Culture Change Through Conversations

When I entered the world of work it never would have occurred to me to ask a prospective employer “what’s the culture like here?”, and that’s despite the fact that I’d just graduated with a degree in Cultural Anthropology. Times have changed, but why?

Given this new reality, it’s no wonder that organizations and CEOs continue to view culture as a critical concern.

For leaders and consultants who are accustomed to tackling big problems head-on, culture change can feel like trying to nail Jello to a wall, for good reason. As culture change agents, unless we can help organizational leaders think and act more laterally when it comes to culture change, we’re virtually guaranteed to miss the mark at delivering radical changes.

In part, this is due to the qualities of culture.

One factor is that culture is deep. Although we often point to the artifacts of organizational culture that are visible to us, like the physical office environment, the way people dress at work, or how punctual people tend to be, these grow out of invisible layers of shared meaning and assumptions.

Even the most energetic culture change programs cannot succeed if they are solely top-down, because trying to control what people believe is nearly impossible. Culture change programs that seek to do this lead employees to feel that the organization sees them as objects needing to be “fixed.” Resistance naturally follows, as does cynicism about future ‘culture change’ initiatives.

Mandating behavior changes from the top might appear to work for a time, particularly if organizations also align incentives and penalties. But when you push a system, it pushes back, even if it’s not immediately visible. Counter-cultures pop up, and people find inventive ways to assert themselves and their beliefs.

A larger societal example is Prohibition as compared to anti-smoking efforts. Prohibition banned all alcohol in the United States in 1920, and gave us the speakeasy subculture, and a thriving cross-border black market between Canada and the US (you’re welcome America!) before being abandoned. Smoking, on the other hand, has been approached incrementally and from multiple social and economic channels, resulting in a social attitude shift towards this behavior that has been far more effective at achieving widespread change.

Culture is also emergent and thus surprisingly stable — while leaders certainly have an outsized influence on a culture, they don’t transmit it one-way like a radio signal, which they can control. Rather, culture is transmitted between each person in the culture: people learn how to be a member of the culture by interacting with and observing others in the workplace (not just what they say, but what they do). Then, when they act in accordance with the observed culture, they become transmitters themselves, and further reinforce the legitimacy of the prevailing culture. Culture isn’t made once, it is constantly being made and remade like a giant feedback loop reinforcing the existing culture. And that makes it resistant to change.

A simplified explanation is that each bird is paying vigilant attention to the movement and behavior of its neighboring birds and adjusting its flight accordingly in real time. If you get enough of a change in direction in one part of the group, it can spread across the entire flock. This is a reasonably good analogy for the emergent nature of culture.

This might all seem theoretical, but it actually has enormous practical significance for culture change work in organizations.

Although it will often feel counter-intuitive, when you help your clients avoid sweeping, top-down programs, and instead use a lateral approach in combination with leadership commitment and modeling, you can work with, rather than against these qualities of organizational culture.

They tweak their transmission, not for a day, but for 30 days, and then further after their next conversation and commitment. This allows us to get inside that self-reinforcing feedback loop and work with it, rather than against it. It also provides visibility into what is actually happening in your client’s organizations through the data collected by the platform, allowing you to deepen your impact as a culture change advisor.

This kind of coordinated, deliberate, and persistent approach results in the accrual of smaller, less dramatic changes, that over time can allow the culture to reach a tipping point within the organization. New behaviors become part of the culture, rather than being forced in from the outside, and they proliferate through the organization because of that.

As you work with your clients and prospects, organizational culture is likely to be top of mind. This directive may be a challenge for some, but for others, will represent a massive opportunity for increased client impact, shifting cultures, and better organizational outcomes. The key will be a mindset shift for you and your clients — away from top down directives and “culture change initiatives,” toward embracing culture as an emergent system that only shifts through regular, sustained, incremental change.

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