Culture Shaping

? John Brown, MA, MSc, Cambio Group, LLC

The term “organizational culture” refers to the premises, values, beliefs and behaviors that make up an organization’s collective behavior.?Every year, US companies spend upwards of $160 billion dollars on organizational development and training[1] , and every year, hundreds of new books are published, each claiming a better mousetrap for shaping company culture.?It’s a big business with big players, and a big challenge for CEOs. As someone who makes a living in the organizational consulting business, I’m confronted with this wherever I go.?Every consulting firm has an angle that promises impressive results, and typically carries equivalent price tags.?A company of 1000 employees can easily spend north of $1M on broad “culture building” initiatives, but measurable return on investment remains elusive.?

Dr. John Traphagan, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of Texas at Austin, traces the examination of “culture” back to 19th century social anthropologists and discusses how the definitions of culture haven’t changed much since then: “Culture is the values, practices, beliefs, etc. of a group of people. In other words, culture is everything; which basically means it’s nothing from an analytical perspective.[2] ”?To be able to analyze and shape culture then, some operational definitions are in order.?In this article, I’ll share some insights on how to approach organizational culture in ways that are readily applicable to all kinds of workplaces and which get results.?There are three distinct cultural phenomena happening in any organization:?The aspirational culture, the manifest culture, and the latent culture.

Aspirational culture refers to the culture that organizational leadership aspires to; it is the intentional definition of how that organization behaves in its “best” or “ideal” way.?Good companies will invest some significant time and effort in defining their aspirational culture, and that’s the right place to start.?Aspirational culture efforts are often closely tied to branding and communication, a double-edge sword because while it communicates what you hope for, it’s branded qualities allow people to dismiss it when it doesn’t fit with the manifest culture.

Manifest culture is the culture that is happening in any given workplace.?It’s an entirely local phenomenon, a product of the people-management skills of the direct supervisors and leaders of a particular group.?Manifest culture is the sweet spot for training efforts at culture-shaping.?By training those people who directly supervise teams, they in turn will take away new skills and try them out among their direct reports. By identifying the group of people who are tasked with managing others and building a training program around them, efforts at shaping culture will reverberate through a much larger group.?From a tactical standpoint, I will often ask HR leaders to make a list of who conducts the face-to-face performance reviews.?They can be a highly disparate group, and that’s a critical challenge.?There may be no rhyme or reason to their titles, and they are often siloed according to their tasks or technical expertise, with little or no opportunity to share skills and strategies with one another.?Forming a training cohort focused on this group of direct supervisors and investing in culture-shaping efforts here will reap larger rewards because they will build more coherent and effective strategies around the leadership of people.

Latent culture refers to the organizational dynamics that are not readily apparent and often underground.?There are two subtypes of latent culture; nurturing and toxic.?Nurturing latent culture is expressed through those individuals who don’t look for the limelight, are not direct supervisors, or are not in leadership roles.?Their good will, steady efforts, or supportiveness of their peers often goes unrecognized, undeveloped or underutilized.?Nurturing latent culture is a second sweet spot for culture-shaping.?Efforts to recognize and empower these people on a team will bring lasting rewards.

Woe be to the executive who ignores toxic latent culture, and woe be to the business unit whose leader is a protagonist in this group.?These are the people who poison the well through passive aggression, power-brokering, underhanded or misleading communication, egocentrism, or the infinite other ways that we are all too familiar with.?When a leader is part of this toxic cultural subgroup, the entire business unit will become a manifestation of peoples’ efforts to avoid, mitigate or cope, and the manifest culture will be indistinguishable from a dysfunctional family, with secrets, forbidden topics, and unholy alliances. Culture shaping efforts at the toxic level are costly and often worthless.??When toxic people ascend to leadership roles, they are often products of multi-generational family businesses or individuals with good ideas who have been venture-capitalized into leading teams for which they are ill-prepared. Toxic latent culture is seeded by the ubiquitous frustrations of working for ineffective or disempowered managers and watered by water-cooler gossip.?The ill-conceived “open” office systems of the 90’s and early 2000’s were in part, efforts to diminish the private, closed-door environments that toxic culture thrives in.?But toxic employees are like mushrooms; they may whither in the light, but their spores will find whatever dark corners there are in which to grow.?All too often, good managers and leaders invest countless hours and dollars in trying to work with toxic employees. Their error is not in the effort, rather it is in the miscalculation of the cost-benefit ratio.?We tend to underestimate the cost of a toxic employee because it is not easily quantified, and observed only through the employee who dares speak up.?Like schoolyard bullies, toxic employees wear different masks, and when the boss is in the room, they are well-practiced at grasping their pearls and exclaiming “moi?”?This is not the place to invest your development efforts, rather, it is the place to accurately analyze your sunk costs and isolate your toxic actors.?

Organizational development and culture shaping efforts start with an analysis of alignment:?To what degree are the aspirational, manifest, and latent cultures aligned??If there has not been an effort to define the aspirational culture, that’s where you start, because it becomes your benchmark for alignment.?Aspirational culture is necessary, but irrelevant unless it shapes the manifest and prosecutes the toxic.?By itself, it is an insufficient step in culture shaping.?The cost of attending to aspirational culture more than manifest culture comes in the form of the dissonance that people experience when the manifest culture is not aligned with the aspirations.?

Data driven leaders will often look to employee engagement surveys to try and parse out what should be done to shape culture, and this is where the big consulting organizations have placed their bets.?The best among them will use engagement data to prescribe training efforts aimed at the broad treatment of areas where employees are identifying cultural weaknesses.?This quickly becomes a costly investment.?A more tactical approach, and one that works most efficiently in culture-shaping, is to identify the people managers, and double-down on training efforts with them.?It’s a simple but logical approach:?If your front-line leaders are learning and applying good, evidence-based people management strategies, focused on their teams, the manifest culture will start looking more like the aspirational culture. That alignment will show in less-immediate but highly valuable “lagging” indicators like growth and retention.

In larger organizations, particularly those whose growth has occurred through mergers and acquisitions, these frontline leaders are hard to identify and isolated from one other because of tasks, geography, or unfamiliar titles.?By identifying them through the common factor of number of direct reports, you bring them together by their common culture-shaping potential.?They find an affinity of purpose and become a natural guild of people-managers, the sweet spot of culture-shaping efforts.???

Defining your culture-shaping efforts should begin with defining your aspirational culture, identifying and investing in training the people-leaders of your manifest culture, enriching and empowering the latent nurturers and isolating the toxic players.?Culture is a result of how we treat one another.?The idea is not to invent it, since a culture is ever already there, but to find the most effective and efficient points to bend the curve.???

[1] https://www.td.org/Publications/Blogs/ATD-Blog/2013/12/ASTD-Releases-2013-State-of-the-Industry-Report

[2] https://hbr.org/2015/04/why-company-culture-is-a-misleading-term