Posts Tagged with "culture"

#2: How a culture of meetings proliferates.

An abundance in both the number and duration of meetings, while not inevitable, is strongly correlated with company size and age.Read more →

#12c: How high turnover damages performance and culture.

More damaging than direct loss of investment in your employees, but less visible, is the effect of high turnover on team performance and company culture. A team that loses a key member not only loses their expertise, but also suffers a loss of cohesion.Read more →

#13: Company values, organically created.

Within a company, the values of its culture are not those that are written but rather the values that are regularly modelled and rewarded. Note also: what is not rewarded? What behaviours are punished?Read more →

#13a: Culture, values, and performance variation across companies.

An employee's at work experience is greatly affected by their local environment, yet a company's performance does not comprise only the sum of its employees' individual experiences. Performance variation has been found to be stronger across companies than within them.Read more →

#13a1: To improve individual performance, improve team performance.

Individual performance follows a power law: the best outperform the worst by an order of magnitude. A manager is unlikely to change her people in a meaningful way, so it is unlikely for low performers to become high performers and shift the distribution (at least, within a company or team).Read more →

#13b: What is culture?

What is culture? It is a consistent set of patterns for thought and behaviour. It is your company's shared language. It is your group's norms — for example, how meetings are run, or how feedback is given.Read more →

#13b1: How understanding company culture helps you succeed.

Culture is multi-layered and pervasive; this has several implications for how to succeed within a company.Read more →

#16: Incremental change is the predominant form of change.

Success and failure are not absolutes. Goodness — in art, in expertise — is a spectrum. The world changes in increments. There are few major leaps in any endeavour; most progress comes incrementally.Read more →

Reference #89: How Netflix Reinvented HR

Culture mismatch is a common issue when trying to instil a company's culture. It is particularly common in startups; the desire for both casualness and high-performance creates conflict.Read more →

Reference #139: Peopleware

Performance variation is stronger across companies than within them.Read more →

Reference #155: Peopleware

High-turnover companies have a culture of short-term thinking.Read more →

Reference #175: Peopleware

DeMarco and Lister offer a few approaches to improving a meeting-heavy culture:Read more →

Reference #198: The First 90 Days

Joining a new company is much harder than being promoted from within.Read more →

Reference #200: The First 90 Days

Culture is a consistent set of patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting. It is grounded in their shared assumptions and values.Read more →

Reference #202: The First 90 Days

When joining a new company, you can benefit from finding a cultural interpreter.Read more →

Reference #208: The First 90 Days

When learning about and leading an organisation, you must consider the following domains: technical, interpersonal, cultural, and political.Read more →

Reference #236: The First 90 Days

It's important to not only secure early wins but to get the right wins in the right way.Read more →

Reference #242: The First 90 Days

People and organisations can only absorb so much change at once.Read more →

Reference #243: The First 90 Days

Changing your organisation likely means changing its culture.Read more →

Reference #248: The First 90 Days

Your organisation is an open system. It is affected by the external environment — such as customers, competitors, and suppliers — and by the internal environment — including morale and culture.Read more →

Reference #291: The First 90 Days

It is valuable to have a network of trusted advisors, both within and outside your organisation. To start, cultivate three types of advisers: technical advisors, cultural interpreters, and political counsellors.Read more →

Reference #406: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture covers "pretty much everything" a group has learnt as it evolved. Culture exists at many levels of observability, arranged roughly as follows from most to least observable:Read more →

Reference #407: Organizational Culture and Leadership

You can define culture as the accumulated shared learning used by a group to solve problems of external adaptation and internal integration — how the group handles change and interacts with the rest of the world, and how the group interacts with itself.Read more →

Reference #408: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Since culture is a product of shared learning, to understand a group's culture you must understand its history.Read more →

Reference #409: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Certain elements of culture cannot be easily changed. These are the basic taken-for-granted assumptions; they are the earliest shared learnings, and they provide meaning and stability.Read more →

Reference #411: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture is socio-technical. It solves for issues of internal integration (how the group works together) and external adaptation (strategic, problem-solving). Effective organisations align, if not integrate, the external and internal dimensions.Read more →

Reference #412: Organizational Culture and Leadership

One of the great dangers in culture change efforts is to assume that external issues are separate from culture and instead focus on internal issues. Here, internal issues are the "mechanisms by which a group makes life pleasant for itself".Read more →

Reference #413: Organizational Culture and Leadership

With time and shared learning, culture becomes more than shared behaviour. It becomes a shared way of talking, thinking, and perceiving the world.Read more →

Reference #414: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The concept of culture as a learned phenomenon of a group implies it possesses the following characteristics:Read more →

