The desire to understand how to manage organizational culture, and change culture to align with new strategic initiatives, is an understandable one. Managers want to be able to influence their corporate culture. Some will even pay $1200 or more for an executive seminar on the topic of managing culture change.
The truth is that culture cannot always be managed. Leadership can sometimes influence an organization's culture, but other dynamics can make the leader's attempts to intervene have unpredictable consequences. In an earlier post, I stated that "when scholars teach about organizational culture changes, we often
assert that there are three ways in which a culture shifts over time:
emergence,
crisis, and leadership."
As a leader, modeling the values you wish to see employees embrace is crucial. If you want employees to be able to improvise, come out from behind the podium, leave the scripted speech behind, and improvise conversations with employees. If you want employees to provide outstanding customer service, work a day or two on the front lines each quarter, and then work to remove any policies that limit employees' ability to think creatively about how to exceed customers' expectations.
As a leader, telling stories about others who embody the best of your company's values can provide direction and motivation to employees. Inspiring stories of people doing the right thing gives those outstanding employees public recognition, and vividly illustrates the best that your company can be.
As a leader, setting policies in place that reinforce key values, and that nip behaviors in the bud that could undermine key values, is potentially powerful.
In those three ways, leaders can influence organizational culture change. Finding the behaviors you can visibly model, the stories you can tell with pride, and the policies that can make values explicit, are three keys to shaping organizational culture.
What is harder to "manage" is how cultures emerge -- because leaders are often not around when that emergence is occurring. Cultures may emerge from a particular interaction between supervisor and subordinate that plays out in front of other employees.
For example, a supervisor's disapproval or anger can discourage behavior that would be desirable in the culture, if it is threatening to the supervisor's sense of self-esteem. (Employees taking their first steps toward empowerment, exercising initiative without prior approval from their supervisors, can run into the supervisor's insecurity quite quickly.)
Similarly, resource constraints can reinforce boundaries between subcultures within a company, fragmenting action in response to a challenging time. If employees become more loyal to their workgroup than to the organization as a whole, cooperation can break down, turning a brief resource constraint into a long-term liability in employees' willingness to work together productively.
Managing culture in the context of an organizational crisis can be extremely difficult -- enough that the topic merits a whole separate blog post.
Because the idea of managing organizational culture change presumes that culture can be managed from the top down, there are many war stories about efforts at culture change that are ineffective. Understanding how employees may respond to change initiatives can help calibrate managers' expectations and remind them that their direct influence on corporate culture is limited.
However, if the winds are blowing against the direction in which you want to travel you will need to chart and oblique course, heading toward your destination without aiming for it directly. If you try to confront the headwinds squarely, your sails will luff, and your yacht's progress will stall.
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