Organizational Culture

It's important, but can it be changed?

Culture has been likened to the air we breathe and at times it certainly seems elusive to capture. We recognize its importance to organizational success as it affects things such as employee motivation, retention, innovation, acquisition integration, policy implementation, talent selection and more. What kind of leadership can be exercised is prescribed by organizational culture; so are the kinds of rewards that align with expected behavior. Organizational culture can also be a malevolent force, encouraging acting out, shirking responsibility, backstabbing, conflict, and dishonesty.

So, culture matters; but what is it and how can it be shaped as a force for good versus evil? I’ve never been happy with Edgar Schein’s popular definition of organizational culture as existing at three levels; the outward artifacts we see, such as the art on the walls or the location of executive offices; the behaviors we witness, which tell us something about what people believe are the acceptable and unacceptable things to do; and the underlying values, which are often hidden from view and emanate from the hints offered by leaders but also the long history of stories people tell. Schein’s description isn’t wrong, it’s just not very useful in practice. The deep values are what drive the most important choices people make about their behavior but the art on the walls is what is easy to change. Changing values is hard; that’s why simply putting up a poster with a list of values that the company ascribes to doesn’t have much impact after a day or two; the poster becomes another piece of art on the wall. Warner Burke says, “You don’t change culture by changing culture,” meaning that you can’t simply instruct people to change their deeply held values and beliefs. People have to live through experiences that lead them to make conscious choices to change and then adapt to a new way of thinking and being over a period of time. A change in the art displayed can signal a desire to create a new culture but actually transitioning to a new culture takes more – and sometimes, depending on the values involved and how deeply they are held – a lot more.

I like to think of organizational culture more like DNA. There are strands of culture, each pertaining to different aspects of organizational behavior. Some strands have to do with what we should expect from leaders, and others have to do with how hard we should work, or whether we should show up in the office on weekends. There are perhaps hundreds of these strands, and like DNA, their individual characteristics combine together to produce a unique entity. For us, it’s who we are as a person; for an organization, it’s the organization’s unique culture.

The reason I like to think about culture this way is that it prevents us from imagining that there are only a few values that if changed, would create a totally more positive culture tomorrow than the one we have today. If we can fit a list of values on a poster, we can be pretty certain the list will at best be a tiny fraction of the values and beliefs that hold the current culture in place. On the plus side, because the strands of DNA culture are interconnected, if we change the values listed we will see some changes in culture. Still, we shouldn’t expect things to be radically different. It took a long time to build the DNA we have, and it will take a long time and directed effort to reshape it. That is, unless we are hit by a meteor.

The equivalent of being hit by a meteor is being acquired by a larger organization with its own culture and way of doing things. The DNA of the acquiring organization is both different and comprehensive; it specifies everything needed to make the acquiring organization the unique entity it is. As members of the acquired organization, we have a choice; we either adopt the DNA of the acquirer, or we are “rejected”. We quickly learn everything there is to know about surviving in the new organizational culture: when to eat lunch, who to get to know, how to get promoted, what they do to satisfy their customers, and more. We are immersed in a sea of new DNA strands that we bump into and learn about every day and are reminded, sometimes abruptly, by members of the acquiring organization just what is expected. Because we are interested in surviving and perhaps even someday thriving in our new environment, we pay attention to the subtle as well as the more direct messages we are receiving. We notice the art on the walls and ask people around us what it means and why it was chosen. We observe closely the behaviors of our peers and dress as they do, engage during meetings in the ways they engage, leave work just slightly later than they do, and talk sports even though we never used to before we were acquired. Within a few months, we are virtually indistinguishable from our new hosts and if a visitor were to arrive, they would have to ask whether we were originally from the parent company or the acquisition.

Now contrast that experience of being acquired to culture change efforts involving posters with a few values on them being hung in prominent places. If the posters are all that is done, they will soon be ignored, fading from consciousness into the background of other artwork on the walls. If the posters are supplemented by workshops in which the values are discussed, we may remember them a bit longer but still be confused about their meaning or exactly what behavior they call for on our part. If the values are modeled by leaders and rewards are attached to them, we are more likely to adopt a few new habits in order to conform with expectations. Nevertheless, in a thousand other important and less important ways, we are still preserving the old DNA. The culture is still the old culture, with a few new strands incorporated.

When the global bank ING, headquartered in the Netherlands, wanted to change the way their organization operated including the bank’s culture, they required everyone to reapply for a job. This was a way of signaling that the old culture was to be left behind and a new culture was to be discovered. Offices were redesigned so that when people entered the buildings, they felt they were in a different place than the one they had worked in before. Reporting relationships were changed, which act as a powerful orienting device when it comes to understanding how one is supposed to behave. New processes were adopted, so people had to relearn how to do their work. Even with all that, some of the bank’s proud heritage was preserved; not all the stands of culture DNA were replaced. Enough was done to drive home the message that the bank was about to enter a different era of competition that people took notice and started to pay attention to what they needed to learn. It was almost like the bank was acquired by a new entity, only the entity was itself.

I think that’s how we need to conceive of organizational culture change. Anything less makes for interesting artwork but not much more.