Ask an anthropologist if you can change a culture and they will stare at you in dismay: are you crazy? It is a life mission to understand a culture, by immersing yourself into it for a couple of years. You need to taste the rituals, feel the conversations, touch the unspoken and hear the ‘smell of the place’ to get a basic understanding. Putting that to words means that you run the risk to lose its essence, or project your own views. Let alone change it.
Ask successful HR leaders whether you can change the culture and they will say that culture is fully on their radar. They nurture it. They nourish it. They cultivate it. Interestingly, all these verbs refer to the growth of living organisms or eco-systems. It means that none of the concrete actions taken to cultivate a culture, guarantee success on its own. There is no check list, ‘tick in the box’, or certificate for a healthy culture. Neither is one distinct culture better for high performance or growth. Yet, these HR leaders describe the potential benefits of a healthy culture as: the fundamental support of a strategy with an explanation of ‘how we do things around here’. It results in: increased productivity, attraction of clients and new employees, improved agility, leveraged diversity through psychological safety and faster and better decision making.
“There is no way to ‘manage’ a culture.”
In this magazine, we explore the advantages of fostering a healthy organizational culture and delve into practical strategies for achieving it. We will do it with the curiosity and open mind of an anthropologist, knowing there is no way to ‘manage’ a culture. We will also do it with the business sense of executive leaders and present the business case for culture cultivation. Numbers appeal to some people, but ultimately, we hope that you wake up to become a believer in the power of culture to make or break the ambitions of your organization. Finally, we will do it in the spirit of these HR leaders, who monitor their cultures constantly to cultivate and regenerate it. This respect for the tremendous power of culture is what created our joined interest: to inspire and rewire cultures.
Why OPen, Inspiring, and REsult-driven?
These three words inspired us to name our company: Opire. In our view, it is essential to look through the lenses of: ‘openness’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘result driven’ to understand an organizational culture. First of all: ‘open’ refers to your state of being as an organizational anthropologist. Hopefully it stimulates you to use all our senses ‘openly’ to understand the culture again and again, as if it was your first day at work. The longer you work in an organization, the more difficult this becomes. Fish are the last ones to discover the water. Like oxygen for us humans. Culture, like oxygen is omnipresent and self-evident. We forget how vital it is. Open also refers to the relationship of any organism or culture to its environment. Organizations are living systems with all sorts of relationships with employees, customers, partners, and countless other stakeholders. In a way you can argue that organizations are nothing but relationships.
“The way cultures deal with all emotions, determines the quality of relationships.”
That points to our second word: inspiration. It describes the quality of relationships between all these stakeholders. In many culture models the quality of relationships defines the culture to a large extent. At best these relationships are inspiring. In reality, all long-term relationships have their highs and lows, not much different from our relationships in our personal lives. We believe that if you want people to bring their whole selves to work, then you need to be prepared to deal with the whole range of emotions people feel throughout their lives. Excitement, curiosity, enthusiasm and motivation are great drivers of collaboration and results. Anger, frustration, disappointment, sadness and fear are equally present in life and work. These emotions are not always as visible as the ‘positive’ emotions. There are often even repressed in the culture. It is the way cultures deal with the full range of emotions, that determines the quality of their relationships. At best these relationships are described as ‘trusted’, at worst these relationships are toxic. Have you encountered both?
“Can you raise the bar without increasing the pressure?”
Thirdly, a culture is defined by the way in which it generates results. That can be through primarily individual contributions, through focused interactions or through more complex (high context) collaboration. In this case, trusted relationships are vital to make the collaboration work. In practice we see the result orientation of a company being undervalued, in terms of how it defines cultures. Many discussions about psychological safety at the moment take place without exploring how those organizations come to results. Visible examples of derailed cultures (Studio Sport, The Voice of Holland, governmental departments, universities and numerous sports examples) stem from the high-pressure results orientation, which can deform relationships and trespass boundaries. Organizations need to have robust social safety processes in place. Leaders need to step up to create a safe and challenging environment to work in. Can they raise the bar without increasing the pressure on people?
