Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1) Introduction.
2) What is culture in an organisational setting?
3) Why is it powerful?
4) How is a culture created?
5) The role of leadership in determining culture.
6) How to design or change a culture for longevity.
7) Warning signs to cultural clash.
1) Introduction
This short booklet was inspired by some reading I was doing as I sat at my desk
thinking about how to re-position my business’ website and profile. I had been
reading an excellent book called “How to book yourself solid” by Michael Port. As a
Human Resources Specialist I am in the service business. A critical part of being
successful in the service industry is to know what service you should be offering and
this decision is largely based on identifying the service or offering that you are so
passionate about that you would do it for nothing. My passion, in an organisational
sense anyway, is culture. I have seen countless instances where opportunities are
over looked, poor decisions made, talented employees frustrated and money
squandered due to the interference of an organisation’s unique culture. To
compound the problem is an apparent significant lack of awareness of the subject, or
a lack of preparedness on the part of leadership to discuss the matter. Either way,
damage is being done and it is so unnecessarily wasteful. This booklet examines
culture in non academic terms but with some academic backbone. I trust it will be a
useful resource in providing insight, and ideas for shaping and changing your
organisation’s culture.
2) What is the culture of an organisation?
Ask any ten people to define leadership and you will probably get ten different
answers. So, I suggest it is with agreeing a definition of the word ‘culture’ in an
organisational setting. One of the world’s leading scholars on organisational culture,
Edgar Schein, defines it thus, “Schein concludes that culture is a property of an
independently defined social unit—a unit whose members share a significant number of
common experiences in successfully addressing external and internal problems. Because of
these common experiences, over time this group of people will have formed a shared view of
the way that the world surrounding them works, and of the methods for problem solving that
will be effective in that world.” This is quite a mouthful. Broken down I believe it says
simply that a culture develops when a group of people find commonly acceptable
ways of doing things over time, and that these behaviours become permanent with
use. If you have spent any time in a group, team, or organisation you will notice
behaviours, thought patterns, and attitudes that guide and even dictate the actions of
the members of the group. For example, I went to a boy’s boarding school. In the
prep room where we did our homework it was an offence to talk or read comics
during work hours. If a prefect or teacher walked into the room and asked who was
talking, the offender stood up and accepted his fate – usually involving some pain to
one’s rear. This behaviour was rigidly policed during the first months of a school year
by the “old-boys” until the “new-boys” behaved in this fashion. This had been going
on for many, many years, and was part of the school culture to the point where on
hearing the words, “who was talking”, the response of the offender became almost
automatic. This illustrates one version of a strong culture. In a work sense, I was
working for a training organisation that had facilities that offered wonderful potential
for use as a mini-conference centre. The facility was managed by an engineer and a
retired school principal. Despite desperate efforts to get management to see the
added value that such a centre could offer, they remained closed to the idea
because the culture dictated that training should not get mixed up with
supplementary services. As time wore on the government withdrew its funding for
such centres. The additional revenue that could have been provided by the
additional services could have sustained the operation. As it happened the centre
closed and the buildings were eventually sold off to a private company. Culture can
be a very destructive influence.
I believe that the power of the culture is in its relatively unseen nature. It is not
common for organisations to have a statement of culture on the wall next to the
statement of vision or mission. Actually, I have not heard of one organisation that
has such a statement. This is because culture is very hard to define in measurable
terms but the effects are clearly discernable in every day organisational living. The
power therefore lies in influence. Every thought is influenced by the intangible, every
action a product of a subconscious awareness of what is “okay” around here. If well
understood and harnessed the culture of the organisation can be a very effective tool
for progress and change. If not understood or ignored, the culture can be debilitating
to the point of total failure.
Now imagine a scenario in which a business is in decline. The business has good
products and services and has been a market leader for many years. But the market
has changed and is looking for a high quality but more affordable alternative. Trying
to sell more of what the market doesn’t want is futile. Change is required. The
solution is found in an innovation that offers the same product or service but
packaged in a way that makes it more affordable to the customer and is less costly
to provide. Genius you say! Yes but now about the implementation. The strategy
requires significant thinning out of the workforce because some of the services have
been altered or outsourced. The management of the business is largely ‘old school’
or traditional in approach and the trimmed, ‘no-frills’ offering is somehow beneath
them. In addition, the employees are highly unionised and antagonistic to change.
