Weighing up your Culture – Where do you Start?

As a culture leader, you’ve embarked on a pretty complex undertaking to reconstruct or renew your culture – to curate the good aspects of the current culture you want to keep, and also graft on some new cultural shoots that will take it to a different and better place if you possibly can.

You’ve taken on the challenge of deliberately shaping the culture knowing that if you don’t create a culture by design, you’ll most likely inherit a culture by default and it may be one you don’t want either in terms of performance, behaviour, well-being or fit with your strategic directions.

1. Where to Start?

There’s hardly ever one ‘right-place’ to start. But big or small, any cultural renewal effort needs roadmaps. In our Leading Culture Clinic , I introduce people to 8 broad phases most culture change efforts tend to go through, based on my experience of working with culture change and renewal in many workplaces over the past twenty-five years.

No model ends up panning out exactly as you expected on-the-ground. It’s a bit of a bumpy road with lots of ups and downs, twists and turns.

The process of working with culture always involves unpredictability and calls for improvisation. Any culture change recipe you apply ‘cookbook-style’ is likely to not quite be your dish. So, see these stages as indicative.

• Starting with education and awareness-raising - what culture is, why it’s important and how to lead it - is always handy. Without this, we have trouble engaging with something we don’t really understand the true nature of.
• The other obvious place is dialogue and conversations to explore culture change prospects with senior leaders. Don’t expect them all to be on side though. Senior ranks have their fair share of cultural blockers, and some may be heavily invested in protecting the current culture.
• Another practical place to start is by linking strategy to culture and looking at the fit between them. Those senior leaders not interested in culture may suddenly grow more so, when they realise how much culture can affect the success and outcomes they depend on from strategy.

You might also run a collaborative ideas-exchange with various groups across your workplace to create a cultural manifesto – a short declaration celebrating strong points of your existing culture and proclaiming how you hope it will evolve in future. Cultural manifestos are meant to be public and popular documents – not a treatise – and have broad popular appeal.?

2. Scanning Culture

Another obvious place to start a culture change effort is to first find out what the current culture is like and what kind of shape it’s in before you begin to re-construct it. This is second in our 8 Phase Culture Roadmap - Scanning the Current Culture.

• A culture scan takes an imprint of the culture now. It’s a way to involve everyone assessing good aspects of the culture you want to keep and not-so-good parts to let go of or renovate.
• This phase often happens in conjunction with, or after Phase-1: Creating a Vision of the culture you want in future. This leads to spotlighting potential new guiding cultural principles…
• So, your scan should include seeing how current culture stacks up against preferred future culture. But a note of caution. You can’t just impose new culture principles no matter how beneficial they seem.
• Your new culture directions need to be collectively adopted over time and enjoy a groundswell of belief and acceptance. They can’t be mandated even though this routinely occurs. So, use your scan to explore support, to educate but not to dictate or sell.

Culture scans don’t always involve big, formal surveys.?A scan can also consist of running a series of culture conversations and dialogues with slice groups across the workplace to exchange ideas on major features, patterns, impressions and other characteristics of the culture – now and future.

Whatever the method, culture scans must use multiple reference sources. You can’t solely rely on your impressions, those of a senior executive team, a few people in HR, a consultant or frontline staff opinion either. It’s got to be a collective perspective combining and moderating many sources of feedback.

There’s also one other thing all scans should have in common. You have to engage and involve people who live and work in the culture to tell you what they think is really going on, and get their perspectives and experiences of what it’s like for them. The scan needs to give them a valid voice and they need to feel safe.

3. Scanning Commitment

A culture scan is a necessary, but by itself, insufficient step. Carrying out a culture scan to assess and understand patterns in the current culture won’t do or change anything by itself unless you’re willing to act on it. That’s my first tip. Only do culture scans or surveys if you plan to act on them. Otherwise, it’s a pointless tick-the-box exercise that takes you nowhere and wastes everyone’s time.

• Over-surveyed staff often cynically say that management’s doing “another one of those culture surveys”, muttering in the same breath, that “nothing ever seems to come out of them.”
• Often, they complain they don’t even get proper feedback on the results, get told how results are to be used or the reasons for running the survey in the first place! On top of that no action occurs.

Conducting a culture scan means you’re committing yourself to action of some kind. As soon as you do, the message you send to staff is that something’s afoot. Surveys raise various degrees of anxiety, cynicism, hope or expectation.