We look at relationships, results and how openly people within a culture interact with each other and the external world. Based on this and a systemic view of the whole organization, we start to explore how leaders can cultivate and regenerate their culture.
What is culture?
A first definition of culture was already mentioned in the introduction: ‘the way we do things around here’. The value is in its simplicity. It allows culture change agents to start conversations with groups of people, who have little background knowledge about culture. It focuses on the visible, behavioral part of cultures and makes conversations tangible. Values and leadership profiles are often used to explain what is expected of people and leaders in particular. In any attempt to make values practical for use in organizations, these values have been described in terms of behavior: it is observable and concrete. It allows people to bring these values alive in their daily work and have conversations about it.
“The way we do things around here.”
Again, anthropologists would nauseate when hearing this oversimplification of what culture is. A first step towards a richer description is the distinction that Robert McGee made in his book: ‘Story, Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting’. McGee is seen as the guru of screenwriting for movies and plays. You could view his talent as the ability to bring a culture alive in a two-hour movie or play. ‘Style’ refers to the behavioral element of a culture, like in ‘the way we do things around here’. ‘Stories’ refer to the conversations that are held inside and outside an organization that reflect what is important in the organization. Intranet, website and all employee and external communications are valuable expressions of a company’s culture. HR leaders tell us they follow what stories are unfolding and being created and whether these support the culture they want to nourish. ‘Substance’ refers in this context to the processes and systems an organization uses to work together and get things done. All people processes in the employee journey have a profound impact on culture: the way people are hired, onboarded, objectives are set and development and performance are organized. Of course, this is where leaders play an important role, through their role modelling as well as their use of the people processes and tools. This employee journey is the area where you can make the most tangible contribution to culture evolution. Designing and implementing ‘fit for purpose’ people processes, that shape a rich employee journey, contributes directly to evolving the culture.
“The unconscious, taken for granted parts are like the oxygen we take in every minute.”
In the most complete definition of culture, it is all of the above and more. Then you could use the iceberg as a metaphor for culture like we do for leadership behavior. The visible top 10% is behavior, under the waterline you start finding the values, stories, structure and substance and at the deepest level of the iceberg are the most deeply held, unconscious beliefs and habits in the organization. It is the unconscious, taken for granted parts of the organization. The oxygen we take in every minute. Here the role of external consultant or anthropologist can be to ‘reveal the system to itself’. In one organization, the senior management group thought they were very result driven. When we looked at their quarterly goal setting and progress in more detail, they realized how often they were going around in circles. Priority setting never resulted in the termination of any project. It was merely a reshuffle of goals. After long discussions, everybody returned to their departments, and they agreed on just a few points. Some did not even communicate what had been discussed. It was a painful observation, which was initially met with a lot of resistance. Now that the unconscious process had been ‘revealed to the system’, there was an opportunity to change this. Still not a simple task.
Benefits & business case of a healthy culture
Here is the brief summary of the benefits. In the separate Magazine by the same name, we explore this topic more in depth.
- The people execution power forming the engine that makes strategy happen.
- External perception: A positive culture attracts both customers and employees.
- Increased productivity: A culture that minimizes entropy (energy loss), leads to higher productivity.
- Sustainability and agility: A well-defined culture enables organizations to navigate mergers, transformations, and crises with agility.
- Leveraging diversity: An inclusive culture that celebrates diversity, fosters innovation and growth of people, products and services.
- Psychological safety and decision-making: Cultures that encourage open dialogue and inclusivity, empower employees to participate in decision-making.
