Positively impacting society on a global scale through culture awareness, education and action.

As a supervisor or mid-level manager in a global company, you may not have the power to shape the entire culture, but you do have the power to shape culture in your department, local office, or workplace. It is not a question of whether or not you shape culture, but whether you shape culture consciously or unconsciously. The way you speak, the language you use, and the behaviors you exhibit influence the culture whether you are aware of it or not. When obvious signs emerge that indicate workplace drama, such as absenteeism, turnover, negativity or low morale, the leader can start to shift culture by changing language and behaviors. Here are some snapshots along with the behavior and a communication example to help you shape culture and improve business results.

What are your beliefs about organizational culture? Some of your beliefs might inhibit your willingness and ability to proactively improve the quality of your work culture.

New clients ask me very similar questions when I start guiding them along the path to a powerful, positive, productive culture. Some of your beliefs might be challenged by my answers! Here are those questions and my responses.

Everyone in the workplace knows that the bottom line matters, and that without a healthy bottom line, jobs are at risk. Everyone also knows that customer satisfaction matters, since without it there is no healthy bottom line. And everyone knows that quality of products/services matters, because without it the customers won’t be satisfied. And more often than not, this is where the conversation stops.

Professor Edgar Schein reiterated the essence of culture’s cerebral nature at the 1^st Ultimate Culture Conference in Chicago, hosted by Human Synergistics last fall when he reminded the attendees of the erroneous tendencies of many professionals who approach culture interventions as a quick fix. Dr. Schein accurately opined on the need for culture and change consultants to fully understand as well as appreciate the intrinsic complexities involved in cultural transformational engagements. For to attempt to change an organization’s culture is to attempt an arduous task. To attempt to change culture, if at all possible, must be with extreme caution, consideration, and patience because culture exists on two planes: the simpler and easier is the visible, peripheral stuff ; while the harder is that which lies deeply within and referred to as the skeleton by Dr. Schein.

Collaboration is the buzz word of the 21^st century and for good reason. Today employees work on all kinds of teams and cross functional groups to help firms remain agile and productive in response to market change and global business complexity. This basic fact of work-life places the necessity to build a culture of collaboration at the forefront of work.

What’s your perspective on corporate values? Are they silly, meaningless words that have to be invented to complete a vision, mission and values trio? Or are values a competitive edge that helps attract and retain the right people for your organization?

“Our people are our greatest asset” has been uttered by many CEOs for a long time. However, most of them don’t focus enough on employees’ experience because they are too busy setting their sights and business targets on improving the customers’ experience. 

There is an up and coming leader in a global IT firm, Ray, who is known as the smartest guy in the room. He has been a top performer for years, is well known for his executive briefings of customers, and his solid strategic sense. In fact, he’s so smart that whenever he goes into a meeting with colleagues, everyone waits for him to weigh in on the issue of the day, since there’s no point in having a different view. You’re most likely going to be made wrong. He also has the ear of the Senior Vice President, so Ray speaks with power as well as smarts.

In an earlier post, ‘Culture for the age of ideas’, we argued that the culture of many organisations is still unthinkingly based on the old industrial-era mindset of scientific management and command and control. We suggested that there are a number of persistent organizational behaviors that have their origins in this outmoded culture that are now actively preventing the things that modern organisations know they most need: employee engagement, commitment and creativity, for example. This idea was fully explored in our book. My Steam Engine Is Broken: Taking the organization from the industrial era to the age of ideas.

If an organization wishes to inspire and sustain innovation, a culture of innovation is required. And while there are many variations and hybrids within innovation cultures, the basic components remain constant. Of course, this does not mean that innovation can’t survive in a non-innovation culture; it just faces much longer survival odds and its success will likely be despite the organization’s culture and not because of it.

One of the greatest challenges our times is the deliberate change of behaviors, particularly when the behaviors of a larger group of people are at stake. Most people know how challenging it already is to change a simple operational process. Now, when it comes to behavior, we touch the most complicated thing in the world—human beings. There’s nothing more complex, capable and creative, but also odd and cruel than us out there.

What Steve Jobs understood, that many others do not, is that it takes much more effort to achieve simplicity than it does to achieve complexity. Everything naturally expands towards the complex, unless very tightly driven the other way, and cultures are no different.

How often have you heard somebody talk about the urgent need to change the culture? They want to make it world-class. To dispense with all the nonsense and negativity that annoys employees and stops good intentions from growing into progress. To bring about an entirely different approach, starting immediately. These culture critiques are as common as complaints about the weather — and about as effective. How frequently have you seen high-minded aspirations to “change the culture” actually manage to modify the way that people behave and the way in which they work? And how often have you seen noticeable long-term improvements?

There is unprecedented evidence regarding the success-relevancy of an organization’s culture. Cooperation, leadership, innovation, mergers and acquisitions, strategy implementation, etc.—virtually everything is deemed to be depending on culture. A culture related competitive advantage is considered to be extremely hard to imitate. According to culture expert Larry Senn, “after 50 years, we’ve got there in terms of people getting that culture makes a difference.”

Organisational Culture has been a focus for business for more than three decades and demands attention as organisations try to attract talent, overcome low engagement levels, and build their reputations and sustainability. Culture (including organisational culture) reflects in shared meaning, characteristics and behaviour (internally and with the outside world). A workable definition derived from Hofstede for organisations, “it is the mental programming that we inherit from our ancestors and pick up from the people around us.”¹  In juxtaposition is Jung on the development of individual character, “The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally this is not a conscious, intellectual process.”²