The Ps of Organisational Culture

My way of defining organisational culture is to state it as the distinguishing attributes of a group. These are the qualities of the organisation. The cliché "culture eats strategy for breakfast" spells the need to watch the elements that determine it. I identify the elements as the 5 Ps of Culture:

Personalities: organisational culture is influence by the personalities of the individual that lead them. There is no blaming third parties or former leaders. Once you take charge, people look up to you. They are trying to conform and will act according to what you allow or disallow. Personality is "communicated" and non-verbally most of the time.

Politics: In organisations, politics mostly revolves around efforts to win the support of leaders. In a sense, those who are liked the most get the most latitude. Latitude translates to easier accomplishment of goals or the forgiveness for non-achievement. Power-play moves breed groups, cliques and "campaign" action and these are staples of culture-formation.

Policies: The culture of well-established organisations are bounded by their written rules. Start-ups and organisations that are still growing or those with poor leadership settle for behaviour trends from personal conceptualisations of what policies ought to be. They are unbounded at first and then, without policies, accepted as precedent. Precedents are like case-law. They dictate practice where written rules do not exist. All organisations have rules, written or unwritten. The worry should be on weak rules.

Past: That organisations follow precedent means past experiences can influence current practice. These may have been positive or negative experiences. A learning organisation encodes good lessons into practices and guards the organisation around bad experiences. This is mostly through story-telling, repositories or, in formal set-ups, reviews of policies from learning extracted from incidents.

Pressure: The influence of benchmarked organisations or suppliers and customers are sound influencers of culture. Good practices must be emulated and the importation of costly practices identified and stopped. An organisation must have a sensitive skin: to allow in what is positive but to repel the adverse. These practices may also be brought in by new employees keen to make a difference. Not every ship that comes to your harbour bears friendly-cargo!