informal coalitions

"What matters in this company is ..." - Some risks and paradoxes in a statement of organizational culture

In the previous two posts (here and here), I have looked back at a workshop I ran with a new management team. Its aim was to surface and explore the taken-for-granted assumptions within the relevant part of the ‘parent’ organization, as a basis for reflection on the managers' aspirations for their own business. I felt that this raised awareness would help them to understand the impact that they would have, as managers, on the emergence of cultural assumptions within the new business.

Six main themes had been identified during the workshop, which the most senior manager present had then translated into a set of ‘cultural’ statements.  As explained in the earlier posts, he had couched these in wholly positive terms, whereas the original source data was much more negative in tone.  This threatened to shift the focus of the subsequent sessions away from an exploration of the underlying dynamics of organizational culture, to a more conventional ‘design, build and communicate’ approach to cultural change.

Organizational culture – in at the deep end

In a previous post, I wrote about a workshop on cultural assumptions that I had facilitated with a new management team. These ‘deep cultural patterns’, when surfaced, were expressed largely in negative terms.  Nevertheless, the senior manager felt compelled to couch these in positive language when playing them back to the team. The six statements are reproduced below.

What matters in this company is:

• #1 - Being seen to deliver and being associated with success.
• #2 - Being politically astute, with the right connections and able to present information in the most effective way.
• #3 - Being a team player.
• #4 - Having a confident, positive, can-do attitude.
• #5 - Being recognised as a key player in the company's business
• #6 - Putting business success first.

In contrast to the ‘rawness’ of the themes that the team had actually identified during the workshop, these statements were essentially aspirational. 

Managers are part of the culture too!

During a workshop that I ran with a new management team, we set out to try to identify some of the taken-for-granted assumptions (within their part of the wider organization) that were tending to channel everyday sense making and action taking down familiar, culturally-acceptable ‘pathways’.  I felt that the raised awareness of these ‘global’ patterns would help the managers to reflect more insightfully on their own behaviours, and the impact that these might have in reinforcing and/or potentially changing ‘unhelpful’ patterns.

The everyday 'talk' of leadership action

An assignment that formed part of my engineering studies in the 1970s, included the requirement to reflect and comment upon the following proposition: 

"Talk and paper are an engineer's most important tools."

The same statement could be applied to leaders - especially as regards the role of 'talk'.