Peter Drucker is quoted as saying ‘Culture eats Strategy for breakfast’. Over the last 20 years we have been involved in numerous transformations, implementations, and change programmes, that have all seen varying degrees of success. Of those that were less than successful; no one planned for them to be anything but successful. Everyone on the team worked long hours, attended meeting after meeting, filled in status charts, made forecasts and then re-forecasted delivery dates, they watched as milestones were missed as delivery dates slipped, as projections were sometimes fudged, directors were re-briefed and on occasion asked for additional time and money to complete the transformation/change/programme. And all the while everyone on the team wondered what they were missing, what were they not doing? Was there a different methodology they should be using? Everyone was sure the plan was watertight, the models, the Gantt charts and the Prince2 methodology were clear and everyone agreed that this strategy was the best way forward.
So why didn’t it just work out of the box?
People – that’s the reason, was yesterday and will be tomorrow. We forget when we run our models, produce our charts, and create our implementation teams that people are involved and that those people were involved before we arrived with our brilliant ideas to improve things. Those people all have a view on how we have always done things around here. Some of those views are conscious and some less conscious. If your brilliant ideas do not align with those views, you have two options 1) accept from the outset that the effort required to reach success will be considerably more as are your chances of failure or 2) change the culture to align with the new strategy. Easy to say, difficult to do.
How do you define culture, and what is the culture you want to promote?
As you can see in this diagram (copyright Michael Sakota, Agilitrix, 2012). The challenge we have with defining and then changing culture is that it is primarily hidden. The company website, printed material, social media, and conversations with employees, suppliers, customers, partners and other stakeholders, might give an insight to the company culture. However, we need to be careful when generalising. When told by a supplier that the company always pays late; this is not necessarily a sinister indicator of a toxic culture of ‘we are better than you’ or something similar.
What is culture? One of the best definitions I have come across is simply – ‘what makes us, us and them, them!’ Recently while working with a large multinational conglomerate; with two sites just 20miles (35kms) apart that could have actually been different companies, security was – different, work times – different, performance management and reward – different, attitudes to the customers – different. A 20mile cultural gulf. Us was very much us, and them ….”well they just don’t understand what it’s was like to work here!”
Sitting on the side of a massive technological change, we recently watched as the culture perverted the direction and intent of the project. The new technology was designed to reduce duplication, streamline processes, remove the necessity for excel this and oracle that. However, the culture was that ‘the technology should be made to fit what we currently do’ rather than we will have to change what we do to fit the improved processes supported by this technology. Culture had a multiyear and many millions of pounds breakfast of this strategy.
Culture is the character and personality of your organisation. Personality is what we generally see and discuss with strangers. Character is something that we see when (dis) stressed and when given the opportunity we are a little less inclined to share with those we don’t know well. To get past personality to character takes time, patience and trust. It’s what makes an organisation unique and is the sum of its values both written and unwritten, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviours, and attitudes. Positive workplace culture attracts talent, drives engagement, improves happiness and satisfaction, and delivers high performance. The culture of a organisation – be it a multinational spanning the globe or a team of 8 individuals is influenced by everything; leadership, management, workplace practices, policies, people, functional arrangements, reporting structure, hierarchy and politics. As was seen in the last example culture is not always positive nor conscious but its impact is so obvious in retrospect.
Understanding a company or team culture requires the capacity to listen, without bias, prejudice or judgement, without trying to fix, or solve, change or improve, with our offering your opinion – just listen.
Ask questions that cause people to think: what’s it like to work here? To be part of this team? What do you actually do? How do you make things happen? Who gets promoted? What do you have to do to get fired? How do you get on the best projects? What is the biggest time consumer? Who gets the international work? Does the company care? What does care mean?
Once you have a better understanding of the current culture it’s time to ask what are the subtle changes to it that need to be made? This is not a quick fix, in some circumstances culture can take years to change. What is aligned, what is misaligned? Is performance management not supporting the reward structure? (no one gets fired around here, you just have to do enough) Is a lack of carparking causing a change to the start time? Is this having an (unintended) impact on customer service? Does HR support the managers and their efforts to improve performance and when they can’t improve performance to help them exit people from the business? All examples of culture in action, unwritten, unspoken, just the way things work around here.
One of the biggest challenges for fast growing start-ups is that they are so innovation/ disruption/ milestone /funding/ customer numbers focused, that they allow their workplace culture to evolve rather than managing and consciously creating the culture they want to be know for. Uber and WeWork are examples of exactly this.
Culture requires the maturity to see the company/team for what it is now and what it has the potential to be, what it accepts now and what it will or will not accept in the future. It is a dangerous policy to allow culture to ‘take care of itself’. Culture is always a product of human intervention; intended or otherwise. We cannot leave culture to create itself, as that is a non-sense. While working with a large mobile phone network operator, we discovered that during a night shift at one specific location, half the team were asleep – not just asleep at their desks but tucked up under duvets and on mattresses they had brought in. When we question the team about this – the standard answer was ‘it’s always been like this, this is how the team works’. When we discussed this with management, they were disappointed but not surprised. They had heard rumours and done nothing about it. So a night shift culture was allowed to evolve. However, this evolution must have had a start point – someone must have realised that for the number of calls being received only half the team needed to actually work and the other half could sleep, and this became the unwritten, unspoken culture of this team. Would this culture been allowed to persist during the day? I doubt it.
When Drucker made his now famous quote, he wasn’t dismissing strategy, what he was actually saying was that a well-intended strategy can be undermined by the culture that was there long before the strategy. To strategy you can also add: reorganisation, transformation, change, technology, process, system, methodology, technique, training intervention etc, etc, etc.
Remember that culture is also a differentiator – as your strategy can be copied by your competition, however your culture is unique to you it is almost the DNA of the organisation and like DNA is very difficult to replicate, it evolves over time and has the potential to ensure survival in a highly competitive environment or when difficult times hit. Vitamix is a great example of this and how a culture of staff care was reinforced during tough economic times when the easy thing to do would have been to lay off staff. To read more about this, get a copy of Simon Sineks recent book; The Infinite Game. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
