Understanding Your Group s Culture

Culture surrounds and influences the other four elements of organizational architecture, shaping thinking about strategy, structure, systems, and skills. Indeed, the most important business problems you will face in your new situation will likely all have a cultural dimension.

Your organization s culture consists of the norms and values that shape team members behavior, attitudes, and expectations. An organization s culture cues its people about what to do and not do. Often, as discussed previously, there are fundamental assumptions about how things work that are so embedded and long-standing that people are not even aware of their existence.

Cultural habits and norms have an especially frustrating way of reinforcing the status quo ”no matter how much the status quo needs changing! So, it is vital that you diagnose problems in your group s existing culture and address them early. Only then can the culture fully support the group s strategy and align smoothly with the other pieces of the group s architecture ” structure, systems, and skills.

To understand your group s culture, you must peer below the surface-level signals of group culture, such as logos, styles of dress, and ways of communicating or interacting, as well as the social norms, or shared rules that guide behavior. Search for the deepest assumptions group members take for granted. For a new leader who is trying to align the various dimensions of his or her group behind the identified strategy, the most relevant assumptions involve the following:

Power. Who do employees think can legitimately exercise authority and make decisions?
Value. What actions and outcomes do employees believe create value? Value can take such forms as making profits, satisfying customers, promoting innovation, creating supportive working environments, and so forth.

How do you tease out fundamental assumptions? To understand assumptions about power, look at how decisions were made in the past. For example, who deferred to whom? To understand assumptions about value, look at how people spend their time and what energizes them most. For instance, do team members seem to focus most on forging positive, collaborative relationships with one another? Do they make customer service a priority? Do they spend most of their time trying to generate promising new product ideas? Is precision in execution valued?

Initiating Cultural Change

You can t hope to do more than diagnose the culture and begin to work on changing some behaviors in the first 90 days. The following list sets forth five ways to begin cultural change. Whichever methods you use, aim for cultural changes that will align with your group s strategy, structure, systems, and skills.

Change performance measures and incentives. Change the metrics by which you judge success. Then align employees objectives with those new measures. For instance, consider changing the balance between individual and group incentives. Does success require people to work closely and coordinate with one another ” for example, in a new-product development team? If so, then put more weight on group incentives. Do people in your group operate independently ”for example, in a sales unit? If so, and if their individual contributions to the business can be measured, then place more emphasis on individual incentives.
Set up pilot projects. Give employees opportunities to experiment with new tools and behaviors. For example, set up a task force to experiment with an innovative approach to production or to tackle problems with distribution.
Bring in new people. Judiciously bring in people from the outside to stimulate creative thinking and discipline among group members. A new person could be a substance expert in a key area ”for example, new-product development or R&D management. Alternatively, you could bring in a process consultant ” someone with a strong business background, but who focuses on running the process of group dialogue and supports your efforts to implement change.
Promote collective learning. Expose group members to new ways of operating and thinking about the business ”for instance, new perspectives on customers and competitors . One idea is to engage in some benchmarking of best-in-class organizations.
Engage in collective visioning. Find ways to bring people together in creative ways specifically to envision new approaches to doing things. For example, schedule an off-site meeting to brainstorm ideas for improving existing processes.