Jeremy Bradley-Silverio Donato, COO at Zama.
The term “culture” is often brandished as a Band-Aid for a company’s problems. If there’s a downturn in workplace morale, it must be an issue with culture; if there’s an uptick in performance, it’s down to the culture; if there’s an increase in revenue, that’s because of the culture too. Or so the common thinking goes.
Too often I see leaders use organizational culture as a catchphrase and umbrella term for describing all kinds of company practices. I believe this is an oversimplistic understanding of organizational culture.
Culture has been called the “sofware of the mind,” which is the idea that a company’s culture is its set of shared assumptions, values and beliefs which establish patterns and expectations. You do X and you get Y, which in turn creates a sense of identity or social glue. While this definition of organizational culture is sufficient for quickly identifying or describing phenomena within a company’s lifecycle, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of digging into the artifacts and assumptions that underpin why a particular corporate culture has emerged. Was the culture a conscious choice on the part of leadership? If not, can the culture really adapt to changing circumstances?
Organizational Culture: The Three Levels According To Edgar Schein
To get us deeper into thinking of culture as something that underpins what an organization is about, rather than simply explaining what the organization does, Edgar Schein at the Sloan School of Management described culture as having three levels.
Artifacts
The first exists at a level that is visible but sometimes undecipherable. Schein calls these the artifacts that an organization possesses. Think of everything from office layout to furnishings, logo placement on walls or the way people dress and talk to one another. These are all easy to observe, but they can be difficult to grasp if we never think of culture as anything deeper than this.
For example, the lobby of my company’s lobby in Paris has a huge logo on the wall by the entryway, as if to announce, “This is a new and different environment to the one you’ve just left.” Yet in my private office things are more subtle; the lighting is dimmer, green plants surround plush chairs and there are curtains to soften the harsh window light. I’ve created this environment so that people feel more at ease in the space, which is an element of culture that lends itself to open communication.
Values
Going further, Schein says that organizations often have a greater awareness of their values, even when these values are not articulated. Values impact how the people within an oragnization interact and represent the organization both internally and to the outside world. Apart from the values that the company puts on its website or espouses in rehearsed speeches, core values are often reflected in the way people speak about the company at the water cooler or in the cafeteria.
The general mood of a company has a lot to say about how the organization is peforming. Leaders also have to be mindful when their internal values do not line up with their externally-published ones. If a company’s mission is safeguarding privacy but its internal IT systems are a mess, there’s a deeper cultural issue at play. In this sense, leaders are the storytellers of culture and how they act and perform within the work environment helps to reinforce core value propositions.
Assumptions
Finally, Schein talks about assumptions, which are invisible and taken for granted within the organization. These are the beliefs about a company that are so deeply embedded, they often even go untalked-about. If you want to see the mismatch between assumptions as lived experience in contrast to espoused values, look no further than the recent big bank and crypto failures. All of these organizations had published sets of values that supposedly underpinned their business strategy, yet each of them contained numerous individuals operating at the level of assumption: “This is how we do things around here.” The problem with such an approach is that little room is left for scrutiny, improvement or innovation.
Moving Beyond The Simplistic: Recognizing Subcultures
So returning to our initial question, and keeping in mind Schein’s insights, how can leaders move beyond a simplistic understanding of organizational culture?
Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that subcultures exist within cultures. Every company will have subcultures of people with similar views or working patterns, people who have been there a long time, people who consider themselves outsiders and so forth. Sometimes addressing the needs of these advocacy groups can be just as important on working on the larger organizational culture piece.
Culture is additive. Managing culture is thus a responsibility for all managers at every level of an organization, and consistency in messaging is the key to reinforcing the culture that leadership want to see.
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