What Is Company Culture? It’s Much More Than What You Think
By: Sambrita Basu
Tags: Agile, Change Management, Culture Change, Organizational Culture, Leadership

A Formative Experience

One of my clients several years back while at Accenture was a media company that had just seen the incoming of a new CIO.

Now, this new leader was a true visionary: he saw the potential of the IT function to revolutionize the way it worked and to serve stakeholders across functions in new, agile ways. He was an inspiring and highly intelligent leader and was able to truly set the vision for the future of the company in a meaningful way. When he spoke at town halls, everyone listened with rapt attention.

As key to his initiative, I was leading change management for the implementation of Jira, which at the time meant driving training and communications for the new tool and team processes.

I ran into a major unexpected hurdle, though. The organization was bogged down with decades of politics and resentment between teams that inhibited the level of collaboration the new CIO envisioned and limited the adoption of new tools.

Executive leadership had the right vision, but the strategy was lacking: bringing in a new tool alone couldn’t solve the problem. It seemed more and more that the vision of agility and continuous improvement that the new CIO had charted was just an idea on the wall, and not an actual practical reality.

Why Digital Transformations Fail 84% of the Time

The experience was pivotal for me in realizing how critical people and culture and organizational alignment issues are to the success of a transformation, eventually leading to the formation of my company, CultureStrategy.

Working in business consulting for 15-odd years helping companies navigate through digital and organizational transformations, it has always been interesting to experience the tension that takes place in an organization as a result of being forced to change.

Through my work, it became apparent to me that each organization had its own unique, intangible force — or “energy,” — that seemed to unconsciously run the organization: everything from the words used, the beliefs about leadership and the overall company, the work behaviors, the communication styles and style of meetings.

The power of this force could supersede all traditional efforts of driving change.

Another way of describing this force is simply “the way we do things around here.”

Most of the time, people in the organization are either unaware of organizational culture, or simply complacent to it. After all, culture is usually not something that is consciously cultivated(unless you’re a Zappos or Amazon), but something that just forms by itself as a result of:

1. Leadership behaviors

2. The organizational design

3. The technology being used

4. The policies and processes enforced

Organizational culture is an interplay: it both impacts and is impacted by people, processes, and technology. It is woven in so deeply into the DNA of the organization that it is often imperceptible. And because of that, it usually gets ignored or taken for granted when in fact, it can be the key to a company’s transformational growth.

My company, CultureStrategy, was developed on the premise that culture counts. Not only does organizational culture matter, but it can be measured or ‘counted.’

It can be assessed through combining both qualitative and quantitative data from the company, which is what our 360-Degree Organizational Assessment does. And only once we measure culture can we work on changing it, by understanding its levers and its impacts on the organization.

There are some general best practices for changing organizational culture that I will get into in my next article. But it is important to remember again, that each organization is unique and has its own personality. And thus, it has its own unique journey it needs to take for change.

And why bother, you may ask? Why not just stay the same? Let’s just say survival depends on it. These days, organizational change is not a one-off occurrence but it is the norm.

Change is the only thing that is constant, with new technologies and competition sprouting up everyday.

And an organization’s potential and ability to navigate change of any kind is directly dependent on its culture.