Corporate Culture is Under Attack
In most articles you read, corporate culture or perhaps a lack of culture, is blamed for most implementation and execution problems. Culture “trumps everything,” it is argued, usually without the empirical evidence to back up such a claim.
This argument can create a “culture trap” – a very narrow way of thinking about culture and its role in organisational problems, says Wharton management professor Larry Hrebiniak. This can lead to poor decisions and frustrations as managers try to affect culture and culture change with the wrong methods.
“Culture is important; it definitely can affect behaviour and performance outcomes.” Said Hrebiniak. “But it’s also important to realise that behaviour and performance affect culture. Culture is not only a contributing factor, it’s also a dependent variable affected by other critical execution-related factors. Incentives, structures, decision processes, behaviours, people, and controls affect and shape culture. It’s important to understand these dynamic interactions to fully comprehend culture; how to manage it, and how to avoid ineffective, knee-jerk reactions to change it.”
So what’s more important — culture or the factors and conditions that affect and shape it?
Making Sense of Culture When Its Business As Usual
If you are like most leaders your previous attempts to change your organisation’s culture haven’t fared well for numerous reasons. The most common reason we hear is the day to day demands of the business draw leaders away from the major focus needed to effect lasting change.
However, the benefits of having the right culture are too great to abandon the process. What is the solution you ask? You will need to focus on changing some of the factors and conditions that affect culture, rather than directly on culture itself.
As you know simply appealing to managers to change behaviours, thinking, values, and beliefs rarely works. Culture-changing activities such as climbing the trust tree, scuba diving, team poetry readings, thoughtfulness training, and other team-building exercises alone seldom have long-lasting effects. Moods may be lifted or behaviour changed for a while, but managers soon fall victim to the same old organisational excuses, lack of assessable accountability, structures, incentives, processes, and controls.
So What’s the Answer?
Hrebiniak, stresses that to change culture, you should focus on four of the factors and conditions that affect it:
- Structure and Process. Work with senior executives to empower their employees to do their own thing. The need for meddling with the teams, should decrease if executives engage in conscious decoupling to let team leader’s decisions and actions prevail. But what happens when the next major problem arises? Usually senior executives apply a one size fits all centralised solution. As an alternative, they could change structure instead. Increasing the span of control for managers and their teams, for example, would mitigate against involvement by senior executives. Empowerment of employees’ nurtures independence at lower levels. Behavioural change of executives can foster behavioural and culture change in teams therefore the organisation.
- People. Bring in fresh blood and thinking. Rotate managers with different views of competitive conditions or operations. Supply different needed skills or capabilities from the outside. New people, ideas, and strategies can lead to behavioural and performance changes that, in turn, will affect new ways of thinking and culture change.
- Incentives. Change incentives to reward performance. New people will be attracted by the new incentives and the opportunities presented and the culture will begin to change. Incentives affect behaviour and performance and attract new resources and capabilities, which can lead to culture change.
- Changing and Enforcing Controls. It’s important for you to increase feedback, evaluate performance, and take corrective action. Emphasis should be on tweaking strategy implementation activities to achieve desired results. It’s important to learn from performance, including mistakes, and use the lessons learned to change incentives, resources, people, methods and processes, and other factors to foster strategic and operating goals. It’s also necessary to hold managers accountable for performance results. These actions or emphasis will help to shape new behaviours, task interactions, and ways of thinking that will create or define a culture of learning and achievement.
In Conclusion
Change does not have to start on a Monday and be completed by Friday. Change will always be a slow process because the culture has evolved and is entrenched. Therefore cultural change that is planned and delegated will be a measured process, carried out through a series of planned actions. In large organisations real change can take up to three years.
We often find a short term engagement by an external consultant not blinkered by the current culture is often needed. The consultant will have the time, ability to train, design and implement the needed and agreed change initiatives. This will ensure the change initiative – is accepted by the majority of employees and will become irreversible.
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