Is culture all it's cracked up to be?

Is culture all it’s cracked up to be?

The short answer is, NO it’s not. It’s a farce.?

Culture is complex and takes intentional and sustained efforts to change it. It’s hard work and exhausting. Building constructive cultures generally takes a couple of CEO tenures to get started, and that’s if you have good ones.?

By talking about culture as ‘values and behaviours’ we water down how complex it is, and how bloody hard it is to improve. Organisational culture is influenced by levers across a range of factors, systems and approaches all interconnected together in such a way that certain behaviours, and performance, can be predicted.

If it was easy, we wouldn’t have toxic workplaces and more people would have a better understanding of the language to use. And it’s not the ‘C’ word. The word ‘culture’ should be banned given how well we have done at butchering what it means. Nobody cares. They’ve heard it all before. And been wildly disappointed by the initiatives we’ve attached to it.

It’s not engagement.

It’s not climate.

It’s not 'just our values'.

Values, norms and expectations all govern the way people approach their work and interact with each other.* The way we do things around here. What they have to do to survive, or to thrive. Because they’ve seen how it’s worked out for those around them.

Generally, at some point, success comes with conforming to an organisation’s culture. Is that the way it should be? No. But it takes a very strong, competent and empowered leader(ship) to shift it.

Does your Exec have the guts to terminate the ‘brilliant jerk’ who makes the most sales but has the most appalling behaviour? No? Toxic culture. Your People and Culture team could help ‘enable culture change’ until the cows come home with it to be swept away in one single ‘retention-of-an-a$$hole’ decision from the top.

Does your organisation believe it’s ‘like a family’? You know, that tolerates poor performance, excuses and emotional outbursts (sorry teens); avoids hard conversations to keep the peace but becomes passive-aggressive and starts complaining about your team (hello divorce); centralised dictator style leadership (‘I told you so’ parenting) or very unclear about what’s expected of you (‘I don’t know, ask your Mum’). Yes? Toxic culture. Cameron Coutts recently shared the analogy and emphasised that it’s better to build a high-functioning team instead of a dysfunctional family. I loved how he outlines the parallels in the relationships between home and work.?

Unlike culture, climate is generally made up of what people are seeing going on and what it means to them, along with how they feel about it all. The happiness indices (aka engagement surveys) generally measure this. In reality, if your engagement scores go from 92% to 95% it’s unlikely that business performance will necessarily improve. Real business results, bottom line and market share, not KPIs that give the illusion of high performance. Climate is easier to see and has shorter-term impacts on performance and generally what we focus on. But in reality, it’s the outcome of the culture.

Culture on the other hand is harder to see, and you guessed it, much harder to change. It has a longer-term impact on performance and is a better predictor of performance. It can be measured and developed but often this takes more time, effort and money than the Executive would like.

So we run the engagement survey, again. Which can also be expensive. And even better, we don’t read through the qualitative data and do little with the results to meaningfully drive change. Even if we don’t write the best questions, open-ended responses often give us cultural clues about the systems that are broken. But we hadn’t factored those into our 3-year people strategy so we give some more convenient overarching themes and tick that KPI for another year.

Culture is both the cause of leadership styles but it’s also the outcome of leadership styles. Leadership is both the contributor and outcome of culture and to be honest, is a deal breaker if you’re trying to drive change and improve performance. If your senior leaders aren’t invested in ‘culture’, nor understand what it means and what kind of focus it will take, then you’re wasting your time.

But, that doesn’t mean HR teams should abandon all efforts to positively influence culture. We need to understand business culture more fully and look at our systems and processes enabling the toxicity.

• Structures - how can we help improve roles, influence and decision-making?
• Systems - in particular selection, training, performance appraisal and rewards. What are we seeking, encouraging and rewarding?
• Design - improving job design, and specifically the complexity and interdependencies that exist.
• Capability - in leadership, communication and empowerment.

Culture by stealth can be encouraged and?change happens best through a?movement, not a mandate.

We have built so much architecture that influences and drives individual, team and organisational performance. It might be time for some reno, if not demo, of those structures.

HR teams have a phenomenal capacity to educate, influence and make practical changes to levers that can help build more constructive cultures. But first, we have to understand it, and to be honest I think many of us don’t. And that’s okay to begin with, but we have to acknowledge the gap, and close it.?

Leaders remain key.?

They DIRECTLY impact culture through their own personal styles, behaviours, thinking, leadership strategies and management approaches.

INDIRECTLY they impact culture through clear espoused direction (vision, mission and values), structures, systems, job design and communication processes.

So let’s help them to improve it.

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If you're a People and Culture leader trying to navigate practical ways to cut through this culture caper, book a call with Trina.