In my time, I probably saw about as many “culture programmes” as I did restructures. Rather than taking a set of sheers to the org chart to – supposedly – create the settings for a functional- and behavioural change, culture initiatives try to deliberately deal with an even more intangible part of organisational life. Arguably, they represent two extreme ends of a spectrum, both actions in response to a sense of “something’s off in here, we need to do something”.
I’m assuming everyone who’s been around the corporate block a few times can remember a workplace that either has an infectiously positive and productive culture, and one that seemed to slowly suck the life out of everyone who dared enter. It can be hard to point the finger at exactly how each state comes to be, but its significance to working life is undeniable. Which is why this ol’ chestnut never fails to delight:
It serves an important reminder that no matter how good, fitting and timely an organisation’s vision, strategy or action plan may be – without the culture to support it they’re barely worth the pixels that display them.
So it only makes sense that from time to time, institutional leaders come to the conclusion that they need to actively invest in their culture, or do something to shift it in some direction. Hence, culture programmes. And as so often, the sticky part is in the doing – how do you change a culture in a deliberate way? So today I want to look at an interesting paper on the matter and ask: after breakfast, what does the culture eat next then?
Rationalising culture
I came across this fascinating paper by Wilcoxson & Millett that explains how organisational culture tends to be seen through a “scientific rationalist” lens, where culture is one of the many individual, definable components of an institutional machinery:
“In this paradigm, organisational culture is primarily a set of values and beliefs articulated by leaders to guide the organisation, translated by managers and employees into appropriate behaviours and reinforced through rewards and sanctions.”
So we can picture a machinery with cogs and buttons. The authors point out that:
this concept of culture is almost always taken from the manager’s perspective and “emphasises the leader’s role in creating, maintaining or transforming culture”.
Equally, what can be rationalised can be measured – and that gives us the impression of control and transparency. In corporate setting, there tends to be a few questions in regular staff engagement surveys. If you’ve completed such surveys in a few different workplaces you’ll know that they follow certain "heuristics”, aimed at different facets of some definition of “culture”. This means that “the researcher determines what scenarios or concepts should be used to describe the culture”.
In other words - these staff survey questions really shape what your organisation can (and can’t) conceive of as culture.
In the process of attempting to make something abstract like culture tangible in corporate terms, we almost inevitably narrow what culture means down to a needle-point and a numbers-go-up/numbers-go-down polarity. I know that when organisations run staff surveys they do have open text fields and analyse the comments they get, so they will seek and also find a bit more on the context behind the ratings. But our rationalist corporate culture really values dashboards and clearly-defined concepts. That’s understandable, and better than not having any data at all - but it makes it harder to conceive of culture in any other sense than these metrics. And it can lead to something of a false sense of control of something that is really highly contextual.
Consider this example question from a listical on culture questions by an HR “academy”:
“Is the organization’s mission and vision clear to you?”
“Organizational culture should match up with what the company claims to be about. If employees are unclear about the organization’s mission and vision, they can’t live them out as expected.”
Fine, in principle. But that question doesn’t measure how clear an employee is on the org’s mission - but how clear they think they are. BIG difference. I might think I’m clear on the mission and vision, but if I was asked to articulate it, I might be miles off. That’s what I mean by contextual.
One culture, or many cultures?
The Wilcoxson & Millett (2000) paper contrasts the idea of a “unitarist” perspective on organisational culture – one where the whole organisation is presumed to have one, consistent culture as a characteristic – and “pluralist” views where multiple sub-cultures co-exist (for example between team leaders and service staff, or between project- and operational-teams), and even “anarchist” readings where culture is “transient, issue-specific” – a fancy way of saying “it suuuper-depends”.
All that makes academic sense, but in a practical setting where manager’s job descriptions codify some kind of “culture” responsibilities, I’d suggest that any contingent culture ideas are not much use. What do you do with that? You may break your staff survey responses down by team, so you can point to which team has bigger/different culture issues than another one does and make it that team-managers’ problem to resolve – but that still leaves us in very clearly framed, contained idea of what makes and breaks corporate culture.