The brand strategy is carefully crafted and communicated. A new brand mission,
vision, and values are decided on after consultation with the workforce. The process
of the structural and service changes begins.
At each business unit in the new brand where the changes are implemented the
leader of the brand participates in each change process. He clearly spells out the
challenge, the remedy, and the new way of work that will save the business. He
shows the management a new style of leadership, away from the old characterised
by autocratic, aloof management, and into a more visible presence on the shop floor
during which times team members are encouraged, called by name, rewarded
publically for extraordinary effort, and even asked for an opinion. This style is
repeatedly modelled by senior brand leadership at corporate level as well as at
business unit level. Time is taken to share business results with employees regularly.
People see progress and the results of their efforts and begin to understand the pain
they have suffered. At every opportunity the Brand Leader visits the business units
and encourages and challenges the ‘troops’. More importantly, he is seen to be living
the values espoused by the new business philosophy. The change is dramatic.
Almost overnight the market embraces the new business model. The financial
position turns completely around and the business becomes the life blood of the
company. Stories of unbelievable service exploits begin to stream in from employees
and customers alike. Employees who were ardent unionists become the company’s
best service ambassadors. Everyone celebrates the new found prosperity.
What was described here actually happened. I was part of it. The brand took off and
literally turned around the fortunes of a company in deep trouble in a recessed
economy. Then something significant happened that serves to underline the deep
impact that culture has on a business. Due to the success of this particular brand the
brand leader was promoted to become the Managing Director of the whole company.
He was a dynamic leader who had been chosen for his “get things done, no
nonsense” style of leadership. He had come to the job with a reputation of being
something of a tyrant and a dictator who epitomised the company’s “break-legs” style
of management that followed the style of the founder of the business many years
previous. The promotion had a curious effect. The leader who had so successfully
led the reviving change did not carry on the new philosophy that had brought such
success, to his new position. Whether it was the larger span of control he was now
responsible for and the accompanying pressures, or a new challenge that he felt
required a different approach I can’t say, but he reverted to his previous style. The
whole company shifted in its behaviour and reverted to the so-called “break-legs”
autocratic style. As he moved upward a successor was brought in to manage the
new and successful brand. The new manager was not strong enough to continue the
successful brand philosophy in the face of the revision to the old culture. Slowly the
successful brand took on the mindsets, attitudes and nuances of the “old” company.
The business suffered enough for the management to look for other ways to ensure
growth and new brands were added to the portfolio. While the business was still
successful, it became in general a clinical operation lacking the warmth that should
characterise its industry – a far cry from the wonderfully warm, hospitable, and can-
do approach that played so important a role in turning the brand into a company
saver. Over the years following the company never regained the incredible spirit it
had. It seems the company now re-brands itself every few years to somehow try to
regain what it has lost.
This true story serves to illustrate the power of culture. It also demonstrates how the
leader’s character and style powerfully influence, even dictate the culture. The leader
was either a product of the original “break-legs” culture, or recruited because he
fitted well with it. The important part is that the old culture lived on even in the face of
an amazingly successful change process that inspired most employees. Culture is
powerful because it is deeply ingrained, it lies quietly in the hearts and minds of the
long serving members of the organisation, and it influences everything.
I must begin this section by making the following observation. Whether a culture is
created by design, or not, every company has one. If the design component is
absent then the culture will develop of its own accord. Edgar Schein states that a
culture is formed when in an intact group, “members share a significant number of
common experiences in successfully addressing external and internal problems”. The
emphasis here seems to be on the successfully negotiating problems as a means to
establish a culture. He goes on to add that when the group has successfully
negotiated the problems over a period of time those assumptions, attitudes, beliefs
and behaviours become entrenched and so culture is developed. He goes on to add
that the role of the founder of the organisation is important in all of this. He states,
“The founder of the organization usually has personal opinions such as, “This is better than
that,” or “This way of doing it is better than that way of doing it;” and so on. However, the
employees in the organization must collectively experience for themselves the validity of this
problem-solving methodology and of criteria for decision-making. Ultimately, if the
founder’s methods for reaching solutions work reliably and successively for the group, they
come to be taken for granted—and become the culture of the group”.
