BOTTOM LINE
Your culture has contradictions and competing commitments that create patterns that make you unable to live your cultural values fully. But if you can see them, name them, and then make targeted changes to processes or the way you use technology, you can overcome the negative effects. That’s culture change, and it’s the bedrock of leadership in the 21st century. Our latest book lays out the model for doing this, and our assessment, consulting, and coaching, and can help you make it happen.
THE DETAILS
When we think of culture, we tend to think about ideals, aspirations, and key principles. We think of culture as something that should be distilled down to a few key points—our culture values collaboration, accountability, innovation, trust, support, fun, etc. The list goes on.
And your culture is about those things. If you look around, I’m sure you’ll see behavioral evidence that those things are real and present in your culture. The challenge, however, is that your culture is almost certainly NOT about those things at the same time. Your culture contradicts itself. Everyone’s does. That is because your culture is made up of the behavior of humans, and we humans contradict ourselves all the time.
We are full of what adult development experts call “competing commitments,” like that commitment you have to maintaining a balanced life, which competes with your commitment to doing well at work and advancing in your career. If you push too hard on work/career, you’ll find yourself falling short of your commitments to your family or your health.
The only way to escape the negative impacts of the competing commitments is to see them and acknowledge them and then intentionally choose new behaviors that get you out of the trap. This is how adults continue to grow and develop, and this is also how you improve your workplace culture.
The first step is to acknowledge the contradictions. Acknowledge the fact that while people collaborate every day (as individuals), departments and layers in the hierarchy are really poor at collaboration. Acknowledge the fact that while you do a good job at moving quickly in today’s changing environment, you’re culture is probably pretty bad at fixing things that are broken or stopping things that are no longer adding value.
These contradictions are common. And if you’re not sure if you have these contradictions, then run a culture assessment. The data are typically quite eye opening. When our clients first see the culture patterns that are revealed in their data it’s a big aha moment. They say, “Wow, that’s us. That’s how we do things here. No wonder we’re struggling with [problem of the day].”
But don’t feel bad about the patterns. Everyone has some version of them. And remember, the competing commitments that drive the patterns don’t need to be eliminated. It’s okay to have commitments that compete—they just need to be managed. And you do that through the nuts and bolts of culture change.
As we argue in our latest book, culture change is easier than you think. Our “playbook” model will get you making intentional changes to the way you do things that will overcome the traps that are created by your current culture patterns. Like making some simple improvements to your project management practices can make workload and workflow more visible to people across the organization, and suddenly those requests for cross-functional collaboration start working better. Or being more disciplined about running after-action reviews following big projects will help you identify and fix the broken parts of your processes, which will increase your agility. As you fix the culture patterns, people start to be more successful. Results improve. Employee turnover drops. That’s the power of an awesome culture.
So embrace the contradictions in your culture. Call them out. Study them. Figure out what process, structure, or technology changes you could make that would reduce or eliminate the negative effects of the contradictions. Then make those changes and reap the rewards. Culture change is not some elusive alchemy, inaccessible to ordinary leaders. It is, in fact, the bedrock of leadership in the 21st century. Whoever changes culture the fastest, wins.