There is much talk these days of “culture change”. Organizations desire to be more nimble, more innovative, more pro-active, more market focused. How to get there is always the stumbling block.
Rather than culture change, I prefer the concept of culture shift. I don’t believe that you can make a wholesale change of all that you have been, and replace it with something shiny and new. Culture is too deep, too embedded, too much in your organizational DNA. You might shift parts of your culture, or shape it, though. If you think of a human body, we’ve figured out how to give someone a new heart or a new kidney – but the essence of what makes a person remains.
Organizational culture is an ecosystem. It is just like my yard and flower gardens – something is going to grow there. What grows there depends on what I chose to plant (or not), the quality of the soil, the amount of water and sunshine, and the care I take in ensuring that invasive weeds don’t take over.
It was an amazing thing, last summer, in the wake of the tornado that struck our home, to see what happened in my yard. There was no time to plant, weed or tend. Heavy equipment ripped out big swaths of lawn. Sunshine reached parts of the yard which in the past, shaded by 100 year old oak trees, had only known shade.
Things grew – fast and furious. Weeds sprung up with a passion; weeds I had never seen before. And they grew everywhere. My carefully tended hostas and ferns withered and died in the harsh sunlight. And it was dismaying, in spite of 20 years of careful tending, how one season of neglect quickly eroded the progress made to date.
As it is with my yard, so it is with your organization’s culture. What you sow, you reap. And then you must diligently tend and nurture what you do want, and weed out what you don’t. Leaders shape the culture every day – with every action they take, every decision they make, every policy they enforce, every policy they ignore, every hire they make, and every employee they dismiss.
Can you shape the culture? Absolutely – it begins with clarity on the culture you want to create and getting leaders aligned with what needs to happen to do that. Ask yourself:
- What is the kind of culture that gets us the results we want?
- What elements of our culture serve us well?
- How do we ensure those elements thrive?
- Are there elements of our culture that are no longer working for who we want to be?
- How can we weed those elements out?
- What do we need to do, day in and day out, to move us toward the culture we want?
