NDMA Inc.: Culture

Culture, in an organizational context, may be broadly defined as the behavioral patterns (habits and conventions) generally adopted within an organization. Put simply, it's "the way we work around here."

Culture includes all the beliefs, values, attitudes, rituals, and behavior patterns that people in an organization share.

Organizational culture is different than national culture. A global organization has a culture that transcends national cultural boundaries (though national cultures influence it).

Culture is relevant to leaders in every organization, regardless of whether it's a for-profit corporation, not-for-profit, or governmental institution.

2. What kinds of organizational problems can be traced back to culture?

Whenever the organization suffers from bad habits, or "we just don't think to do it that way," the root cause may be culture.

Culture very directly affects an organization's ethics, integrity (trustworthyness), ability to team, customer focus, entrepreneurship, empowerment, and willingness to take judicious risks.

There are thirteen themes that describe an organization's culture, covering a wide variety of topics.

3. I've heard that trying to change an organization's culture is a long and difficult process. Is this true?

Although many believe it takes a generation to change corporation culture, that's not true. Culture can be changed quickly, with the right approach.

Consider that culture includes two things:

* Values, attitudes, feelings, beliefs.

* Behaviors, habits, practices.

Those who attempt to change culture by dictating values find themselves on a long, frustrating path. It's exceedingly difficult to teach people what to value or how to feel.

On the other hand, a behavioral approach is consistent with learning theory. Behaviors are tangible, and they're easy to teach, model, and measure. That's where the opportunities lie.

4. Can you give me an example of a behavior that might be part of an organization's culture?

Simply telling people to trust one another (a feeling) is not likely to have any significant impact, no matter how many posters you plaster around the workplace. Nor are the statements, "We value trust," or "We are trustworthy," likely to make it so.

Instead, consider the following behavior: "We make no commitments that we cannot keep, and we keep every commitment." This clear, direct, actionable principle can ensure that people act in a trustworthy manner.

Once behaviors change, values and attitudes generally follow. In this example, once people behave in a trustworthy manner, they will learn to trust one another.

5. Does improving organizational culture just help people get along better, or can it contribute to bigger goals like better organizational performance or customer satisfaction?

It absolutely can contribute to the bigger goals. Let me illustrate with an example:

One of the major performance challenges facing many organizations is to convert a bureaucratic organization into an entrepreneurial culture. In a bureaucracy, people are given a set of resources and manage them as best they can. They think in terms of following procedures and performing tasks. Bureaucrats get ahead by building empires.

In an entrepreneurial culture, the opposite is true. Entrepreneurs run lines of business, and find ways to serve their customers by acquiring whatever resources are needed. They focus on delivering products (i.e., results), and are empowered to perform any tasks and utilize any processes needed to get the job done. Entrepreneurs abhor overhead (the bureaucrat's empire), and always try to do the most with the least.

Entrepreneurship means continually thinking about what it takes to keep your business-within-a-business competitive and your customers happy, and behaving with the same initiative and caring as if the business were your own.

While you can't demand that people care about the business, the specific behaviors of entrepreneurs can be described as part of an organizational culture.

For example, leaders might say, "We proactively seek new opportunities to better serve our customers by improving existing products and developing our capability to deliver new products."

And by adopting new behaviors, people naturally learn to see their jobs in a new light.

6. How is corporate culture (organizational culture) related to teamwork?

There are a number of reasons why organizations struggle with teamwork. Culture is certainly one of the most common root causes. If this is the case in your organization, cultural change can have a tremendous effect on teamwork.

Applying a behavioral approach to teamwork issues requires understanding the all of the workplace behaviors that together define teamwork. To illustrate, consider how specific and detailed the behavioral principles that we use to address teamwork are; these examples are drawn from a couple of pages of principles related to teamwork:

* We buy services (that are not within our own domain or specialty) from others within the organization in two situations:

- We subcontract with others whenever it would be helpful to us; i.e., whenever they can do the work better than us, and hence improve the value of our products.

- Even if we don't feel the need for help, we buy from others whenever doing the work ourselves might jeopardize others' ability to conduct their business in the future (not just shrink their business, but impede their ability to do business with others).

* When contracting with customers, we commit only our own groups. We don't make commitments for other groups.

- If subcontracts are required, we gain the agreement of our suppliers before the contract with our customer is finalized.

- We determine only our own prices and time-frames. If subcontracts are required, we ask our suppliers to determine their prices and time-frames before we finalize our price and time-frame.

* We meet all commitments to people within the organization, just as we do commitments to clients. (We do not fail at an internal commitment in order to accept a new client contract. Thus, we can trust each other and are just as comfortable subcontracting to each other as doing the work ourselves.)

Don't be frightened by this level of detail. The specificity is essential; it makes the principles actionable. A comprehensive set of detailed behaviors can be developed by a leadership time in a series of guided workshops.

And it's equally important to realize that "easy" approaches, like some generic team-building exercises and slogans that claim "we are a team," don't achieve lasting results. When it comes to organizational change, you get what you pay for.

The "sweat equity" invested in crafting clear behavioral principles builds the understanding and commitment required to effect meaningful change.

7. How long does it take to make sigificant changes in an organization's culture?

We have been helping organizations with this for over a decade, and our expericnce is that dramatic cultural change can be achieved in less than one year. But only if it's done correctly, with a process that's participative and focused on behaviors.

And, of course, the process is accelerated if leaders utilize the thinking of other leadership teams who have invested time in crafting clear principles of behavior. A database of "ideal practices" provides a starting point for crafting one's own cultural principles.

8. What's involved in implementing culture change in an organization?

Cultural change begins with carefully crafted principles of behavior, written in such a way that everybody knows exactly what to do. The various principles can be grouped into sub-topics, and published in a document that is distributed throughout an organization.

Once they're clearly documented, cultural principles are "rolled out" through either training courses or a series of manager-led workshops.

Our experience is that education is best done in small-group sessions in which people have time to ask questions and fully understand each principle. Moreover, in these sessions, it helps to translate principles into local practices by discussing what people in the group must do differently. These sessions can also be used to gather people's feedback and update the principles accordingly.

Education must be reinforced by continued leadership modeling and mentoring, and by incorporating adoption of the new culture into people's performance appraisals.

This process is described here.

9. How can NDMA help me make positive changes to the culture in my organization?

We have developed a process, called Culture in Action, that has been widely used; and we've learned a lot in the course of helping the many kinds organizations we've worked with (private, public, corporations, non-profits, and government). NDMA provides training and facilitation for any or all parts of a culture change process.

We have also collected and fine tuned a database of "ideal practices" that capture the collective wisdom of the many organizations that have been through our Culture in Action process in the past decade.

It's not intended as an "off the shelf" culture; rather, it helps leaders word their ideas clearly, and suggests topics they might want to consider a part of their own culture. This helps to ensure that the changes will be comprehensive and effective.

10. How can I learn more about organizational culture?

We've written a short monograph, called "Culture In Action," that contains the next level of detail on how to change organizational culture. It provides an overview of the goals, the process, and the results of the approach that we use.

We'd also be pleased to discuss your unique concerns and your cultural-change plans. Qualified executives can arrange a complimentary telephone consultation with Dean Meyer. Give us a call at 203-431-0029.

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