You should think about culture change all the time
Tags: Consulting, Corporate Culture, Organisation, Culture Change, Leadership

When things go wrong, culture is often blamed. Sometimes it’s even “the culture of blame” that’s to blame. If that culture can be eradicated, somehow, then all will be well again. But that attitude makes it hard to prevent a future crisis of culture. Instead, organisations bounce between doing culture work and letting culture shift and deteriorate, like a drop of ink gradually spreading through water. To stop the culture work/decay cycle, you should think about culture change all the time.

What’s the problem? Isn’t culture hard to change?

Photo credit Jason Train, Flickr

It sounds like there’s a paradox here because we know how hard culture change can be and how long it can take. But culture is organic. It has a default shape, just like the human body has a default shape. Yet each individual human body is different, and it’s constantly changing!

What we need to do, then, is to be mindful of those changes and shifts. Culture change is a movement. And, crucially, culture preservation has to be a movement too. That means that leaders and managers have to be vigilant and ask questions about culture impacts. Like learning to ride a bike, or becoming a better chess player, movements take practice.

Part of evaluating any strategic decision should be the question, “Will this affect our culture?” And there needs to be some serious analysis to help answer it. So, not just, “Does this approach affect our bottom line?” or “Will this initiative improve engagement?” but also, “Is this helping us be the organisation we want to be?”. Your culture movement can embrace and build on culture shifts, but you can’t rely on that happening just by chance.

That means that values need to be actively engaged in decision-making. And decision-makers need real insight into what the possible impacts of a decision, policy or approach might be, not just superficial best guesses.

Really? All the time?

Doesn’t that all sound exhausting, though? Well, maybe. But no one said leading an organisation was easy!

“It’ll be fine,” or, “No one will notice,” are common responses when someone asks the question: “Is this helping us be the organisation we want to be?” But they’re not good answers to the problem of a culture’s foundations sinking. Whether people notice consciously, or the consequences just get into the water, that apathy goes against the very heart of culture preservation as a movement. Because a movement means actions, and every one counts.

Let’s come back to the human body analogy. You can’t do all of your exercise in January and expect that it will lead to good health and wellbeing throughout the year. You know you have to achieve a balance. So, after a long day at a computer, you find a way to keep moving. You might do a class, or run/walk/bike home.

It’s easy to do this when we inhabit our own body. (Although plenty of us manage to find ways to ignore it to just do a few more emails!) But no leader inhabits their team or organisation in the same way. Feedback can be slow, more unreliable, and easier to ignore. So, every organisation needs to come up with strategies that enable them to notice and examine movements in the wider culture properly, giving them the attention they deserve.

Should we really be fighting culture shifts?

No, your organisation doesn’t want to feel like it’s constantly fighting change, either. Or at least not fighting change just for the sake of it. Not all culture shifts will be bad and need immediate corrective action.

Some will be good for your organisation, and you’ll need to think about how to embed them. Culture shifts that help your culture movement are exciting. They suggest the culture is evolving, and it’s going in the right direction. But there are some questions worth asking. Why weren’t they already there? How did you miss them? And are you missing anything else too?

Some culture shifts will be good in principle, but not right for your organisation. You’ll need to find smart ways to handle that because they will feel like A Good Thing. The best case scenario is that they’ll dilute your focus. The worst case scenario is that they’ll create a conflict in your organisation.

And, of course, some culture shifts will be neutral. They won’t seem to matter much. But they might mean your organisation isn’t fully committed to the culture movement. That can be just as disastrous as an organisation not fully committing to its strategy, targets, or budget!

So what should we do?

Sometimes just asking the question, “Is this helping us be the organisation we want to be?” is enough to show that leadership are taking culture preservation seriously. Perhaps the question needs to be baked in to business case processes. Or maybe policies and initiatives that aren’t supporting your culture are bubbling up because staff don’t feel sure anymore about exactly what that culture is. Those conversations produce a feedback cycle that can help you see the ink spreading through the water. That insight will let you plan for managing culture shifts and maintaining your culture movement.