Guessing versus Knowing

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My husband is from Colorado and loves to backpack through the Rocky Mountains. With 58 “Fourteeners,” or mountains that are taller than 14,000 feet (4267 meters) in his home state alone, there are plenty of challenges for him. And just like anyone who has ever spent time in the mountains at high altitude, he knows that the risks are great. Even on a beautiful summer day you can’t discount the possibility of a pop-up snowstorm. There may be a cloudless blue sky above you when you set out in the morning that turns into a raging rain storm and strands you on the mountain just a couple of hours later. For someone who has not grown up in the mountains, it can be difficult to know how to plan for a trip at high altitude. Once, he and his friends were camping and saw that a car from Kansas was parked between a stream and the mountain. Torrential rains erupted across the mountain range, swelling the stream and making it impassable. When the car owner contacted the park ranger and asked when it would be possible to retrieve the car, he was told that he would have to wait for the snow to melt in the spring (it was September). Guessing, not knowing, cost this person their car for half a year. The stakes are high. And while it’s impossible to know exactly what will happen, careful planning and knowledge of the terrain are crucial for success. Experienced climbers measure out each ounce of equipment and carefully consider the value of each item they will carry. They examine each item’s worth against the weight it will cost them to carry it. They know that guessing doesn’t cut it, they need to know what they are up against. Otherwise, the risk of failure is too great.

The parallel here with the merger and acquisition process is evident: the risk is high. You need to know where you are and where you want to go. And guessing isn’t good enough. While many groups offer culture consulting, not all measure where you are and can provide you with a strategic plan for how to get where you want to go. 

When we talk about culture consulting at Hofstede Insights, we look at three primary areas. One is national culture, which most of the articles in this series have focused on to date. The second is organizational culture and the third is consumer culture. We have expert analytics to measure all three areas.

National culture, as I have explained in past articles, is the culture in which a person grows up. Between the influences of parents, teachers, and friends, a set of values is established and reinforced and is more or less fixed by puberty. These values determine to a large extent our gut reactions to things like whether what someone says is polite or impolite, how much privacy a person should have, and whether we should be restrained and oriented towards our obligations or free to indulge in the good things of life. When you enter the international business world, you begin to notice differences. Some don’t come as a surprise (non-native English speakers often speak with an accent, those from other places may dress differently than you do, etc.), but others may shock us greatly. I was recently working with a client for whom the equitable treatment of each individual is a high priority. For those of you reading this who grew up in the United States, I would venture that you agree with that position. So when I told him that roughly 85% of the world’s population does not share that value, it came as a shock. It was extremely hard for him to conceive that someone could think that it’s okay for people to have different rights to power and privilege. If you are an employer, you cannot change the national culture of your employees. You can’t make a Russian into a German, you can’t make a Nigerian into an American (and you shouldn’t try). Your employees come to you with a fixed set of values as immutable as the values you hold yourself. There are ways to manage these differences, as we have seen in past articles, but there is no changing the core values of another person.

Organizational culture, the area we will be focusing on in the next several articles, is a different story. All organizations have a culture—either intentionally or by default—that distinguishes them from others. Organizational cultures, however, unlike national cultures, can be changed. There are many organizational change management entities with fantastic ideas and inspirational goals for your organization, but not all are equal. We take a different approach from most: we insist that you measure where you are before you begin. After all, no one approach works for every sector nor for every business within a sector, so how can you reasonably go forward if you don’t know what your starting point is?

As with our national culture database and analytics, we approach Organizational Culture through the lens of values. Those values differ from national culture values. We again have six areas of focus: 

1. Organizational effectiveness: Should you be more means-oriented (the how) or goal-oriented (the what)? 
2. Customer orientation: Should you be more internally driven (“we know what is best for the customer) or more externally driven (“the customer is king”)? 
3. Control: Should you be flexible and informal at work or should you maintain a lot of control and discipline over people and procedures?
4. Focus: Should the focus be on the local unit or the profession itself?
5. Approachability: Should you have an open or a closed system? Should there be a greater concern for employee welfare or should employees be left to “sink or swim”?
6. Management Philosophy: Should the company’s managers be employee-oriented or work-oriented?

There is no “ideal” culture within Organizational Culture just as there is no “ideal” National Culture. There are simply cultures that promote your business’s strategy and development and those that hinder it. So our process begins with measurement. We send a survey to a cross-section of employees from your business to determine where you are (the survey generates data points along scales from 1-100). We call this your “actual culture.” We then sit down with key decision makers and influencers and discuss what the optimal culture should be (generating numbers along the same scales). The strength of our approach lies in the gap analysis – how far is your optimal culture from your actual culture? Quite often we find that even companies that are in periods of chaos are aligned along one or more of the scales. As we review the gaps, we are able to assist decision makers with where their efforts should go. Are your optimal scores and your actual scores in alignment on Control? Then let’s not focus energy—or financial resources—in that area. Are there areas where you need to move the needle? We can provide you with ideas for both quick wins as well as long-term shifts to get where you want to be. As one of my colleagues likes to put it, “we go in surgically.” 

Is your current company culture hindering you as you try to reach your goals? Don’t guess where you should make changes: let us help you measure and know. Then go in surgically and fix what’s broken without spending money on what’s working well. Email us at [email protected] to schedule a complimentary needs analysis call.