Reference #415: Organizational Culture and Leadership

New members of a group are taught only surface-level aspects of culture. As they gain permanent member status, they are taught more of the culture. One way to reveal deeper shared assumptions of a group is to observe or interview long-standing group members.Read more →

Reference #416: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture cannot be inferred from behaviour alone. Behaviour is determined both by cultural predisposition and by external environmental circumstances. Only after uncovering and understanding the deeper layers of culture can you say whether a behaviour is or is not an artifact of the culture.Read more →

Reference #417: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Macrocultures are the cultures of nations, ethnic groups, religions, and other kinds of large social units.Read more →

Reference #418: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural learning is mediated by leadership behaviour. For example, a leader may provide (model) a behaviour the group is not exhibiting but should be. Such cultural learning may also occur through a high-power leader, such as a founder, demanding a new behaviour to achieve some purpose.Read more →

Reference #419: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture can be analysed at several different levels of visibility. From most observable to the most deeply embedded, the levels are as follows: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions.Read more →

Reference #420: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Artifacts of culture are both easy to observe and difficult to decipher. Without additional information, you will not be able to reconstruct what an artifact means to a group.Read more →

Reference #421: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Your interpretations of an unfamiliar group's artifacts — what you see and feel — are projections of your own cultural background.Read more →

Reference #422: Organizational Culture and Leadership

All group learning comes originally from an individual's beliefs and values on what should be (and the gap between that and reality).Read more →

Reference #423: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Certain beliefs and values can only be confirmed by social validation — that is, the shared social experiences of a group. Consider a system of religious and moral beliefs.Read more →

Reference #424: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Like other beliefs and values, those confirmed through social validation provide comfort and meaning to a group's members. But they may not be correlated with actual performance. They may even be negatively correlated.Read more →

Reference #425: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Espoused values and behaviours in an organisation often reflect desired behaviour. Yet there is often a gap between desired behaviour and observed behaviour. To get a fuller picture of culture and correctly predict future behaviour, you must understand the basic underlying assumptions.Read more →

Reference #426: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Basic group assumptions generally cannot be confronted or debated. Hence they are difficult to change.Read more →

Reference #429: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When dealing with someone whose cultural assumptions differ and conflict with yours, the solution is not to declare either party's cultural assumptions "wrong". Instead, aim to find a third cultural assumption congruent with both parties.Read more →

Reference #431: Organizational Culture and Leadership

To change culture, leaders must have a detailed understanding of their culture. They must especially be able to identify the stable elements that have been the source of the company's success.Read more →

Reference #433: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture is morally neutral. Despite what our cultural prejudices may tell us, there is no inherently right or wrong way to do things.Read more →

Reference #434: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Organisational culture often reflects both the originating national macroculture and the underlying technology of the business. It cannot be understood without looking at the macrocultural contexts in which the organisation exists.Read more →

Reference #436: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In his 2001 study, Hofstede surveyed IBM employees across all nations in which they had offices. He identified six dimensions of culture across which nations can be compared:Read more →

Reference #437: Organizational Culture and Leadership

All societies value both individuals and groups, in that neither make sense without the other. Yet cultures differ dramatically to the extent their espoused norms and values reflect deeper assumptions.Read more →

Reference #438: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Individualistic societies place high value on personal accomplishment and ambition, condone personal competition, and define intimacy and love in personal terms.Read more →

Reference #439: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Power distance is the degree to which people in a hierarchical situation perceive a gap in social and psychological status. It is also the perceived difference in ability to control each other's behaviour.Read more →

Reference #440: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The 2004 Globe study of culture derived nine basic dimensions of culture:Read more →

Reference #441: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Languages (and the culture of the language users) fall on a spectrum of "high context" to "low context". In a high context language, a word or phrase can be more difficult to interpret since its meaning depends on context.Read more →

Reference #442: Organizational Culture and Leadership

England (1975) found, when comparing managerial values across different countries, that managers tended to be either pragmatic or moralistic. Americans were often pragmatic managers who seek validation of an approach in their own experience.Read more →

Reference #443: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every culture has a basic time orientation toward the past, present, or future. Anglo-Americans have been found to primarily orient toward the near future, while the Japanese sit at the extreme of long-range planning. Time orientation also affects organisations. U.S.Read more →

Reference #444: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultures view time on a spectrum from monochronic to polychronic. Most managers in the U.S. have a monochronic view of time. Time is viewed as an infinitely divisible linear ribbon that can be divided into compartments. Within each compartment of time, only one activity can be performed.Read more →

Reference #446: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural assumptions about time affect how space is arranged. For example, monochromatic time is linked to efficiency and so space is arranged to minimise wasted time.Read more →

Reference #452: Organizational Culture and Leadership

One approach to handling multicultural issues in a group is to focus on "cultural intelligence". This concept proposes that building understanding, empathy, and the ability to work with other cultures requires four capacities:Read more →

