Before diving into what organizational culture is, a disclaimer: A fixed, universal understanding of what organizational culture is does not exist. Tharp points to a study as an example of how complicated it can be to define organizational culture. The study, he says, identified 54 different academic definitions of organization culture between and In other words: shared beliefs within an organization that have been proven to work well in external and internal communication, are embraced by management and employees, and are used as guidelines when addressing problems or other situations.
Schein states that culture can be seen in three key ways within an organization: in observable artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions.
Google is a great example of a company that uses observable artifacts to define its organizational culture. Google works well as an example here, too. These are defined as:. Indeed, even defining what a creative culture looks like can be challenging. But such an approach is dangerous. But such objects are only part of the picture.
In the s, psychologist Edgar Schein of the Sloan School of Management developed a model for understanding and analyzing organizational culture. Artifacts are the overt and obvious elements of an organization. Yes, foosball and free food are also artifacts. Artifacts can be easy to observe but sometimes difficult to understand, especially if your analysis of a culture never goes any deeper. That's a very strong artifact indicator, it won't tell you what they believe as a company, but it will talk a lot about what you're going to expect as you're part of that organization.
Anyone know anything about Fog Creek Software? Joel Spolsky, who's a software engineer, was one of the co-founders, and as a software engineer, he believes that engineers need time and space to create flow, so every single engineer has their own office. Their belief, his belief, as a founder, was built into the company culture and it manifests itself in the form of an artifact, which is, offices for each engineer. Pretty strong indicators of the culture in both cases, so we can use that.
Another interesting take on environment is the business model, I won't dive into this too much. A question I often ask of a company, as I look at them, is how do they make money? This will often have a strong influence on how the leaders will shape the culture of the company. If you're building a product, and you're selling this product, subscription model or something off the shelf, you'll have different economic pressures on the leaders, than say, if you're building a social media platform, and, you know, your revenue model is built on advertising.
It's not going to be definitive, but it will provide some influence over the culture and how it evolves. Let's talk a little about structure. Has anyone ever seen this cartoon? This has been around for probably a long time, but it's awesome. What it is providing is a caricature of various organizational structures for six big tech firms.
I say characters because this is the artist's playful take on some of the cultural beliefs of this organization, but I like the term character because it's rooted in truth, exaggerations of the truth.
We can see down here in Apple, this is historical, at this point, but it shows in this big red center being Steve Jobs controlling everything in the organization.
You have Oracle over here with their oversized legal department compared to their engineering department, Microsoft showing the contention between the different groups, etc. These are fun, playful take on organizational structure, but org structure can actually provide a useful artifact to understanding the company. For instance, this is a question I kind of will ask of an organization, it's how large is engineering compared to other parts of the company. Going back to the business model, if it's building a product that's for selling the enterprise, you should expect there's going to be a sales department, you should expect that there's going to be a customer success department.
How big is that compared to your engineering team? The reason that's important is you want to understand a bit how decisions are made in the organization. How do they go about deciding whether or not to release a feature, who's deciding, who has the authority to decide some major decision within an organization? Which departments have influence? Going back to that Oracle example, you can guess that, maybe in the artist's mind, not mine, the legal department at Oracle is more important than the engineering department.
Then how information is communicated, which can be very important way of understanding how a culture evolves. Org structure can tell us something else about the company. Has anyone heard of the parable of the blind men and the elephant? For those who haven't heard of this, I think it's an Indian parable that talks about a group of blind men hearing about this animal called an elephant. They all travel to seek out this elephant, since they're all blind, they can't see the whole elephant, so they each feel parts of the elephant and they start describing what they're feeling.
One of them is feeling the trunk, the tail, the leg, the body, the ear. Each of them has a very different take on what the elephant looks like. When you're looking at and you're talking to people in an organization, this is very similar to different departments.
Specifically, to answer Dan's question from earlier, my perspective is from a JavaScript client-side part of the organization. My team works on the client of Slack, and so that is our perspective or my team's perspective, whereas, may be very different than someone in marketing. Another piece of information about culture is the reality is that organizations have sub-cultures.