Cultivating cultures
Ok let’s start cultivating cultures. Where to start? That depends on where the executive team is at: are they believers in culture that needs to be cultivated? Or are they sceptics who think this is wishy-washy soft stuff, that leads to endless debates and no tangible results. With the sceptics: start on the hard and visible side of the employee journey and how managers can create productive teams and organizations. Clear goal setting at all levels in the organization, helps to create stretch goals and a culture of discipline to get things done. Once managers understand their role and there is a ‘fit for purpose’ process in place, employees will start asking for support from their managers and trust to get things done. It will open up the conversation about the whole employee journey and how the company can shift from treating employees as their asset to treating them as people with hopes and fears, ambition and drive and relationships. Lots of value is left on the table, if an organization does not shape the employee journey to create an engaging and challenging place to work and develop in. Conversations with the senior team on how the employee journey can support strategic goals, can lead to a well aligned HR Strategy and priority list.
In most cases the executive team will be somewhere in the middle between the sceptics and the believers, or there is a mix of views within the team. It is the quality of conversation that can be facilitated in this executive team, that will lead to a coherent approach to cultivating the culture congruent with the strategic goals of the organization.
Measuring culture through the Barret Value Assessment
Believers in culture cultivation will want to take stock in their organization before they start new culture initiatives. They want to ensure their initiatives are carefully sync-ed with the strategy, the employee journey and the development of leaders: Where should we focus our efforts to cultivate a culture, that fully enables people to develop themselves and help realize the strategy?
The Barrett Values assessment has become a worldwide standard to measure cultures and give everyone in the eco-system a voice to express their views on their personal values, current organizational values and desired organizational values. Whether it is an organization with 50 or 50.000 people. The survey results add up all people’s views and provides a rich overview of the culture through the lens of values and levels of consciousness. These levels of consciousness build upon Maslow’s theory and provide a compelling picture of the culture of the organization. The outcomes provide a rich data set to start the sensemaking about the essence, the true qualities, and the shadow sides of the culture. It also shows a comprehensive picture of any subset of the data for parts of the business: departments, business units, countries, or functions.
There is one special feature, which we particularly like. The assessment measures entropy.
“Entropy reveals the degree of dysfunction within the organization.”
Friction, frustration, fear, and self-serving actions of leaders contribute to energy loss of all employees. Potentially limiting values account for 5% to 30% of the total employee costs. By addressing these issues, organizations can reduce this productivity loss. Trust and internal cohesion decrease when entropy is high. So, there are many reasons to address high entropy rates (>10%). The benefits and business case magazine describes these benefits in more detail.
The Barrett values assessment also offers an entry point to discuss the role leaders play in a culture change initiative. The assessment can be extended into a leadership 360. The feedback from peer leaders is helpful and aligned with the values approach. Leaders are so pivotal in the whole values approach to culture cultivation. For them to understand their role as role model and understand how they can support the culture evolution makes other initiatives more impactful. One sales leader we worked with felt he was doing an excellent job, given his sales track record. “We had grown year-on-year for three consecutive years, well above the company’s targets”. However, through peer feedback, he learned that while his peers applauded his contribution to the team’s sales, they were missing his collaboration on team targets. Additionally, the marketing department was missing his feedback on campaigns targeted at specific customer groups. Even though, he did mention teamwork as one of his personal values. This served as a great starting point for conversations about leadership growth. There is also resistance to using values to cultivate a culture. Quickly, examples pop up of organizations who communicate short ‘wish lists’ of words on plastic cards, walls and screen savers. It can quickly feel unreal and artificial. Therefore, it matters how values emerge from group sessions with people from throughout the organization. Focus groups can be informed by the values assessment. Dive into the history of a company to ensure some of the values reflect the signature strengths of the organization. We recommend 3 - 5 values, with 60% reflecting the core DNA strength of the organization and 40% the stretch, to cultivate that culture to a better version of itself that supports the strategy more. Delve deeper into these values and define the values in the context of your organization.
“About 50% of the Fortune 500 carries ‘collaboration’ in their values.”
The behaviors -and what it is not- give the opportunity to translate the value into tangible actions in your organization. Explore what is required of you and what you can expect from your peers in very practical words. Hereby you are, ensuring they are more than just words on a wall.
