Yesterday's Tom Peters! Times had a very interesting article by Darci Riesenhuber the Transformation Architect - What Is It Worth to Understand Culture?
A couple nuggets from the article:
- What is culture? Simply, it is the culmination of shared values, assumptions, and beliefs tacitly and/or explicitly expressed within an organization.
- Why is it important to understand? Because, it determines how people behave and how work gets done. Let's consider how values and beliefs drive behavior using a consumer analogy: I need milk. The convenience store is closer than the grocery store (I value my time), but it is more expensive (I'm frugal). The grocery store offers more options (I value choice). I decide choice and price are more important than convenience, so I drive to the grocery store. While there, I evaluate my options: Whole milk is tasty, but I am weight conscious so I eliminate that option. While I am frugal, I am also health conscious. Although soy milk is more expensive it has additional perceived health benefits, so I choose soy. While, at some point, these decisions were conscious, as long as all factors remain the same and the reward for my behavior is greater than the cost, I continue to behave consistently and, eventually, subconsciously. What happens when my grocery store discontinues soy milk, the price goes up, or traffic becomes unbearable? Suddenly, I am forced to re-evaluate my behaviors to stay consistent with my values in order to achieve the outcome I find desirable.
- How does it relate to strategy and affect business outcomes? Recognize that the same values driving individuals' buying behaviors also drive their behaviors at work. We should ask ourselves, then, "Why don't we spend as much time analyzing the values of our talent pool to predict on-the-job performance and satisfaction as marketers do the values and emotional drivers of their target market to determine buying behaviors and loyalty?" Employees will behave in accordance with their values, regardless of your business strategy.
- high growth business strategy creates an unstable environment that requires individuals to take risks, an individual valuing stability, security and consistency will feel anxious and begin to seek ways to remedy their discomfort.
- In some cases, they are able to adapt and learn the behaviors necessary to succeed. In others, the personal transformation is simply not possible and they fail. The best way to avoid this is to determine "fit" during the selection process.
- Strategy changes throughout the life of your business, so must your culture. Changing your culture is not impossible, as many would believe. You just have to carefully evaluate and adjust the factors that influence culture, such as your systems (reward, IT), structure (reporting, physical), policies, HR practices (selection, training), communication, leadership-style, etc.
