To many business people the word "culture" alone makes them a little nervous. Add "organisational" to it and you really have problems.
However, organisational culture is fast increasing its credibility with even the most hard-nosed business people. If you think of it in terms of "the way we do things around here", then you have a better start to a conversation. (Although if you follow the link above you will see that there are as many descriptions of organisational culture as their are people.)
The reason that this issue comes to mind in that the recent edition of Management Today has a MasterClass in Culture Change on page 16. It runs about 250 words. Which is pretty concise for a master class.
I believe that there are a few commonly held misconceptions about organisational culture:
- It's all about relationships and behaviour
- It's heavily influenced by national culture, diversity and geography
- Certain business sectors will always have certain cultures
- A culture change programme will need to touch every part of your business
- Without leadership involvement culture change is impossible
Just checking to see if you are aware.
The last one there is true.
You can not change the culture of an organisation without the involvement of leaders. Not is a sustainable way, anyway. Let's look at the misconceptions, just to be thorough.
1. Culture change isn't soft. More often than not it is process driven: new systems, changing business conditions, new leadership. To make people 'do' things differently, you need to change the way they do things.
2. I discussed this one earlier. And I believe it. Two businesses in the same field can be widely different. But managers in France and managers in Iceland will tend to approach things in broadly similar ways.
3. There are many examples of sectors that are deemed to be one way acting the other. If you visit Abbey in their London HQ or Nationwide in Swindon you will see that banks don't act or look like we expect them to.
4. Culture change programmes can be quite small and discrete. You can change the way work is done in one part of the business. We do it all the time. A manager or employee will suggest a change it will alter the culture of that part of the company.
Depending on how much change you want to affect... and how major that change is... culture change programmes can get quite big. But we would always advise that you start fairly small and grow the process over time.
Why are leaders important to culture change?
They embody the business. They model the behaviours that employees believe to be correct. They make the decisions that alter the course of the business.
This isn't a Master Class. This is just a small corner of the culture change discussion.
But you have to start somewhere.
/df