The Universal Value of Constructive Organizational Cultures

Nowadays, organizations are often confronted with various developments in both their environment and within the organization, as well with the so-called ‘VUCA-World’ and ‘significant adverse events’, which together require them to address their way of doing business with high and true "sense of urgency". Organizations therefore must operate in a complete different with focus on growth and stability.

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These puts higher demands on both, the organization’s strategy, and culture. Strategy and culture are among the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness. Strategy offers a formal logic for the company’s goals and orients people around them. At the other hand, culture expresses goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms.

 

Strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision making. It relies on plans and sets of choices to mobilize people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so. Ideally, it also incorporates adaptive elements that can scan and analyze the external environment and sense when changes are required to maintain continuity and growth. Leadership goes hand-in-hand with strategy formation, and most leaders understand the fundamentals. Culture, however, is a more elusive lever, because much of it is anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns.

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For better and worse, culture and leadership are inextricably linked. Influential leaders often set new cultures in motion and imprint values and assumptions that persist for decades. Over time organization’s leaders can also shape culture, through both conscious and unconscious actions (sometimes with unintended consequences). The best leaders I have observed are fully aware of the multiple cultures within, which they are embedded, can sense when change is required, and can deftly influence the process.

 

Unfortunately, in my experience as a Business Advisor and  Organizational Coach, it is far more common for leaders seeking to build high-performing organizations to be confounded by culture. Indeed, many either let it go unmanaged or delegate it to the HR function, where it becomes a secondary concern for the business; What in my belief should not the case if HR understand its role and added value contribution. Leaders may lay out detailed, thoughtful plans for strategy and execution, but because they do not understand culture’s power and dynamics, their plans certainly go off the rails.

 

It does not have to be that way, as organizational culture can, in fact, be managed. The first and most important step leaders can take to maximize its value and minimize its risks to become fully aware of how organizational culture works.

 

Organizational culture is a system of shared values and beliefs that can lead to behavioral norms that, in turn, guide the way how members of an organization approach their work, interact one another, and solve problems.

 

Importantly, a distinguish can be made between organization’s espoused values, which are its stated values, from its operating organizational culture, which is the set of norms and expectations that drives the behavior of all members, including leaders, on a day-to-day basis. As you will see, although operating cultures are influenced by espoused values, the two are not necessarily aligned.

 

A constructive organizational culture is one that encourages members to work to their full potential, take initiative, think independently, participate without taking over, and voice unique perspectives and concerns while working toward consensus. In organizations with strong constructive cultures, quality is valued over quantity; creativity and curiosity are fostered in place of conformity and indifference; collaboration and coordination are believed to lead to better results than competition and silos; the bigger is emphasized over minutiae; and doing good is viewed as important than looking good or “being good”.

 

Experience show that yet knowing what types of cultures are effective and productive does not necessarily translate into acting on that knowledge or creating those kinds of cultures. The behavioral norms that guide the ways in which members approach their work and interact one another tend to stray further from the organization’s values as one moves down the organizational hierarchy. While this tendency might seem to suggest that the origins of culture disconnects - where behavioral norms diverge from values - are at the lower levels of organizations, research as well as experience have proven that the roots of such problems are usually embedded at the top.

 

Leaders affect culture . . .  and culture affects leaders

 

It seems more likely that the leadership styles of the respondents’ superiors - including their aggressive behaviors and nature of the feedback they provided - produced passive responses.  It is important for organizations to understand the thinking and behavioral styles were reinforcing.

 

Clearly, leadership styles shape culture and, reciprocally, culture shapes the thinking and behavioral styles of leaders. This type of causality is consistent with the notion of reciprocal determinism proposed by psychologist Albert Bandua (1978). Leaders can change their own behaviors, but changes are fragile if:  a). Their thinking does not change or b). environmental factors are nonsuppurative or point in another direction.

 

As noted in a recent Harvard Business Review article, many leadership developments programs today do not have significant impact on their target organizations because of deficiencies “in the policies and practices (environmental factors) created by top management”.

 

Such behavioral and environmental factors include not only the skills and qualities of leaders but also systems, such as those around reinforcement, performance management, and goal setting; structural features, such as empowerment and the distribution of influence; and technological factors influencing the design of jobs.

 

All these factors send signals that translate into the shared beliefs held by members of an organization regarding what is actually expected. The emergent behavioral norms and expectations may be inconsistent with the organization’s stated values and preferred culture and stand in the way of even elegant programs designed to change leaders’ behaviors.

 

Consequently, to achieve improvements effectively and sustainably in performance, development initiatives must simultaneously address leaders and members as individuals and the organization as a system in a way that is consistent with the organization’s stated values and preferred culture. This does not imply that everything must be changed all at once and right away. Rather, the members of an organization need to see from a leader’s initial changes that a different set of behaviors is truly expected and will be supported. This is much easier said than done, particularly when leaders are unaware of their own thinking and behavior and how they affect-and are affected by-the organization’s culture.

 

By intentionally internalize a constructive cultural norm, leaders can map the impact of their organizational culture on their business and assess its alignment with strategy. In this regard also how, organizational culture can help leaders achieve change and build organizations that thrive in even the most trying times.

 

 

Source: ‘Creating Constructive Cultures; Leading People and Organizations to Effectively Solve Problems and achieve Goals, by J. L. Szumal and R.A. Cooke.