The "C Word"

Introduction.

There’s a word out there we should never say around the wrong people.?It’s inflammatory and triggering to protectors of the status quo, of which there are many. It’s meaning is often misunderstood and feared, but once the cat is out of the bag, the damage is done, not to be undone.?Like hitting “send” on a late-night email with inadvisable content, once you say the words culture change, you have activated the resistance.

The problem is a common one in modern times.?Words that once meant one thing, suddenly change their meaning entirely. This is especially troubling with the word culture because we don’t really have any words to replace it. Culture has been defined many ways, but all end up somewhere in the vicinity of this one. Culture is a powerful social force that describes the norms, rituals, and traditions of an organization and how it functions. It is long term and self-adjusting as well as self-sustaining. It is extremely difficult to grasp or shape from the outside.?

Therein lies the secret. It must change organically, from the inside. Once this is understood, the question becomes simply how.

After working with organizations large and small for over three decades, we have unlocked this mystery, at least partially, with proven results. Guided, inside-out transformation has been proven to work in both large and small organizations going through mergers, dramatic growth cycles, recovery from tragic events, and general malaise. Even more interesting, this positive change does not require any time consuming or costly culture assessment to get started. In fact, we strongly recommend against it. To understand why, we need to take a short detour.

On Dogs and Horses

Executives want to control things – and rightfully so.?This is especially true with regards to things that impact their business or organizational strategy or key outcomes.?Of course, performance on these outcomes also impact their personal reputation, brand, and career, hence the natural drive to control.

Culture powerfully impacts all of the things executives care about, think about, and plan for. But it stubbornly resists any direct control. Typically, these leads to two executive responses to culture. The first is to claim the culture is great and assume they are right. The second is to ignore it. Both are nonoptimal and potentially dangerous.

Control can be thought of in two ways.?The first is like training a dog.?A dog craves attention, wants to please, and can be quickly trained with rewards, and if that doesn’t work, with limited forms of punishment. Eventually, dogs will obey commands without question and become incredibly predicable and reliable. Most organizational outcomes can be controlled in this manner.?

But culture is more like a horse.?A horse doesn’t need you or even really want to please you, not like a dog does at least. They tolerate people, learn to trust a few, but are just fine if they have a couple of their equine friends in the pasture to hang with. They are also too powerful to try and train with punishment. Try and put a shock collar on one or cause it pain and you will quickly learn what 1200 pounds of anger looks and feels like.

Horses must be approached differently, as a partner, not an obedient tool. I have a sign in my barn to remind me of this. It reads simply, “When in doubt, let the horse do the thinking.” As the rider learns to partner with the horse, the horse will typically learn their end of the bargain. “Don’t hurt me, don’t surprise me, and we will go together where we need to go.” It’s a beautiful thing to experience, but it takes time and focus, and is a two-way learning curve between horse and rider.

Horses also respond differently depending on the skill of the rider. Expert riders provide subtle cues with very small shifts in their weight on the saddle, or slight pressure from the legs. Amateurs jerk the reigns and try to yank the horse’s head with the bit in their mouth. An amateur might get the horse to turn temporarily, but the horse will never trust the rider and its unlikely they will ever work together as a team over a ride of any significant duration. If it gets bad enough, the horse will find a way to get a bad rider off their back, usually with considerable pain and injury to the rider.

Cultures are like that, partners we must work with and learn about until we reach a mutual agreement on where we can and should go, not a dog we can train to do our bidding. Cultures can’t be pushed, but they can be guided, and can guide you as well.

At Convergent Performance, we want to teach you to ride like an expert and appreciate the wisdom inside the culture.?We will show you how to develop a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship and steer the culture to a place you both want to go. But like any lasting relationship based upon trust, it takes time, attention, and know-how.

If you’re interested in riding lessons, contact us at convergentperformance.com?