few times in order to get to those successes. In a big organization, how do you get a culture of accepting the right kind of failure, or learning from failure versus seeing it as a personal defeat. 

Sophie Bechu: I think I’m at that stage at Philips where there are a couple of things that I want to turn off, because they haven’t yielded what everybody would have liked them to yield. And to be honest, a lot of the people involved have started to look like they’ll have their noses out of joint. 

On the other hand, I launched an experiment not long ago that was very much presented as an experiment. So if this one fails, I think it will be a lot easier to distance people from the failure itself. And by the way I expect and hope it will succeed—we’ve done everything for it. But when somebody else starts something and you have to say, well maybe not, I find it a little harder. 

Ken Banta: One last question: When you think of your own career, what’s been the most important factor in your development as a leader, or the thing that was most important to success as a leader?

Sophie Bechu: I think the most important thing is the one I’m not good at, which is building organization or capability. I’m very at ease with ambiguity—or at least it doesn’t scare the heck out of me—and therefore I sometimes don’t realize the value of clarity for an organization to work at its full potential. I think at this point I do understand that value, but it’s probably the issue I get to the latest when I should take it on from the start. So that’s a different way to talk about success. 

Ken Banta: Well, self-awareness is a big part of success. So Sophie Bechu from Philips, thank you very much for joining us.

Sophie Bechu: Thank you.