Ignore Culture. Focus on Behaviors!

I had a fascinating discussion with a VP of a national healthcare organization recently on the topic of shaping their culture to become more agile, efficient and nimble. The organization is going through massive change and she stated that an “old” culture is holding them back. She was surprised, (and pushed back at me), when I suggested she forget about culture – it’s too nebulous for most leaders and employees to get their heads around, and culture takes too long to change. If you have a problem now, focus on specific behaviors that are needed to get a new strategy implemented and new work done.

Be cautious of only developing high-level organizational values (at least in isolation)

Organizational leaders who identify the need to change or shape their organization’s culture often don’t know where to begin or how to go about it. Often, consulting groups are engaged who then implement extensive (and expensive) surveys, assessments and develop detailed culture models and analysis. A frequent outcome is a huge amount of data and a new set of organizational values, with extensive communications and training programs to all employees. Having been involved with a number of these types of initiatives in large organizations, my view is that these kinds of high-level programs have little or no impact on culture and company performance. The reason is that these initiatives produce outcomes that are too high-level and vague to be meaningful to most employees, and are too general to be pertinent to the day to day work of different functional units perform.

A market research firm example

My work with a marketing research organization describes this well. Their corporate office was attempting to develop a faster and more collaborative dimension to their culture, and had developed high level values espousing speed and collaboration. These values were extensively communicated throughout the organization. But, nothing happened. I conducted some analysis at business unit level, and a senior executive described how “moving faster” felt to her like conducting superficial research, and passing on data that was poorly vetted. With her bias towards accuracy and thoroughness, this approach of “speed” felt unprofessional. I suggested collaborating with her organization’s customers, and finding out what would be acceptable to them: These customers wanted both quicker turn-around of data, but also wanted thorough and accurate data. The outcome of this collaboration was a new mindset agreed on by both the research firm and the clients of “good enough” versus “perfection” and “fast updates” as new research produced new insights. Most importantly, I worked with them to define new mindsets which we expanded into specific and observable behaviors. For example, previously, if a client has requested research data in sixty days, the response would have been “sorry, that timelines will produce incomplete data, you’ll have to wait double that” to “we can likely get you imperfect data in that timeline, but if you work closely with us, we can iterate and update quickly”. I worked with team managers to develop sets of work-specific behaviors within their various market research teams, and in some cases coached leaders and managers on how to enact these behaviors on a day to day basis (using a 5 step process).

Punchline

I am not suggesting that developing corporate level values is a waste of time. Not at all. What I am saying is that these high-level values MUST be defined in terms of specific and unique behaviors for the day to day work done by each business unit, function or team to be meaningful and practical.The punchline is that organizations that develop high-level cultural values that are not translated into work-specific behaviors throughout the organization will achieve little if any cultural change.