Ignore Culture at Your Peril

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Edgar Schein, MIT Professor of Management and author of Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View, contends that many of the problems confronting leaders can be traced to their inability to analyze and evaluate organizational cultures.  Attempts to create a new vision, or make wholesale organizational changes, fail because they run counter to the culture.  Major changes must at least address culture, and they may even require work to change the culture.

What is culture?  My favorite definition: it is the presuppositions that make behavior acceptable.  Gordon Gecko said "Greed is good."  So any behavior that allowed him to make money was OK.  The simplicity of this definition is a good foundation for analysis.  To me culture is not icons, the furniture, artifacts or values.  The physical items indicate the culture.  And values certainly drive the presuppositions that make the culture.  Of course, understanding values and artifacts is needed to grasp the culture.

Thankfully this topic has been well explored in the organizational context over the last decade.  This of course was possible because the broader topic of culture has been a discipline of anthropologists for hundreds of years.  There are materials and tools.   And of course consultants.

Before searching out consultants, do your research.  Washington State University has a good page on the topic.  The Free Management Library is also an excellent resource.


Key points to remember:

1. You cannot change the culture unless you know what it is and how it got that way.
2. Fix problems, not blame.  This principle should be applied in all aspects of the organization (part of the culture).  Here it allows total honesty when analyzing culture.
3. Once you understand the current culture, decide what culture makes sense given your business, market, and stakeholders.
4. Aggressively align departments, people and processes with the new culture and values.
5. As quality and process improvement, culture is an ongoing concern.  Don't set it and forget it.