Not following through on culture scans dashes expectations, increases resistance and plays into the hands of the cynics who say you weren’t serious about culture change in the first place. So, unless you’re committed to action – better not to start.

4. Planning Scanning

To transport your workplace culture to a better place, you first need to get some sort of handle on what the current culture is like right now. Once that’s been done, you’ll gain insights into where cultural renewal or reconstruction efforts need to be concentrated.

But it doesn’t stop there. A culture scan can go further than that.

• Rather than just give you information on current culture, you can also use it to explore the kind of culture you aspire to – the vision of the culture you’d like to cultivate in future.
• The question to answer is: ?what cultural attributes, behaviours beliefs and guiding principles do we need to incorporate into a reconstituted culture that will better equip us to face the future and support the strategies we need to get there?

This diagram sets out a simple 4-step process I work on with senior leaders, culture action teams, or representative slice samples across the organisation to:

• Start sharing ideas about the vision of the culture you’d like to have.
• Decide what sort of things in the current culture you’d like to keep, strengthen or leave behind and let go of
• Identify kinds of behaviours that will produce and support the future culture you want and those that may block it.
• Specify what kind of core beliefs will help or hinder achieving your future cultural directions.

While you can and often need to identify fresh guiding principles you’d like to see added to the cultural mix in hope of renewing, enlivening and steering the culture on a different course to the one it’s on now, there are a few cautions to take in doing this.

• Senior leaders need to introduce any new cultural principles tentatively and exploratively rather than boldly proclaim and impose them. Test the waters.
• Relying on a culture scan as a means to announce new cultural principles, values or directions in a form of fait accompli, without consultation, can be seen as high-handed and seed insurrection.
• People may think what’s the use of responding to the survey when management have already made up their mind what they’re going to impose on the culture before they even hear our ideas. It can be a monumental piece of token consultation that leads to resistance or resigned compliance.

A scan can serve the purpose of getting people focussed on the culture, act as a spur to action or an initiator to the conversations that are needed – but not as the final word on diagnosing what’s going on in your culture, what to do about it or what new directions to take.

5. Culture Dimensions

All culture surveys are constructed around a number of key dimensions or attributes. These are:

• Characteristic or traits regarded as central in any culture that help define it – and there’s a confounding array of different culture-traits models that have proliferated round the globe.
• They can be used to describe what the culture is like now, and also what the culture aspires to become. In this sense, they are both measures, descriptors and can also be guiding principles.

Our general workplace culture scan for instance, uses CLEVER as an acronym to assess characteristics of constructive or dislocated cultures against 6 key dimensions that apply to any culture. As in the diagram below, these are:

1. Conversations and Collaboration: calibre of conversations we have in any workplace and how well we collaborate across teams, branches and functions tells us a lot about culture too.

2. Leadership Styles and Influence: how leaders behave, what they model and how people relate to their approaches. This includes trust, integrity, compassion and other qualities we expect of leaders and whether they live up to these.

3. Emotional tone: every culture develops its own distinctive emotional footprint – the type and frequency of various emotional states commonly generated and experienced in a culture and the positive or negative effect they have over time on the emotional tone and climate

4. Visions, values, directions: how clear and shared visions, directions and values are and how aligned people feel with them. This includes purpose, mission, strategy and the degree to which people believe in, support and act to follow these for success. ?

5. Environmental Adaptability: how well the culture fits us out to engage with and respond to change challenges. This includes how adaptive and flexible we are to unfolding trends, threats, crises and growth opportunities. Culturally, this also influences other states like resilience and well-being.

6. Relationships and Rapport: how respected we feel, how distant or close relations are, the degree of identity, ‘belongingness’ and team cohesion present and also whether we feel engaged, included and valued or marginalised, excluded and under-valued.

We’re confident these CLEVER Culture Scan dimensions yield very robust, useful and insightful data about any culture. But no-one can ever claim any particular culture model is going to tell you everything about a culture. So much of it is tacit and hidden.

6. Custom Scanning

No matter how appealing or masterful it may look, no ready-made, off-the-shelf culture scan is going to fit your context and find out everything you may need it to in your circumstances, unless you customise it – or even better create your own.

• We customise our CLEVER Dimensions to different cultural and business contexts by working with senior leaders and culture scan design groups to adapt modify or add elements, rather than adhere to standard templates.
• As part of customisation, we tailor questions to suit and reflect particular organisation contexts and cultural concerns, constructs or directions. For example, new guiding cultural principles like creating more compassionate or client-centred cultures, or ones that are more focused on success, well-being, resilience, connectivity, engagement or adaptability.

