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The Problem with "Organizational Culture"
For a term so widely used, "organizational culture" is exceptionally hard to pin down. Experts and employees alike struggle to define it, leading to its overuse as a catch-all label for any and all organizational issues. Jesse Price, a senior consultant at Spencer Stuart, even calls culture the "garbage can" of organizational life, where everything we dislike or cannot explain gets tossed.
This ambiguity is a problem for several reasons:
- It's a catch-all: It becomes a label for any negative aspect of work without requiring a deeper diagnosis.
- It has unknown or multiple meanings: As research from Harvard Business Review has shown, when asked to define culture, people offer vague or widely differing answers. This lack of a shared definition makes productive conversation difficult.
This presents a central dilemma for leaders and practitioners: If you cannot clearly define a thing, how can you effectively change it?
If You Can't Define It, You Can't Change It
Continuing to use "culture" as a vague term to justify actions can waste time and energy with little to no lasting impact. Superficial, one-dimensional approaches to culture change rarely succeed because the phenomenon is highly resistant to full-frontal assaults.
Edgar Schein, a pioneering researcher in this field, defines culture as the "learned, shared tacit assumptions on which people base their daily behavior." It is the result of shared learning and practices that, over time, become part of a collective unconscious that continues to drive behavior. To effect change, we must focus not on the outcome we label "culture," but on the processes that create shared learning and influence behavior.
An Effective Approach to Influencing Culture
A useful starting point is to stop using the word "culture" to describe problems and instead examine the underlying forces that shape those outcomes. This requires an interdisciplinary mindset that looks across four interdependent contexts to diagnose organizational outcomes.
The Four Lenses for Diagnosis
- Anthropology: What forces shaped the formative history of this organization?
- Psychology: Why do individuals and groups behave the way they do?
- Sociology: How do the members of the organization interact with each other?
- Management Science: What practical tools can be used to influence the organization's overall effectiveness?
By cross-referencing these disciplines, we can develop a more holistic understanding of the challenges at hand.
The Results Pyramid: Where to Focus Efforts
Management consultant Roger Connors provides a practical model called the "results pyramid" to show where change efforts are most effective. The pyramid has four levels:
- Results
- Actions
- Beliefs
- Experiences
Too often, management tries to force change at the top of the pyramid by mandating new Results (e.g., "we need a collaboration competency") or new Actions (e.g., "assign a collaboration agent"). These interventions rarely have a meaningful or lasting impact.
Connors argues that substantive change comes from focusing on the bottom of the pyramid. Lasting change requires orchestrating Experiences where people can personally feel the benefits of new ways of working. These positive experiences, in turn, help shape new Beliefs about what is possible and how the organization should function.
For example, one organization seeking to improve collaboration created a year-long leadership program. Executives met in functionally diverse small groups to discuss topics like trust and emotional intelligence (Experiences), which led them to believe they could create lasting change (Beliefs). The relationships forged in these groups had a spillover effect, creating a more enriched and collaborative network throughout the company.
Conclusion: Culture Is an Outcome, Not a Target
Attempting to change "culture" directly is a noble goal, but it often leads to frustration. As practitioners, we must educate stakeholders that culture is an outcome of other organizational dynamics. Changing it is a long-term process.
Our goal should be to identify the levers that influence culture's formation. By orchestrating experiences that allow people to discover and reinforce new behaviors, we can guide the organization from its current state to a more desirable future, making "culture change" an organic result rather than a forced mandate. ""