Once the values have been determined they can be used as the compass for all communication, for decision-making, how to approach new initiatives. The values need to be recognizable in the employee value proposition, and they must also be embedded in the different parts of the employee journey and the development of leaders. So, the values are eventually internalized by leaders. Leaders feel how they can grow in their leadership and where they are vulnerable.
Developing leaders to cultivate culture
You can start culture cultivation through professionalizing the employee journey and get the most tangible processes to support your culture in place. You can also start taking stock of where your culture is at right now, informed by a values assessment. Thirdly, you can start developing your leaders to cultivate the culture. In company leadership development programs are by nature a form of culture cultivation. And of course, these three approaches can be combined and carefully planned in time to bolster the key strengths of a culture and/or addressing red flags in the culture (shadow sides).
Starting in the leadership development domain means calling for the support of those with leadership roles in the organization. They are being looked at. They fulfill a role modelling role and frankly, if they do not actively support your culture program, then it is at risk. You can start working on culture bottom up, but to sustain the initiative you need to involve your senior leaders at some point. Timing is everything.
“If leaders fully support the culture cultivation, it ignites a culture flame.”
Their actions ripple through the corridors and every meeting: ‘This is who we are, this is what we stand for’.
Our most inspiring explanation of how leaders can shape the culture in their organization comes from an 8 minute video of Sumantra Ghoshal (see below). He explains: “Revitalising people has a lot less to do with changing people and has a lot more to do with changing the context, which senior managers create around their people. They have to change the smell of the place”. Ghoshal boldly argues that many organizations smell awfully like Calcutta in summertime. He goes on to inspire leaders to create a context along the result dimension of discipline and stretch and along the relationship dimension a culture of trust and support.
We have embraced the simple model of two dimensions (relationships & results) to make leaders aware of the culture they work in, what the shadow side of that culture is and how they can cultivate their culture. Simply, because the model has been proclaimed by so many different academics in different decades and variations from what we described here in Ghoshal’s words. (Drucker, Reddin, Mc Gregor, Goffee & Jones, Kohlrieser, Edmundson).
“Can you stay connected to your true self AND adapt to the organizational context?”
Now how can leaders lead by example embodying the essence of the organization’s culture, while staying true to their authentic self? We believe that has a lot to do with authentic self. That is knowing who you are (qualities, passion, energy) and how you can adapt yourself in different situations, without losing that sense of self. That has to do with embodied self: a congruence between head, heart and hands (body). In this mental world our heads have been overused and overvalued. It is not enough to buy into the ‘new’ culture or values, intellectually. The challenge is to feel connected to your personal values (a groundedness) in order to adapt to what is required in the organization context. Therefore bodywork (outdoor, nature elements, martial arts, breathing, meditation, yoga) have all started to play in bigger role in helping people ground and bringing them back to their true selves. Workplaces can physically change a lot to facilitate this change in the workplace. Meetings and endless virtual calls are overrated for productive work. Creativity, emotions and physical exercise require a different office environment for high performance. In a sense it is part of changing the context people work in as Ghoshal described.
Reveal the shadows through courageous conversations
Every culture has shadows, subtle nuances, unspoken norms, and hidden biases. To evolve, we must unveil these shadows: acknowledge the imperfections, the unspoken fears, and the unaddressed tensions. Then, with courage evolve it toward brighter elements. This is the deepest work in the iceberg, touching the unconscious biases in the organization and potentially meeting most resistance.
We are conducting courageous conversations in the domains of strategy, integrity and culture. It is a way to make conflict productive in an organizational context. Many people shy away from difficult conversations, which in the end leads to mediocracy and frustrated relationships. Esther Perel articulates this well:
“Conflict is a tool for differentiation. For having two people breath and grow inside a relationship.”