Here’s some of the customisation questions we work on together:

• What’s the intent of this culture scan – why are we doing it and what do we want it to do?
• How will we structure the scan and what are the best questions to ask and why those?
• Who completes the scan – random samples, cross sectional slices or the whole workforce?
• How do we make the scan comprehensible, relevant and engaging for a broad audience?
• How many questions should be in the scan and can people manage before they get scan-fever?
• Will the scan explore any particular cultural dimensions we’re interested in floating or promulgating if possible?
• Are there particular values or guiding cultural prinicples we want to build in?

Sometimes, I also recommend testing the culture scan with a representative pilot group before distributing it more widely, and always run briefing sessions either live or online, to launch and then explain the results.?These are backed up with a Cultural Imprints Report distributed to all respondents providing a summary of key results – themes, patterns and future cultural directions. ??

7. Confirmation Bias

As we’ve said, good culture scan models will be firmly evidence-and-research-based. Yet even then, while they may appear scientific and rigorous, in the end models are impressionistic, depending on what organisational leaders decide to confirm or look for in a culture survey and the different emotional perspectives respondents have of their personal experiences of?the culture.

One thing to take into account when you’re framing questions for culture scans or interpreting results, is what’s called conformation bias. It…

• Is the tendency to interpret the facts relating to a situation in ways that confirm our pre-formed conclusions, predictions or beliefs that tend to favour particular outcomes or findings we seek.
• Can result in ignoring information that does not fit our already made-up minds. It can amount to downplaying or overlooking facts that suggest a different conclusion to the one we want.

How does this apply to culture scans??There are several ways confirmation bias can creep in…

1. Avoiding bad news cultures. Many executive teams know culture is seen as a direct reflection on them. So, they have a vested interest in making sure the culture looks good - or at least not too bad. They don’t want to hear bad news about cultures they lead and often companies that specialise in culture surveys know that. It’s bad for business from both ends. And it can lead to cover-up.

2. Filtering questions. Executives or others collude with each other (often with unwitting confirmation bias) to restrict or edit what questions get asked in a culture survey to avoid any bad news stories, or sanitise and water down the results to make things look better than they actually are.

3. Seek confirmation, not disconfirmation of culture. Again, this is part of the ‘success’ cultures of many businesses where to keep up the fa?ade, you need to cover up the truth or continually put a positive spin on things and avoid exposing any of those dark or messy cultural corners.

4. Cover-up, deny or normalise a derelict culture - where the culture tries to conceal dysfunctional and troubling elements - unethical practices, lack of care for customers, practices that are caustic, destructive, corrupt or unsafe. The aim is to somehow normalise these and tell everyone it's all OK!

Some senior executives want to filter culture scan questions before they agree to run it. They do this under many guises – being selective about what goes out to their people, not wanting to upset the delicate culture balance by soliciting feedback that upsets things - but this often amounts to a form of censorship with senior leaders deleting or diluting questions they feel may yield responses that will reflect unfavourably on their organisation.

Cultural regeneration has to be grounded in a clear vision and purpose people want to follow because they believe in it – not because they are told to. It also needs to be aligned carefully with strategy and the business performance you want as well as the well-being and relational culture most staff value.

Culture Scans should give your people a voice – the opportunity to express their admiration, misgivings, hopes and aspirations about the current culture, and what they want it to be like in the future – whether that involves a major overhaul or a series of sight adjustments. ?

In the end, culture can’t be dictated top-down by a few. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” You can demand compliance, but you can’t demand optimism, trust, caring, conviction, or creativity.

Till next time...

For more than 20 years, Bill Cropper, founder of The Change Forum , has helped senior executives, leaders, project groups and teams in all sorts of work settings, revitalise and renovate their cultures.

Why not start a conversation with Bill about what we can do to collaborate with you on your cultural revitalisation efforts.

• Download The Change Forum’s Culture Change Services Guide for an overview of ways we can help with culture revitalisation in your organisation.
• If you’d like to purchase a copy of our full Culture Change Guide and Toolkit, please email or use our on-line contact form.
• Read more on our Leading Culture program live on location or live on-line
• Contact us anytime to enquire about in-house programs, individual coaching or our general consulting services

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