How to Make It More Visible Instead
by Jeremy Nulik
You’ve likely heard this one, but bear with me. Two young fish are swimming in a pond. An older fish swims toward them and says, “Hey guys. Isn’t the water great?” Both of the young fish reply that indeed the water is great. The older fish moves along. The young fish continue swimming along for some time. Then one of the young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
That parable has been made popular by the likes of David Foster Wallace and, no doubt, countless other column writers in search of a metaphor. I would have presented a different one to you, but the story offers the perfect picture of how an organization’s culture can be understood. Your culture - the shared assumptions and beliefs that govern the behavior of your organization - is ubiquitous yet invisible. As such, few leaders have useful ways of articulating the values of that culture. Most of us swim in the waters of our culture completely unaware of the context that surrounds us.
When tasked with trying to formulate values to describe the behaviors in our organization, we typically rely on Successories-like words: Integrity, honesty, innovation, persistence. They decorate the office cubes and homepages. The trouble with these single-word descriptions (outside of their entropy) is that they fail to really describe behavior. Precisely how does one suddenly do innovation? The culture thus remains ill-defined and invisible.
None of this may matter to you. A business can survive with an unarticulated culture for years. And all will seem well. That is, until something changes. The market shifts. The foundations of your industry are threatened. You’ve grown, and you have a new vision. By now, a lot of leaders understand that a necessary component of change must involve the people in the organization. You know, the whole misquoted Drucker “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” thing. Perfect. The implication here is that you can change the way the humans within your organization behave and all will be well. That implication relies on two assumptions:
1. The humans in your organization understand your vision.
2. You can profoundly change humans and force development.
As well-intentioned as most culture change management strategies may be, they are often based on these two assumptions. And it turns out that the more likely two assumptions you can make are the following:
1. The humans in your organization do not understand your vision.
2. A force-feeding of development is usually met with, at best, resentful compliance.
It turns out that the smart brands who find ways to enfranchise people through change start with those two assumptions. Although it may seem counterintuitive, the ways to help the people within your organization to support your change is to first be curious about what behaviors or values truly describe your culture. And then begin using those behaviors in support of your vision.
Instead of a list of words, you must have a compelling set of behavior statements to nurture a culture in support of change. To interrogate those behaviors and end up with something that is not just a list of attributes, you can begin with a few prompts to your key stakeholders:
1. Tell me a story about a time you felt the best during your work. What happened? What kinds of behaviors were present?
2. Tell me about a time that things fell apart. What happened? What was absent?
This will at least give you a start in revealing what is still invisible. Your goal would be to end up with a series of statements that would be instructive for the organization. Avoid, if possible, the list of morals or attributes. Those prompts are but a beginning. And you can then begin to find what parts of your culture already support your vision and the need for change. n
Jeremy Nulik (jeremy@bigwidesky.com) is evangelist prime at bigwidesky, a human business consultancy, in St. Louis, Mo.
Submitted 6 years 299 days ago