The importance of culture

A couple of years ago, I was travelling to the United States on my way to attend a roundtable event which had been organised by Stanford and Boston Universities. Since it was a long flight, I finally had time to dive into a book I had been wanting to read for quite some time – Organizational Culture and Leadership, by Prof Ed Schein of the MIT Sloan School of Management. This is a seminal work which I constantly recommend to anyone with an interest in the topic.

Having been involved in numerous cultural-change programmes, it was a constant surprise to me just how many organisations were complacent to leave the development of their cultures to pure chance, believing a tone set at the top would simply organically permeate down through the levels, and all would be fine. It’s no surprise I’m going to tell you that this simply is not the case.

In 2018, the most progressive and successful organisations realise their culture is everything: controlling their performance, minimising risk, acting as a better disciplinary system than any rulebook, and providing the edge of their competitive advantage.

In Schein’s book, he defines culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration”. Schein’s work focused on different categories of cultures, identifying three levels of culture: artifacts (explicit and visible); espoused beliefs and values (sometimes captured through surveys); and basic underlying assumptions.

These basic assumptions are sometimes very subtle: however, we all know that when you join any kind of organisation, you will quickly discover the unwritten encoded rules that one needs to firstly survive and ultimately thrive.

From the research we do into workplace cultures, we find the best organisations, the ones that get it right, take a very simple approach. They define clearly what their culture will be, they articulate it, they write it down, and they create a set of values that support it. These are real lived values; not ones created by an agency that look good printed on the wall, but ones the employees truly relate to and identify with.

Range of behaviours

From these values, they cascade a range of behaviours, in two clear sets. The first are the desired behaviours: the ones that recognise and reward employees when they live them. The other set of behaviours are just as important: they are the ones the organisation refuses to support – the unacceptable red lines, often in the case of sexual harassment or bullying behaviours.

The final step is to support the positive behaviours by a range of practices in nine key areas – namely hiring, inspiring, speaking, listening, thanking, caring, developing, celebrating and sharing: in essence they touch every area of the employee experience. Developing practices in these areas is crucial, as it creates consistency across the organisation and reinforces the culture throughout.

Leadership matters too. Every leader at every level should be watched to see if they are living the dream. I couldn’t say it any better than Emerson: “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.” It’s never enough for leaders to talk the talk; they must walk the walk, often in very difficult situations. As a leader, at this very moment you could be leading an organisation that has a sick culture, sucking the energy and enthusiasm from each and every employee. If so, you need to drive your culture in the right direction. A simple survey can give you a read on the present culture, and could be the first step of a journey that takes your organisation to a better place, supporting better performance across the board. After all, each employee is selling you part of their life on a daily basis, so the least you can do is provide an environment where they feel psychologically safe and have the opportunity to flourish.

Schein’s book is long, weighty, and worthwhile, and it’s no surprise that I hadn’t finished it by the time I arrived at the roundtable. But imagine my surprise when, right next to me sat Prof Ed Schein, who at 87 years of age was eagerly waiting to contribute and learn from everyone in the room: serendipity at its very best.