- If a group of people all goes to tend a garden
but everyone has different aims
you're going to generate a lot of activity.
But you're not likely to get
a nice looking set of vegetables.
If people aren't coordinating what they're doing,
planting, weeding, watering, trimming,
and harvesting, you're going to have a lot
of spindly plants, or no plants at all.
In the same way, if an organization doesn't have
a consistent culture, you're not likely to get
where your strategy is intended to take you.
Let me tell you three things that I know
are true about organizational culture.
First, what a lot of organizational strategists
don't want to hear is that there already
is an organizational culture
defined by the actions of all the individuals
in the organization.
It doesn't really matter what top management says
it should be, it already is.
The strategists first job is to understand
how the culture already operates today.
Second, some organizations have multiple cultures.
Whether the organization is a rollup of
separate companies, or because of geographical variances
or some other aspect of the organization's history,
cultures can be schizophrenic.
That can lead to cognitive descents
where people in key roles have a hard time
knowing how to make the right decision.
Understand where the culture varies
and what those differences are.
Third, existing culture are almost impossible to change.
People won't suddenly wake up tomorrow
and act totally differently.
We're creatures of habit,
and we don't usually change easily at all.
Now, as a strategist, you may think that
changing the organization's culture is above your pay grade.
But if you're responsible for helping to define
organizational strategy, and ensuring that it can be
widely executed throughout the organization,
you can't ignore it.
Now, let's go back to our garden.
Think of the organization's culture as the ground
in which you're sowing the seeds of the future.
A consistent culture offers fertile ground
increasing the likelihood that the seeds
will rapidly grow.
But an inconsistent or poorly defined culture
means you'll have a much harder time
getting those seeds to take root.
In other words, your strategy will live and die
on the landscape of the organization's culture.
When it comes to defining a consistent organizational
culture, you might think that startups have it a lot easier
than all the other organizations.
Well that's initially true.
Startups get to define their values from the beginning
and, most importantly, they get to hire the people
who match that cultural profile.
But in their haste, rapid growth organizations
often make very expedient hiring decisions.
The result, culture often starts to erode.
Pat Lencioni, author of Five Dysfunctions of a Team
and other great books, has a great way
of articulating this tradeoff.
If one axis of a worker's organizational
fit is performance,
and the other axis is cultural fit,
there are several key insights to be gained.
It's pretty clear what the ideal is
high performance fit
and high cultural fit.
As for low performance fit, and low cultural fit,
well, obviously those are people
who never should have been hired in the first place.
Low performance fit, but high cultural fit.
Those are people who can probably be trained
so they can be moved upward.
But, low cultural fit and high performance fit
that's usually a mistake.
Rewarding high performers that don't fit the culture
is creating a cancer in the organization.
And it's almost impossible
to train someone to become a cultural fit.
Every organization has, what I call,
a portfolio of workers across each spectrum.
If you want to understand just how consistent
or inconsistent your organization's culture is,
here's an exercise for you.
Choose any dozen people
distributed throughout your organization
and request each of them to write
five bullet points
describing the organization's culture.
One way to frame this is to ask,
what are the five most important ways
that people can perform successfully
in this organization?
If you get a set of answers
that are reasonably consistent, congratulations.
You have a pretty good idea
what the garden looks like
for you to distribute your seeds.
But,
if you get a set of widely diverging answers
you're going to find it a lot harder
to disseminate a strategy that's going to get results.
You'll need to work much harder to understand
that landscape, and to identify the kinds of
sub-cultures throughout your organization.