Culture

When it comes to addressing the reality of corporate culture we enter a tragedy of epic proportions. Global surveys show?that eight out of ten of managers believe that culture provides them with a competitive advantage. Yet, similar surveys reveal that only one out of three efforts to change corporate culture succeed.

Management guru, Peter Drucker famously said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Yet it is strategy that is revisited, measured, tweaked and changed every time a company wants to reposition itself in the marketplace. Repositioning is important because we live in what the U.S. military calls a VUCA world. ?VUCA is an acronym that stands for concepts you are immediately familiar with because they challenge every decision you make and every action you take. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity.

Leadership plays a central role in establishing, maintaining, changing and sustaining corporate culture. Yet most leaders shy away from tackling culture themselves, preferring to outsource it to management consultants, think tanks and workshop initiatives. Unsurprisingly the majority of ?corporate leaders report that their “culture shaping” efforts fail to bear fruit.

Where are we going wrong? How is it possible to both acknowledge the importance of something as critical to business and life as culture, and at the same time fail to take it seriously enough to really do something about it?

Part of the problem and part of the answer to the question lies with the concept of culture. Unlike strategy culture is amorphous. It feels squishy. It is hard to measure. It doesn’t even show up on those colourful pie charts that make Power Point presentations what they are. Because we intuitively feel we understand culture we fail to define it. Because we don’t define it we fail to analyse it. Things we don’t analyse are impossible to change. Their dynamic escapes us. And on the few cases where we manage to get it right we have no way of knowing what worked and why, which means we will fail the next time we try.

To show the power culture has of helping us do amazing things and maybe even impossible things, I will give you the case of Sparta and its 300 warriors. Anyone who has seen the film “300” is familiar with the story. In the narrow straits of Thermopylae 300 Spartan warriors and their attendant allies chose to die and hold up for three days the entire might of the invading Persian army. Their actions and heroic death allowed the rest of the Greek city states to prepare and defeat the Persians and, according to the majority of historians, change the entire course of world history forever.

The true size of the Persian army is disputed. Ancient accounts that claim it was a million strong while more contemporary studies of what is possible given constraints of supply and mobility place it somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. But even at its lowest estimate the Persian army outnumbered its opponents by a factor greater than 10:1. So, how was what happened possible? What made seemingly ordinary people of the day attain such high level of resolve, resilience and commitment that their deeds resound with us today, over 3,000 years later?

I submit it was culture. Sociology tells us that culture is the result of our collective behavior. That behavior, and this is something I cover in detail in Intentional, is the result of experienced imperatives that are local to the individual, therefore it creates context. Context, in turn, closes the loop and allows us to interpret the data we see, differently and in keeping with the fresh imperatives that arise out of our context.

The Covid Pandemic Is Like A Social Experiment

This may sound hard to understand so let’s visualize it with an example drawn from our times. A global pandemic forced us all to socially isolate from each other and wear face masks when out in public or when we were indoors near other people. Both of these things generate sensations that add to our overall sense of stress and they both reinforce the sense of helplessness we experience when events that directly affect us are beyond our control.

It is highly tempting then to rebel, refuse to any longer wear face masks and declare that we are willing to take our chances. The calculus that enables us to take that risk takes into account the considerable sense of personal discomfort and emotional pain we experience under these conditions and weighs it against two possibilities: First, that we may catch the virus. And second that we may get seriously ill from it. In most cases the directness of what we feel far outweighs the possibilities offered by a pandemic that is full of uncertainties.

Add to this mix however the news that a vaccine to the virus that will give us immunity has been discovered and suddenly, most of us, would accept that putting up with the discomfort of social isolation and mask wearing for a little longer is OK. What changes in that calculation is that our brain now dials down the level of the discomfort we feel (the data we experience) because the context of our situation (wearing face masks) has now changed. It is no longer uncertain and indefinite. We can see it is coming to an end. That allows us to interpret the data differently and behave differently.

Even more interesting, the ability to interpret the data differently based on the new development of a vaccine relies on the individual’s ability to understand how a world that’s based on scientific discoveries really works. Our ideas, values and beliefs determine the context we experience from the data we sense.

Culture In Your Organization

How does all this now help you, directly? Consider that what we call character in a person we call culture in an organization. Both are central guides to behavior. Behavior is the set of actions we undertake when we interact with our environment. The interactions we have with our environment are responsible for the creation of some of the problems we face. They also provide solutions to problems we experience.

The litmus test of a successful culture (or even, a successful character) lies in three distinct elements:

• Change – Change is something we all experience whether we like it or not. When we are actively made to change, the degree of change we experience and the speed at which it happens determines how well it is managed and how much it will ‘stick’.
• Performance – Unless performance is linked to change and it is measured in direct connection to it the change we make is only an additional distraction to manage and an extra drain on resources. Again, whether we talk about our self and our need to become fitter, quit smoking and read more or we are talking about an organization that needs to become more efficient, agile and responsive the need to link every change we make to the performance related goals we have is key to making the change deliver.
• Commitment – Unless we can commit to the change we apply we are unlikely to stick to it. At the very first sign of adversity we shall lack the resilience necessary to stick with our ‘new’ behavior, tasks and routines as we shall revert to what we did before.

Culture is certainly a complex subject. Yet its components are not. It is created out of behavior and behavior is managed by a set of values, beliefs and ideas that determine how we define who we are, what we do and why.

I really hope this helps. ?