Worse, I remember being instructed - in no certain terms - by a senior manager to fill in the upcoming staff survey “with a positive outlook”, because if our team “scored” better than another one on culture, they (the leader) would have better odds of securing more budget for us.
Trust large organisations to gamify culture…
Narrow views lead to narrow solutions
In their conclusion, Wilcoxson & Millett write that while there is no one correct way to conceptualise organisational culture, the perspective you chose DOES matter, because:
“the paradigm adopted will determine which of the key points of leverage are deemed most likely to achieve the desired outcome of cultural maintenance or change.”
In other words - how organisational leaders conceive of culture matters, because it will shape the actions they take to attempt and influence it. Especially when staff survey markers are a key part of your performance review.
That sets us up for a closed loop: we write questions to measure culture as xyz, we get ratings on xyz, and we form our response around xyz.
Machinery of culture
Where culture programmes are built on this rationalist, neatly-delineated idea of what signifies culture – the likelihood is high that identified issued are matched with simple problem-solution reactions.
The goal of the culture programme becomes to identify and press the right buttons in the right sequence, so that the cogs move as they should.
So if we see in our staff survey that there’s a drop in people stating that they “identify with the organisation and its goals”. What do we do? Plaster the office with brightly coloured organisational value posters. Manaakitanga as far as the eye can see!
There is a drop in “I trust my line manager” ratings? That’s not so nice – let’s have a fortnightly morning tea, at which the line manager spends 90% of their time talking to the same people who they are already close to anyway.
But hey, it’s the thought that counts, right?
Where I reckon culture really lives
It’s all nice and easy sitting on the side-line and chucking rocks at culture programmes, right? I really don’t mean to be as cynical as I sound, so let me lay out my two cents on where we should be looking for culture issues- and solutions. Because fundamentally, I do believe the notion that is expressed in “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is profound and true. Hence the phrase’s immense staying power.
But when there is a drop in “I trust my line manager” rating in the regular staff engagement survey – that can be an indicator for a few different things. But a likely candidate is that a manager did something that was perceived to be opposed to what they were saying earlier – or in conflict with the big, glossy organisational values on those posters. And no morning tea to rub shoulders, or internal newsletter can change that.
And that comes down to the underlying paradox of ALL culture programmes I’ve ever seen: they are top-down affairs, and they quite often directly state how important the leadership’s behaviour is to the corporate culture. Leaders need to “walk the talk”, and “model the behaviour” that we want to see.
I don’t disagree with that at all – but I see this ambition inevitably runs into another saying with evergreen relevancy – Margaret Mead’s seminal:
What people say, what people do, and what people say we do are entirely different things.
Apart from being stitched on my throw-pillows at home, this notion points to psychological- and cognitive limitations that none of us are above. And in my eyes,
a big part of culture issues comes from the distance between how we think we should behave, and how we actually do.
We ALL do it. When asked, we can explain what our values are - and leaders tend to be especially good at articulating what matters to them. But when the going gets tough, we might do something that, to the outside observer, can stand in direct opposition to those values. Because we feel we must, perhaps.
And here’s the kicker, especially in New Zealand, what we DON’T have, is a culture in which we feel safe and valued for calling out when we see such conflicting behaviour in our leaders. When culture-initiatives are leader-identified, leader-solutioned, and leader-led – where is the space in which the people down the food chain can confidently and safely point out those cracks where their ambition and their actions diverge?
Because THAT is what I believe is missing from every organsiational change programme I’ve seen in my time:
Culture change HAS to go both ways. Where leaders can spotlight patterns in behaviour that they observe in their teams that they think should change, the same MUST be true in reverse.
Especially when leaders are so squarely identified as the embodiment of culture - they need to hear what they inadvertently do to undermine their own mission. But those loops do not exist.
When we recognise that the gap between what we hold to be true, and our own action under pressure, then we can recognise cultural “slip-ups” as something human, not as a flaw. The consequence of which should be awareness, not judgement. Wouldn’t that be nice?
So what does culture eat for lunch? The programmes that attempt to quick-fix them with the same superficial junk-food-activities that we see so often in org change. And that’s that metaphor stretched to its limit.