- Esther Perel
For instance: we worked with a highly innovative technical start up where technicians, and founders discussed the technical challenges in heated debates with each other. It was common practice to bash each other’s ideas and be highly critical. But they had extended this behavior to other parts of the organization including people development and delegation. Very little was delegated to experienced engineers, because everything had to pass the ‘founder’s test’. Progress was slow and numerous experienced valuable engineers left within two years. It took an anonymous survey to surface this and it was addressed after a new HR manager had joined a read the results from two previous employee engagement surveys. It took about seven months of conversations to get this message across to the senior team. This process of revealing the system to itself is sensitive to the right timing. It is a case-by-case decision to determine what is the right intervention.
In the Courageous Integrity Conversations domain, we are approached by organizations who encounter signals or reports of transgressive behavior. These signs are highly sensitive in the current timeframe. Reputational risks for individuals and organization are high and organizations want to prevent trial by (public) accusation. Many forms of transgressive behavior are expressions of a culture where feedback to higher managers was unusual for a long time, which led micro aggressions or micro steps of power abuse on the part of these senior managers. It can lead to unconscious trespassers, unintended violations and damage done. This is by no means an excuse for any form of transgressive behavior, but there is a great deal to win to stay in the winner circle and NOT to fall back into the drama triangle of accusations, victims, bystanders and perpetrators. In the drama triangle everybody loses. It is a lose-lose situation. Sometimes external investigation cannot be avoided, especially with more than one signal of sexually transgressive behavior. But many cases benefit from de-escalation. Through interviews, anonymous 360 feedback, mediation or facilitated conversations, understanding can grow between parties, everybody can learn about their own contribution to the situation and sometimes trust can be restored.
“We can change our lives, one conversation at a time."
- Susan Scott
A full professor at a prestigious university was not aware of the fear culture he created through his high standards and (slightly) dismissive comments. No single comment was serious enough to report a violation and scientists widely respected his achievements and the top 5 position in the world, which he had largely built with his department. But more and more talented PhD’s left the department, fell ill, or became depressed. When one associate professor resigned, she mentioned the toxic environment to HR. A questionnaire and interview process among 21 people provided a serious but balanced picture of the situation. A period of intensive personal coaching and various facilitated dialogues in the department brought the atmosphere back to normal in a year’s time. The professor had no clue when we started the interview process. His behavior developed over a period of more than 9 years. Now 2 years later the department is in a much more positive spirit. The professor had chosen the keep the pulse through an annual facilitated off site in which he invites the team to give him and each other feedback.
So, culture is in everything and everyone who is part of an organization. You can’t just pick it up and shape it as you want. But it is worth monitoring, as if you are seeing it for the first time. Ask newcomers what they see, so you can see with fresh pair of eyes. And it is worth cultivating culture like your family or your group of friends. Together, we can cross or clean oceans, and create unimaginable results. If we choose to nurture the unseen, the unheard and the unspoken qualities of the way things are done in your organization.
Bibliography
- Barrett, Richard: Liberating the corporate soul (1998)
- Barrett, Richard: Building a value driven organization (2014)
- Brassey, Jacqueline: Authentic self confidence (2020)
- Drucker, Peter: The Effective Executive (2006)
- Edmondson, Amy: The Fearless Organization (2019)
- Goffee, Rob/ Jones, Gareth: The Character of the Corporation (1998)
- Ghoshal, Sumantra: The individualized corporation (1999)
- Gottmann, John: Make relationships work (2018, YouTube)
- Harris, Thomas: I am OK, you are OK (1967)
- Kohlrieser, George: Care to dare (2012)
- McKee, Robert: Story, Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting (1999)
- ORSC, Organizational, relational, systems coaching: course materials
- Perel, Esther: Pulling the thread, Podcast, 19 October 2023
- Quinn, Robert: Building the bridge as you walk on it (2004)
- Spotlights with Farshida Zafar, Heleen Cocu Wassink, Petra Bosse, Marlise Mahieu, Mathijs van Duurling, Thomas Mulder
- Stam, Jan Jacob & Hoogenboom, Barbara (2023) Tegen de stroom mee
