The big question
What senior leaders need to be clear about
What is organisational culture? The best and simplest explanation is that it is “how we do things around here.”
Most companies could tell you WHY they exist, their purpose. And all of them could tell you WHAT they do. But it’s the HOW in between that shapes their success.
Culture is the engine that drives the overall effectiveness of any organisation. It shapes the quality of the work delivered because it shapes how teams collaborate. And it drives individual performance because it is the key factor affecting staff morale, wellbeing and motivation.
At the same time, hybrid working provides a new and fascinating challenge for organisational culture. Quite simply, how do we establish a “how we do things round here” when there is no physical “here”?
All of these are questions I work through with clients. However, there is often a fundamental question that needs to be asked first.
What sort of culture do you want?
Most senior leaders have a sense of what a “good” culture looks like, based on reading management books and keeping up to date with trends in people management. They use works like “inclusive” and “supportive” alongside “collaborative” and “performance driven”.
But it’s important to think through what we mean by these words. How do they relate to behaviour? What do we want our teams to actually do?
If we are ambitious and we want to grow fast, what does that means for how people work? If we say we want to support the individual to grow, are we making space and time for that? If we want to be inclusive, are we prepared listen to different views about what that might look like?
And how do the different cultural elements we want to see interact? Where do they actively support or compete with each other?
As an example, I work with a lot of purpose-driven organisations. They really, really care about what they do. The cause comes first. This is great for collaboration and acheivement. But it’s not so great for wellbeing, as staff tend to work long hours and feel under pressure. Senior leaders need to recognise this and decide which matters more to them, and how they want to see that play out.
A culture isn’t just a list of buzzwords that one person likes. Often, this stuff can only be worked out by people sitting in a room together and working through these questions.
The second step is to look deeply and honestly at the culture you have (which means speaking to people at all levels and in all departments) and identifying where the gaps are between where you are and where you want to be.
If that work isn’t done properly at the outset, then any culture change project is destined to fail.