Organisational Culture - focus on what’s behind the behaviours, not the abstraction
The best way to shape culture is of course to focus on hiring the people who will ultimately make up that culture. Yet this is often overlooked, replaced with corporate values, slogans, and mission statements. It took billions of years to create and define all of the world’s great cultures — through failure after failure — so it is with arrogance alone that we executives think we can create and define one for our company. To be blunt, cultures are not created or defined by executives; they evolve around the people who make up a company.
- Jeff Stibel
Related
You change a culture with stories
Corporate Values Exercises are Pointless – But What Actually Are Values Anyway?
Five Reasons Why It Makes No Sense to Establish Corporate Values
Think twice about that policy and try telling a story to help people understand
NOTES
This reminds me of a post via Jack Vinson where a discussion ensued on Google+
It turns out that things like “culture” and “collaboration” are easy to spot but very difficult to create - when you focus on creating culture. They are concepts rather than behavior. Rather…focus on the behaviors you want to see and the system that you are trying to change. When those changes occur, take a look and see if the culture / collaboration are happening - or if you need to look at other behaviors / measures
- Jack Vinson
Related
Behaviours are actions not results or values
For achievable business goals we need to action behavioural goals
Oscar Berg posted about this recently, where he says:
…it couldn’t have been created without a deeper understanding of what motivates people and how to design an environment that triggers the right behaviors.
- Oscar Berg
What I had to add to the Google+ discussion
John Tropea - I’m starting to learn we got to be careful of looking at culture as an entity, it’s too abstract a thing, you can’t pick it up and move it to the left or right…I think forget about culture and concentrate on people…if we pay attention to people and make sure their work in meaningful and all that Dan Pink stuff then you start getting emergence (perhaps we can call this emergence culture change)…I’ve been snipping lots on my snippets blog lately on employee engagement…if culture change is our business goal, then our behavioural goal to get there is employee attention…and the strategy I suppose is making sure they have purpose, challenge and are happy
John Tropea - I think I was trying to say you can’t attack culture as it’s emergent, you can only attack the interplay that surface’s that emergence
John Tropea - Maybe I don’t like the word “change” culture as something you do…to me “change” is a result, not something you “do”…we can best influence, enable, seed, encourage…create conditions where the players needs are met and as a result we may see shift or change
John Tropea -
In an earlier comment I said I don’t like the verb/phrase “change culture” as it has connotations of something you do; instead “change” is more of a result.
I was recently thinking how important just the language part of this is…if we really begin to pervasively replace the word “change” with another word then people will think differently about it.
ie If we constantly use the word culture “change” then management will constantly think they can change culture; and use all their top-down thinking to push it. Really, the problem identified as “we need to change culture” is not the problem. The problem is all the stuff underneath; the numerous aspects that interplay. We need to pay attention to this stuff, rather than ignore it.
Related
Does organizational culture exist? A view from the road less travelled
…‘global’ organizational outcomes emerge from the self-organizing interplay of myriad ‘local’ (ie one-to-one and small-group) interactions. At the same time, I don’t believe that it follows from this that there is no such thing as organizational culture. In fact, I would argue the opposite.
-Culture as articulated-
…some of these ‘global’ outcomes enter the formal arenas of the organization as structures and strategies; processes, systems and procedures; formally stated goals, visions and values; physical artefacts; and so on…This represents what I would call the “culture as articulated”. It is here also, amongst the idealized designs, plans and programmes, that conventional cultural change practice is situated.
-Culture as experienced-
If we focus next on people’s perceptions of what it’s like to work inside the organization, we would find a mixture of the openly acknowledged ways of seeing, thinking and acting and, at the same time, consciously held but informal/covert ways of seeing, thinking and acting. This interweaving of formal and shadow-side dynamics might usefully be thought of as the “culture as experienced”…Elements of the idealized ‘culture as articulated’ will both enable and constrain what goes on at this local level. But it is the specific interactions that will determine what actually happens, not the idealized statements.
-‘Deep’ culture-
The more that people make sense of things in particular ways the more likely it is that they will continue to make similar sense going forward. In other words, the ongoing sense-making process creates expectancy - or a generalized tendency to think and act in certain ways. And it is here that we find the essence of what we think of as organizational culture (or the “deep culture” of the organization)
These taken-for-granted ‘cultural patterns’ act back imperceptibly on this ongoing process of shared sense making. Importantly, it is this tendency to make sense of events in particular ways that enables the organization to function. Without it, people would have to think afresh every time that they encountered a particular situation. At the same time, though, they can become ‘locked into’ these socially constructed patterns of assumptions and the characteristic patterns of thinking and behaviour that flow from them.
On the one hand, these help to reduce internal complexity and uncertainty by ‘codifying’ norms of behaviour, expectations and so on. However, the patterning that helps people to create a sense of meaning, and that allows them to negotiate their way through the organizational world in an ‘orderly’ way, can also constrain their ability to act in other ways. Established ways of thinking and acting tend to trap individuals - alone and collectively - within their own, socially constructed worlds and prevent them from noticing and engaging with other emerging possibilities.
Culture cannot be managed from outside as a whole
Leaders are not in control of outcomes
Do You Have ONE or Multiple Organisational Cultures?
Emergence of me is the interplay between social structures and my agency (video)
Groups are not just simple aggregations of individuals
(Source: blogs.hbr.org)
