Who sets Organizational Culture?

NB: I had made an earlier post on this topic I decided to make some modifications to it based on feedback. Thank you.

Professor Geert Hofstede, one of the foremost authorities on culture defines culture as "the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category from others". I would like to define culture as basically what makes an organization unique. This includes the behaviors, policies, philosophies, how decisions are made and generally “how things are done here”. This uniqueness is what determines whether an organization will succeed or not in the marketplace.?

But who creates organizational culture?

Some years ago, I was part of a team whose responsibility was to maintain the information assets of a large multinational organization. This team was led by an intelligent, mid-career professional called David (not his real name), David had all the experience and the skills to lead the team and was on the fast lane of his career growth but the team he led were defensive, viewed colleagues as competitors, were political and never really took ownership of their own work. After a while, David was replaced with Jeff (also not real name) from another team. In a few months, there were noticeable changes in the team's behavior. Team members worked together and saw that they were collectively responsible for the success of any project, collaboration was far better, and general productivity increased.

From this experience of mine, it became obvious that leaders play a major role in creating and maintaining organizational culture and that's primarily because:

• They determine what is rewarded and what gets punished. What gets rewarded or overlooked will become the order of the day.
• They represent what success "looks like" within an organization and therefore their followers tend to imitate their behaviors.
• Employees tend to hold their leaders in high esteem. Although this may vary from country to country (more on this later).
• Leaders consciously or unconsciously act as advocates of organizational culture. Leaders even when they are not conscious of it, promote the prevailing organizational culture.
• Cultural changes don’t take hold until leaders buy into it. A cultural change may start from anywhere within the organization but until the leaders buy into it, it rarely becomes enshrined in the organization.

Leaders that understand their role in setting their organization's culture hold themselves accountable for the behaviors that dominate within their teams even when the team is large. For example, I had the privilege of working with a manager at the time who was new to his role, but he was very aware of the importance of setting the right culture within his team. ithin a few months he made significant changes to how the team operated and he also modeled it. In this time, his team knew what was acceptable and what was not in very clear terms. Not only did he communicate his expectations and held his team accountable for meeting them and also modeling what he wanted, he was also proactive in engaging all his team members to find out if there were barriers they were experiencing in meeting the expectations. As expected, the impact of his actions were huge and within a year, a new culture was in place within his team. For example, prior to the time he became the manager of the team, his team members were only focused on one kind of tasks which made it difficult for members of a unit to take up tasks in other units even when there were clear overlaps. This led to a lot of siloed decision-making and thinking. When he became the manager, he wanted every member of the team to have expertise across the different areas of what the team does, thereby leveling the silos he observed. He did this by first using the group meetings to promote his thought and listened to his team members feedback and that, he initiated a cross-training programme where experts in one subject area trained others in other areas and after the training, he reassigned some team members to different units for a limited time. These activities achieved the objective and resulted in a much less siloed organization. A note of caution here though; this worked because of the nature of his team, they were all information management experts. In a team with a wide set of specializations, this might not work or should be done with care.?

One of the lessons I learnt from? Jeff was that he intentionally promoted open conversations within his team. Issues are openly discussed and?

Steve Jobs once mentioned that in the early days of Apple, they didn't talk much about culture, they just wanted to build a business they would be glad to work in but they started getting the return on culture when they became deliberate about it. By writing their perspectives about the culture they wished for down, debating about it and iterating about it over and over again, they found a new deepened understanding of what it truly was that they wanted to create when thinking of their company culture.This underlines the fact that no organization reaps the benefits of culture until its leaders become deliberate about it.

As much as many studies support the assertion that leaders set the culture of their organization, it's quite unusual to see a leader intentionally craft the culture of his/her team. What tends to happen is that organizational leaders tend to take the attitude "if it's not broken why try to fix it", when it comes to culture partly because it is usually hard to tackle culture-related issues especially in large organizations and also because there is a lot of work that goes into setting a culture for an already existing and seemingly successful organization. For example, it would take a leader with the boldness of Jack Welch to confront and turn around the culture of General Electric (GE) in the 80s because prior to that, GE had tripled in growth between 1971 and 1981 and asking for change at that scale would be painful (and it was painful) even though there were clear signs something was not working right. Most leaders defer to their team on culture and this invariably leads to a disaster. Let me be clear here, everyone in an organization is responsible for maintaining the culture of the organization. That's why there are performance reviews, performance reviews should help members of the organization to keep its culture in view. However, leaders are to be held accountable for the culture of their organization. When leaders fail to set the organizational culture or there is a disagreement on what kind of culture the organization should have, organizational lethargy may set in and overall productivity will suffer.?

As a leader or change agent, is your culture supporting or hindering the achievement of your organizational goals? If it is hindering your organizational goals, what are you going to do about it?