In his article, “How to change Culture – Lessons from NUMMI”, published in the MIT
Sloan Management Review, John Shook notes that the organisational culture that
characterised the General Motor’s corporation before its joint auto plant venture with
Toyota underwent a complete metamorphosis during the time of the venture. He had
firsthand knowledge of this because he was directly involved in the project. The
culture at the Fremont plant changed from one of absenteeism, poor work
performance, challenging of authority, striking, and even sabotaging quality, to one
of excellence in all aspects in which workers wanted to come to work and wanted to
succeed. He notes that the way the change in culture was changed was by
implementing Toyota production and management systems. In their work “creating
and sustaining a winning culture”, Meehan, Rigby, and Rogers state that the way to
change a culture is to change the behaviours that create culture. They say, “Instilling
a winning culture requires changing how people think about the company and
altering habitual behaviours”. Edgar Schein notes, “Schein asserts that managers who
want to shape their organization’s culture do not necessarily have to wait for—or
precipitate—a crisis deep and powerful enough to generate this forced “unlearning”. Instead
they can lead their organizations through a more organized and deliberate cultural change
process if they do two things. The first is to direct significant effort toward understanding the
present culture’s antecedents—the initial evolution of the organization’s culture that came
from successfully solving particular problems. With this understanding as a foundation, the
second thing that managers can do is to find or create a set of new problems that the
organization must confront repeatedly and successfully”. In other words if you want to
change a culture then you must change a behaviour first. As you change behaviour
and the behaviour is repeated over time so the culture will change along with it. This
perspective is supported by Shook who says, “Start by changing what people do
rather than how they think. It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking
than to think your way to a new way of acting”.
Edgar Schein observes that the founder of an organisation has an important role to
play in cultivating a culture, usually through his or her individual preferences in the
problem solving dynamic that he outlines. He notes further that as the members of
the organisation interact over time and jointly solve problems satisfactorily, the
preferences of the founder become less and less dominant in setting the culture.
I would like to suggest something quite different. I believe that the founder’s
preferences in terms of assumptions, attitudes, and actions are massively important
in determining an organisation’s culture. Further to this, every top leader who runs
the organisation will have an impact on the culture as his or her preferences begin to
become apparent in the organisation’s daily life. I have a favourite saying. It goes,
“The characteristics of the kingdom emanate from the character of the king”. Simply
put, the way the leader thinks and behaves (in terms of assumptions, attitudes, and
actions) will determine how the organisation behaves and thinks. I have yet to see
this disproved. From this point of departure it becomes easy to understand how
cultures are formed and influenced. If as we have seen above, changes in behaviour
lead to change in culture, then as people become aware – through observation
mostly - of the assumptions, attitudes, and behaviours preferred by the leader, so
they will adopt these and the “way we do things around here” will change. The
change will happen slowly but inexorably. If the leader stays around for long enough
the culture of the organisation may change permanently. If the tenure is relatively
temporary the organisation may revert to the original culture once the leader has left.
It was for this reason that in my example above, the winning culture of the brand as
instilled by the brand leader faded as the leader left to take up higher office. As he
took up higher office the culture so successfully entrenched in the brand was not
carried through to the rest of the organisation because the leader reverted back to
his original and possibly instinctual style. An opportunity was lost.
If the leader’s assumptions, attitudes, and actions are robustly entrenched the
culture change may be radical, if not then more subtle changes may occur. It is worth
mentioning that the NUMMI case study reflects that change was produced by the
introduction of the Toyota operating processes. While this is true, one must ask what
precipitated the change in operating processes. It was a decision of leadership that
the change must come about. While no monition is made of the role of leadership in
engineering the change of culture, it can be deduced from the text that leadership all
adopted the Toyota way. If they hadn’t I would strongly doubt that the processes
alone would have accomplished the change.
