The Culture of Indifference

Over the past few weeks I have written a series of articles on corporate culture. Based on my experiences, I have categorized cultures into four groups. Red Culture is where everyone cares.  In Pink Culture, everyone pretends to care.  Black Culture is where everyone hates each other, and in Blue Culture nobody cares.

Blue Culture can be the most difficult to change, because, well, nobody cares!  Blue Culture tends to foster a feeling that people have been institutionalized. There are manuals and work instructions and rules and regulations. Recognition is formalized and if there is performance feedback, it is an administrative process and not a development process. Blue Cultures are populated with mediocrity. Processes are rigid. Customers must conform to more elaborate systems of guidelines and rules. People work in Blue Cultures because they are risk averse. In Blue Cultures, people can be average and get by. They don’t have to flex skills or invest in personal development, because their job will be the same five years from now as it was five years ago.

The United States Postal Service and many government organizations are examples of Blue Culture. Acquiring a driver’s license today is not that much different than it was forty years ago. There are paper forms and no on-line data entry. The written test measures what you can memorize and not your competency. The driving portion is human delivered and discretionary.  Often, the people that work at the driver’s license bureau are characterized as not dynamic nor energetic. In some areas of the country there are services that will renew driver’s licenses and registrations for a fee because the customer base finds the process so abhorrent.

In the end, does the driver’s license bureau measure competency? No! Try driving around the parking lot of a shopping center in Florida and you will know what I mean. Does the department of motor vehicles do a good job licensing qualified drivers and vehicles? How many people do you know have been hit by uninsured drivers? How is it possible that one can own a car and not have it insured?

And yet when a government agency advertises for a job, people line up. Why? Because those people want the mediocrity of Blue Culture.

Changing Blue Culture is challenging because it is probable that many nice people who have little or no motivation need to leave the organization. It is distressing to tell a nice person that they are not getting the job done properly, especially if previously acceptable low standards are changing to new higher standards. Many people will assert that they are not being treated fairly. 

Because of such difficulty, organizations rarely emerge from Blue Culture. They most often die of old age, diseased from a lack of vitality and exercise.

Whereas fixing most cultures is a colonization process, fixing the Blue Culture is more of a frontal assault. The process begins with defining accountability and creating a means to measure performance. At first there will be aspects of unconscious incompetence when looking at key performance indicators (KPIs). Think of it as “We don’t know what we didn’t know”. You won’t know how bad those numbers are because no one has ever measured anything in Blue Culture.

In addition to accountability, you will need a strong HR function because as you start to impose accountability, comfortably numb blue people will start to complain as expectations of performance are layered on. They will feel picked on. It is critical that accountability is imposed fairly and equitably and you will want to pay extra attention to protected classes. You will need to train managers carefully.

Managers who are not signed on for the heavy lifting of imposing accountability will leave. As you back fill with the right people, many of the individual contributors will leave. But surprisingly, some will stay. They will start to see the “flywheel of success” as teams and individuals become more engaged, and the perceived risk of exiting the organization and changing careers or employers, might be deemed less risky than staying and sitting the storm out.

Over time as performance improves and is recognized, the culture will start to improve. There may be a middle period where tactical managers with prowess in accountability and direction have to be re-sensitized to learn how to delegate and build leaders. The organization will need to loosen up and gain greater flexibility and self-direction. Lots of those old manuals and regulations will need to be thrown out.

It will take some doing, but you can move a Blue Culture, where nobody cares, to a Red Culture, where everyone cares. It’s just a lot harder than you think.