Do you have a real understanding of the actual culture in your organisation – not the desired or “official culture”?
Does this understanding give you the critical insight to challenge your view, guide critical decisions and enable the actions needed to deliver on your strategy?
Culture has long been in the working vocabulary of business leaders. However, never before have clients and business leaders so frequently been talking about and looking for ways to measure culture than in the last few years.
Of course, this is a great development.
But… yes there is a BUT…. as a board member or business leader, it can be tempting to look for a quick and easy indicator or two to monitor culture, so that the so-called risks are mitigated and the “happiness factor” is ticked off the list.
Beware of just following the noise…culture is not only a risk that needs to be managed. Perhaps more importantly, it is a driver of long-term organisational performance.
However, only if it’s dimensions and influences are fully understood.
Many of our clients first come to us for help after receiving a poor overall culture rating or challenges are identified by low survey scores in engagement, “likability” of leaders, staff sentiment or retention. Culture measures like engagement scores, employee NPS, retention rates, customer impact scores or a combination these, are often used as key indicators to measure culture.
Although this is a great start, measuring these types of indicators against defined benchmarks, is typically only a one-dimensional reading without context and does not on it’s own provide the specific data or view needed to make informed change.
Static, linear measures of culture, like these, may also provide a false sense of comfort to board directors or executives – that the “human factors” are being paid attention to and the organisation is therefore on track with high ratings.
Here’s the thing – this comfort can be short lived, because the indicators do not deliver the type of insights needed to connect different data points and identify hidden patterns of thinking, mindset, action and inaction that show up in a variety of places around the business to enhance or disrupt performance.
These types of patterns often show up where there is dissonance between what is said (or committed to) and what (or how) things are done – deadlines agreed to but repeatedly not actioned without consequence, critical conversations put off or avoided, poor behaviour tolerated at any cost, leaders wanting innovation but continually calling out mistakes, managers that talk about well-being but send emails late into the night..
It’s time to let go of this pervading myth!
Culture is not just an engagement or a climate survey score. It’s much more complex than that!
Businesses have long utilised a menu or dashboard of indicators to monitor and guide key decisions critical to the financial, product or sales performance outcomes. The same approach is required for culture. It is time to move towards a more holistic, insight-driven diagnosis, so that your culture can be clearly unpacked as a complex set of interconnected social systems that will make or break your ongoing success.
Why is it important to think in terms of systems to make good sense of your culture?
Culture is still an undervalued and somewhat misunderstood asset for the survival, growth and evolution of any business.
For those looking to truly optimise the value of their culture to enable positive people, strategy and performance outcomes, there are 4 key truths to consider before you get started.
- Culture is implied – in fact its influence is often clearer to outsiders than those within it.
- Culture is a complex system, with many interdependencies and feedback loops, that enable (or disable) strategy, customer and team outcomes – it cannot be fixed by an isolated decision, action or program.
- Culture is not a static “set and forget” agenda item – it is ever evolving, it shows up in different ways and it is contagious.
- Cultural leadership requires a willingness to be humble, brave and self-aware. As organisations reach new phases of growth, leaders need to ensure that the culture and their style is re-aligned to deliver success in the next phase.
Isolated decisions will often result in unintended consequences somewhere else, affecting the system in unpredictable ways. Taking a systemic view of the same situation, with the help of an outsider, can lead to a broader interpretation and identification of “hidden, systemic patterns” that are standing in the way of good work across organisational units.
For example, following a restructure in Company Red, key roles and areas of responsibility were re-defined at a high level. Although the changes were announced, communicated to affected individuals and signed off, deadlines were slipping and customers were complaining.
Rather than these being attributable to any one factor or person, for example staff not understanding their new roles or job descriptions not being clear, a number of cultural patterns could be at play that need to be addressed at a collective level. For example:
- People holding on to “old, habitual ways” of getting the job done and rejecting change
- The change communication has not been broken down to ensure that staff understand why the change is happening, what it looks like across the journey and why it matters to them
- Messages of blame and negativity are overriding taking ownership and forward action
- Toxic individuals that have been tolerated by leaders in the past are intercepting attempts by staff to build new working relationships and stopping people from speaking up.
Some questions to be asked – Where else are these patterns showing up in the organisation and it’s eco-system? How are they showing up? Are they producing dissonance between the way your talent is known for working and how they are working in your system?
Unless the patterns are unpacked and addressed, any isolated actions will fail to make the positive impact needed for growth.
So what will you do to attend to your cultural leadership?
Culture is a huge asset to your business success if you truly understand and leverage it.
Culture underpins “how” you as a leader create value and protect value through people.
A word of warning though… culture hides more than it reveals. That is why it is critical to draw on a range of indicators and perspectives to extrapolate the value.
If you would like to further explore how to make real sense of your culture as a core asset for growth, please contact Joanne Fisher at joanne@fisherpeopleinculture.com.