The first and possibly the most important principle here is to be consistent and look
at the development of culture as a long-term thing, a journey. In “Going for Gold”,
Gene Ference PhD. of HVS International states the following, “Peak-performing
organizations always view this as a continuous process because despite the best of intentions,
progress is often hampered due to conflicting agendas, personalities, and sub-cultures within
the organization. Therefore, building team culture becomes not a static event, but rather, a
dynamic process, and establishing a common team-culture requires highly interactive
processes”.
Mr. Ference packs a lot into this statement. I see two basic points here. First, the
creation and development of a corporate culture is not a once off initiative. It is a
continuous process. Secondly the process must be characterised by a high level of
interaction among the members of the organisation. This is not something that can
be hatched out in a boardroom somewhere and then hung on a wall for all to see.
Culture is borne out of observation and dialogue. Observation of how leadership
behaves, and dialogue around what is “okay” (assumptions, attitudes, and actions) in
this environment are the defining issues. The role of founder/leader cannot be
forgotten in this mix. As we have discussed above, “The characteristics of the
kingdom really do come from the character of the king”.
Of course every initiative must begin somewhere. Meehan, Rigby, and Rogers
believe that to change a culture one must change the way that people think about
the organisation and alter habitual behaviours. They maintain that step one is to do a
culture survey in order to find out what is currently in place and then set new
expectations. Secondly, they suggest aligning the team and focusing on results and
accountability. Next, they suggest managing the drivers of the culture and lastly
celebrating success. This is basically a standard project management approach to
the change process and is I believe a useful perspective. What is worrying however
is their focus on altering the way people think about the organisation. I have seen
initiatives where corporations try through training, focus groups, internal
communications, and reward try to alter culture. In essence these projects try to alter
the way that people think about the organisation and then hope that cultural change
will become permanent. They seldom get sustained results. As my colleague’s
example above discusses, the first hiccup on the road can bring about a return to the
“old” and comfortable ways if leadership is not strongly living the desired culture.
Shook, in his reporting of the successful turnaround at NUMMI (New United Motor
Manufacturing Incorporated – the Toyota, General Motors joint venture at Fremont),
has a slightly different emphasis. He maintains that the success of this culture
change process was the implementation of the Toyota production management
systems. His position is to change behaviour and the hearts and minds will follow. A
recent study on motivation done by a group from Harvard University showed the one
thing that employees found most motivating in their daily work was progress on the
job. People want to know that what they are doing is somehow contributing to the
greater good and that they have made strides in achieving an objective. In a
dysfunctional environment people are not motivated. They know that their efforts are
not making a difference. By getting people to work in a highly organised system that
delivers high quality results has the effect of motivating people. This motivation
through progress if sustained for long enough generates goodwill and a positive
mindset about the organisation. Of course there are other very important factors
such as giving the employees the means to do their jobs well and having a failsafe
method for dealing with problems in a way that the employees can feel safe in
identifying and dealing with problems. This aspect goes to what Edgar Schein states,
that culture is developed as group members find shared, successful ways of dealing
with problems that they encounter over time.
How then does one go about establishing and or altering an established culture?
If this seems like a series of pot-shots at leadership it is not intended with any
malice. This is simply what is. Most problems in organisations can be traced back to
leadership, or a lack thereof. In fact, Richard Barrett in his book Building a values
Driven Organisation states, “ultimately, the culture of an organisation is a reflection
of the personality of the leader, or the personalities of the leadership group.
Organisational transformation always begins with the personal transformation of the
leaders”.
The list of “hot-spots” above is by no means an exhaustive list but perhaps there are
one or two scenarios noted here that are a little too familiar. If so this could be a call
to arms to do something. Doing something about these symptoms can seem a little
daunting if you have either no experience at working with issues of culture, or
perhaps you would like an independent specialist to assist you in your journey. If you
need help please contact me Barry at barry@fromheretothere.co.za.