Time and time again I have clients who want to talk to me about helping them become a different organization. They want to become something they currently are not… They want to be the “employer of choice”, “the high quality provider” of whatever goods or services they offer, they want to become “the market innovator”. Whatever the goal or the end game, they have ambitions to become a different version of themselves. In a time when standing still is the developmental equivalent of moving backwards, it’s understandable that envisioning a different future is on the radar of most organizations today. So the concept of “change or die” could not be more true than it is today.
Before the conversation with my client or potential client gets too far, I have asked them to describe their new envisioned future and to tell me a little about why they would like to become what they desire. Then we start to talk about who they are now and what they think is good about their current state and what they think needs to change. It takes almost no time at all before we are engaged in a discussion about their current culture. Now culture can be defined in many different ways, but for the purposes of this post I’ll refer to culture as having two parts; the “formal culture” – those rules, policies, procedures, and structures, that govern how we work within an organiztion; and the “informal culture”, how work really gets done in the organization, what the unwritten rules are and to quote another author – “the smell of the place”. It’s the composite of the organization’s norms, expected behaviors, real values (as opposed to what’s espoused by senior management), tacit (undocumented) knowledge and informal people networks.
Most clients are quick to point out their formal culture and they tell me all about their policies and procedures, their hiring policies, their training programs, their organizational structures and reporting relationships. And after I have been there for a little while, and talked to people in the organization and asked some questions based on my experience, I start to get a sense of the informal culture too. Because I am not part of any of my clients’ organizations, it’s pretty easy for me to figure out the informal culture-because I don’t live there. I am not as influenced by the corporate speak of an organization, I let my senses inform me about what the organization is really like. What do I see? What do I hear about how people work together or about how work gets done? What is the leadership of the organization like in terms of skills? What actually happens in the organization when they think no one is watching?
Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well if that is true, and an organization wants to be something it currently is not, then it has to do things differently. Pretty straightforward. Yet one of the most frequent things I observe is that the measuring stick organizations use to evaluate implementing anything new that will help them BE different and get to that envisioned future - is their current culture! All that gets accomplished in that process is that they waste precious time and hold themselves back and reinforce who the organization is today and it doesn’t get them one single step closer to who they want to be.
It has been my experience that organizations literally fall in love with their cultures…and as everyone knows, when you’re in love you really don’t see the object of your love clearly. It’s hard to see the flaws or to see exactly what isn’t working – especially if leaders don’t have the skills that would allow them to have a greater level of objectivity. They see only what they want to see…because they’re in love. But it’s the others around them who often have the most clarity…the objective outsider who is not in love – who can see what’s really happening. This is one of the reasons that I do what I do and also why organizations that want to change who they are, really need an objective outside perspective – preferably with science-based tools that can help them really move from where they are – to where they want to go, as opposed to just moving the furniture around… which certainly IS activity, but it’s not forward movement. Yes, breaking-up is hard to do – but it is a necessary step to get to that new future.
