Culture is not a project, something to do on top of normal work, an extra, something to get your hands around once the big stuff has been done.
Culture is not an ‘HR function topic’ but a business one, with all the help of HR and non-HR that you can get.
Culture is a big word, with similar liabilities as ‘change’: overused, prompt to cynicism, multiple use, a thousand meanings.
Culture is the how you do the What, the platform for your success or failure.
Behaviours create cultures. Master behaviours, agree upon them, declare the non-negotiable ones, spread them, and you’ll get culture.
Culture cannot be taught. It’s something lived, and, in behavioural terms, something that grows from behaviours. Behaviours scale up via social influence, so suddenly you have a causal link between behaviours, influence and culture. Get the first two right, you get a great third.
Most problems with cultures come from decoupling the idea of culture from ‘the real stuff’: operations, compliance, targets, performance. Culture is business. Business is culture. Stuck to each other with glue, and the glue is behaviours.
Chances are you don’t have one corporate culture, no matter how much you preach that. You have subcultures overlapping in a Venn diagram. @The Chalfont Project - Organization Architects rule of thumb is to start from the subcultures. SaaS, start with what the engineers do. Hospital, start with what the nurses do. Manufacturing, start with what the finance people do. Your organization is a plethora of subcultures. Join them up.
You may also have a sub-subculture in a perhaps almost self-contained territory called the Leadership Team. Conventional wisdom says this team represents the corporate culture. Unconventional-less-wisdom says that most of the time they represent themselves, their own ecosystem, their own island.
Dysfunctional leadership teams seem to coexist with rather healthy and successful subcultures, and some dysfunctional organizations seem to have a good functional top. And combinations.
Don’t be shy to talk about culture. If people begin yawning, wake them up. If they smile, smile back and ask why. If they say, ‘here we go again’, stop and have a conversation.
@The Chalfont Project - Organization Architects will give you the guidance to bring about impactful and sustainable transformations within your organization. We are the experts in driving behaviour-based organizational change, we partner with those who envision possibilities, prioritise urgency, and strive to make a meaningful impact in their spheres of influence – whether that's within their teams, as leaders, within their companies, or in society.
#organisationalchange #corporateculture #workculture #strategy #transformation
