There are no Systems for Culture
It's an art not a science
The Science and The Art of Business
I write about systems in business. How you take an input, apply a transformation to it and produce an output. It's the outputs what make a company successful. I'll continue to write about those. Subscribe if you want to learn more. But today I want to put that idea into context. Outputs are the science of business. And if that's all there was to it, everyone would be successful. After all, anyone can make elephant toothpaste. It's just science.
[Elephant toothpaste is the subject of some really cool videos. Some short and some long but I digress.]
There's a science to crafting a strategy. But culture is said to eat strategy for breakfast. Or lunch. Depending on which misattribution you ascribe to https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/05/23/culture-eats/
Outputs are the science of a business. Culture is the art.
Culture is the unwritten rules about how your company operates. Culture is about what you incentivize, reward, or punish. Culture is the connection or disconnect between what is formal and what is actually done. Culture includes the following aspects of your company's operation:
Speed
Incentives
Decision Style
Risk Tolerance
Structural Integrity
I don't mean moral integrity, but rather whether all the parts of your company culture support each other. For example, a decision style that relies on consensus is usually in conflict with a culture of speed. The less structural integrity your culture has, the harder it is for new people to assimilate, and the more power is given to company politics and individual relationships.
Where Does Culture Come From?
If there's no system for culture, how does it happen? In most small to medium businesses (SMBs) the culture is simply an outgrowth of the owner's personality. Without conscious intervention, it will just evolve. Often an owner's beliefs are unexamined and non-conscious. There's an assumption that "this is how the world is", rather than "this is how I believe the world is."
The most fundamental beliefs that affect your company culture are your beliefs about people.
Do you believe people are inherently good or bad? Sure they're both, but what do you believe is the baseline? What do you believe will happen if people are left to their own devices? How do you think will they react in a catastrophe?
Hitler bombed the civilians of London in the blitz because of his belief that such a catastrophe would cause mass hysteria in the populace as everyone looked out for their own self-interest and tried to survive even at the expense of their neighbor’s lives. This, he thought, would make it easier for his military to triumph.
Churchill and Roosevelt also subscribed to this belief which led to the firebombing of Dresden. In the 1960s and 70s the US military dropped three times as much firepower on Vietnam (largely on civilians) as they dropped in the entire Second World War, hoping to break the morale of the citizenry.
In all these attempts (and others) the results failed spectacularly. Instead of hysterical masses looking out for themselves, people banded together to help one another and in many cases, they increased industrial output for the war effort. This reaction to catastrophe is actually quite common.
Rutger Bergman discusses these ideas in his wonderful book showing that humans are hard wired for good despite what popular culture (especially in the west) has believed for millennia. The book, Humankind: A Hopeful History proposes that perhaps the reason our species out lived all the other humanoid species we used to share the planet with, was that we have a natural tendency to cooperate, support, and learn from one another.
What Does That Mean for Your Business?
In 1960, Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise which asked the question:
“What are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?”
He said there are basically two approaches which he called Theory X and Theory Y.
Theory X is based on the belief that the typical worker has little ambition, avoids responsibility, and is individual-goal oriented. They won't work without rewards and punishment which must be meted out by management.
Theory Y is based on the belief that employees are internally motivated, enjoy their job, and approach work as an avenue toward personal accomplishment or even fulfillment. Management's task is to create an environment where the company goals align with those of the employees.
Many management practices have their roots in one or the other of these beliefs, even when they are not explicitly stated. And company culture evolves from such beliefs as well.
If there's no system for culture, what can you do?
An entire approach to changing company culture is beyond what we can cover here. But the first steps are to examine your beliefs and determine if the culture in your company needs to change. Decide if you want to change your culture. If you do, be aware that it's not easy or quick. It requires that you define your culture based on visible behavior and actions. I wrote about that HERE so I won't repeat it. But I will say that just doing a values exercise is not enough.
Running a company well requires both the science of outputs and the art of culture.
If you want to see how a coach can help with both the science and art of running your company, I’ve got a free 45 minute session you can schedule HERE.
PS. No guarantee I can help. But we won’t know till we talk.