Reference #453: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A "cultural island" is a situation in which the rules of having to maintain face are temporarily suspended. Here, a group is allowed to explore its own values and assumptions freely, especially those around authority and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #462: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leadership is the management of culture. The role of a leader with respect to culture varies with the stage of growth of an organisation.Read more →

Reference #463: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A model for the stages of group evolution was summarised by 1956 by Bennis & Shepard, then described "poetically" by Tuckman in 1965 as forming, storming, norming, and performing.Read more →

Reference #464: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a group realises (or has their leader point out) that their strength comes not from homogeneity but from variety, they move from norming to performing.Read more →

Reference #469: Organizational Culture and Leadership

While frequent, it is not a given that founders automatically impose their assumptions on the organisations they create. It is possible for a founder to create an organisation that does not depend on her beliefs and values. This depends on the founder's needs to externalise her assumptions.Read more →

Reference #471: Organizational Culture and Leadership

An organisation is a socio-technical system. How it deals with survival in the external environmental, and how it organisations itself internally to deal with human problems of integration, are equally part of its culture. These problems are highly interconnected.Read more →

Reference #473: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Strategy must consider and make sense within its organisation's culture. Shared assumptions about an organisation's identity are important elements of culture, and so limit strategic options. A strategy must be consistent with the organisation's assumptions about itself.Read more →

Reference #475: Organizational Culture and Leadership

There are six primary mechanisms through which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation:Read more →

Reference #476: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The mechanisms through which leaders primarily embed their beliefs — and in so doing teach their organisation how to perceive, think, feel, and behave — directly create the "climate" of that organisation.Read more →

Reference #477: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In addition to the six primary mechanisms by which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation, there are also six secondary reinforcement and stabilising mechanisms:Read more →

Reference #478: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The most powerful mechanism a leader has for communicating what she cares about is systematically paying attention to it.Read more →

Reference #480: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Whereas in the founding stage of an organisation, leaders create culture, in more mature organisations they are constrained by culture.Read more →

Reference #481: Organizational Culture and Leadership

That certain groups are slow to adopt new technology may be due to strong cultural forces. For example, a doctor may refuse to use a keyboard and computer as their use reduces her eye-to-eye contact with patients.Read more →

Reference #482: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Among other subcultures, every organisation contains three generic subcultures: operators, designers, and executives. Without explicit management, misalignment and conflict may arise between these subcultures as they have different functions and face different environmental problems.Read more →

Reference #483: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The executive subculture is unique among the generic organisational subcultures in having to manage other functions. Its members must hence understand and manage the culture of those functions. They must manage other subcultures.Read more →

Reference #484: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In an organisation's early stage, the emphasis of culture is on differentiating that organisation from its environment. It is the psychosocial "glue" that holds the organisation together and gives its members identity.Read more →

Reference #485: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Absent major external stressors, and if the founder remains for a long time, early stage company culture evolves in small increments by assimilating what works well. This occurs through two basic processes: general evolution and specific evolution.Read more →

Reference #486: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leaders in early-stage organisations can affect culture change by systematically promoting insiders whose core assumptions align better with the culture the leadership is trying to move towards than the status quo.Read more →

Reference #487: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a mid-stage company whose founder has moved on is faced with a crisis (as slipping performance or an acquisition), a new executive leader is often brought in. This leader can fail in three ways:Read more →

Reference #488: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture serves different functions over an organisation's lifecycle. Leader therefore must consider different issues of culture change at each stage.Read more →

Reference #489: Organizational Culture and Leadership

If you seek to learn about an organisation's culture, an effective approach is to act as a helper or in a consultant role. Members may see researchers as outsider and hence not give an accurate picture of culture — for example, by exaggerating to impress you, or by hiding information.Read more →

Reference #490: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The validity of clinically gathered data on culture has two components: factual accuracy and interpretive accuracy.Read more →

Reference #491: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Undertaking a cultural analysis has risks. Internally, members of the organisation may not be able to handle the insights into their own culture.Read more →

Reference #492: Organizational Culture and Leadership

There are several issues with the use of surveys to measure culture:Read more →

Reference #493: Organizational Culture and Leadership

While SaaS providers of culture diagnostic tools may suggest that culture can be changed at the pace of rapid surveying, the process of culture change is often longer and more involved. Diagnosis is only a small piece.Read more →

Reference #494: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When facilitating a qualitative culture assessment, the helper or consultant should avoid becoming an expert in the group's culture. They should instead operate as a process-consultant.Read more →

What you need to know about culture

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. While the truth of that statement is contested, it's clear that culture matters. Your role as a leader is to manage culture. But what is it? It's more than the vibe. It's more than the values. Here's what you need to know.Read more →