These sub-cultures also have their own beliefs, their own biases, their own behavior that they exhibit, and they reward, and their own perspective. If you're talking to somebody from an organization, you want to get an understanding of what that organization believes, you have to understand where they are in the organization, and kind of caveat everything they're saying, based on that.
Another interesting artifact is managers. Managers have power, I'm lumping in here, managers, I'm talking about leaders, founders, anyone who has people that are reporting directly to them. People managers are extremely potent artifact to understand the culture, especially of that team, of that organization, and potentially, of that company. The reason is that managers are responsible for a bunch of things. As a manager, I'm very much aware that I'm, first and foremost, model the behavior that I want my team to exhibit.
I know that the way I behave will be sometimes subtle, sometimes strong signal to the rest of my team, "This is what I expect from you, so you can behave just like me. This is what I accept,". I'm responsible for hiring as a manager, so I have to be very careful. As a manager, most of us are going to hire people that look, and feel, and believe the same things that we do.
Unless you're conscious of that, and you take steps to combat that, and hire people that maybe are different, that complement the team, that flush out the team, you fight those implicit bias, you're basically hiring a team and building the culture of the team based on how you're hiring. We're responsible for rewards, we're responsible for firing. These are two very important signals that we send, if I hire somebody, if I reward somebody like I talked on one example of rewarding Bob, I'm not just rewarding Bob for his great distributed systems work, but I'm rewarding Bob and sending a signal to everyone else that all of Bob's behavior is acceptable.
I think this is an important message, which is, when you reward somebody as a manager, you're rewarding all of their behavior, and everyone else is paying attention to that. Same with firing, you send a very strong signal about what is accepted and not acceptable in your organization.
How many people have worked with somebody that you thought should have been let go, maybe six months before they even were or they were moved off? How many of you who put your hand up, decided to leave or were thinking about leaving because that person wasn't gone? Which is why managers are also responsible for retention.
This is another important signal, I love the quote from Andy Dunn, the founder of a men's clothing company called Bonobos, which is, "The most important people to your culture are those who leave. They're an artifact, you have to caveat your understanding of the culture based on their experience.
Another thing when I'm talking to a manager or looking at a manager to understand the culture of their team or their organization, I also want to understand their history. What's their background? Because it influences how they will go about leading their team, for instance, I mentioned that I was managing in JavaScript client-side team.
Just to base it on the fact that I manage a team that's doing client-side JavaScript work now, you might gain an understanding of what you think I believe as a manager. If you looked at my history, you'll see that this is actually the first time I've managed a client-side JavaScript team.
In the past, I've done all Java, backend tools, developer productivity. I did a bunch of consulting in the Washington, DC metro area for the U. I have a background that actually can indicate my beliefs, buy it's a little different than my current role, it's always good to look at a leader and say, "Where do they come from? I have a background in Agile and Lean, I'd follow some people like Dan North and read everything he publishes, and regurgitate those to everyone I knew, biases like that.
The last artifact I want to touch on is tools. Tools are interesting because if we go back to this understanding of culture, our values dictate our behaviors. Simply removing Confederate monuments would not change history. Specifically, Ms. While, in a literal sense, Ms. Sanders is correct that actions today can not change the events of the past.
That said, history has shown that the destruction of artifacts can certainly have a tremendous impact on the course of the collective narrative in the future. Organizations in the business world also acquire unique histories over time. These beliefs then become immortalized in a variety of artifacts within the organization that serve to reinforce those beliefs.
As your organizational journey becomes etched in the annals of history and your culture develops and embeds throughout the team, inevitably, the artifacts of the organization will evolve to support and reinforce what is valued in that particular culture. Artifacts can take many forms across your organization. The stories that are told within your organization can serve as artifacts to help people understand what is acceptable or not in your organization.
These stories perpetuate a perceived reality from person to person and shape collective beliefs over time. These stories can have a tremendous impact on behavior within your organization and can serve as enablers to driving performance or can serve to derail you- depending on what values are conveyed through those stories.
So, how do leaders create a narrative that can serve to enable behavior change in ways that support the intended direction of the organization? In even the most dysfunctional organizations there are certain things that work well. I have never encountered a group where absolutely no glimmer of hope existed.
So, when I talk about rewriting the history of your organization, this is not to be interpreted as needing to completely wipe away everything that got you to the place you are today.
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