Old habits die hard!

Insights into Organization culture

Perception! In my opinion, the influence of this one world on our lives cannot be undermined at all. Your words are perceived in a way that may or may not coincide with what you intend to mean. Your behavior is perceived in a way which does not truly reflect your own personal self. The forces of perception are so strong that it is very easy to lose sight of oneself in the lure of altering perception in our favor. And probably, before you know it, things are too late and you would have forgotten your true self to become someone else with whom you cannot establish that connect. It takes a lot of courage and self-belief to stand up against this strong current and shape ourselves in a direction where we intend to go and not where the world wants us to go. One of the significant reasons why I love Manchester United as a club! Right, the stark switch from psychology to football may be out of the blue, but then the aptness of the example is striking. Clubs have come and gone with Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea and now, Manchester City. Well, the latter two haven’t gone yet but then Manchester United have stuck to their values about how football needs to be played and how a club needs to be run and this has enabled them to withstand the tests of time and competition to still emerge at the top.

Anyway, coming back to perception now, I believe what is applicable to individuals is certainly applicable to organizations as well. And, how does the perception of the company manifest itself? One of the important factors is organizational culture. What is organizational culture? Hopefully, as you read further, you are enlightened on the concept!

Intangible yet tangible

Organizational culture is something intangible. There is no real definitiveness about it, isn’t it? It is something out there, something ethereal which can just be felt by the employees but certainly gives you the impression that it is not something that you can catch hold of very easily and look to alter like the organization’s management structure, for instance. In one of the organizations that I worked for, the organizational culture was born more out of the nature of the employees from the company’s headquarter nation than anything else. Same would probably be the case for many companies in India except that cultures would differ from state to state!

In any case, the culture of an organization and its development is analogous to the course of a river. The origins of the culture are hidden amongst the proverbial hills and the culture manifests itself continuously based on external factors. As far as the organization is concerned, the most it can do is alter the course of the river flow. And that is exactly how it can make the intangible seem tangible. For instance, Google, as an organization may recruit the brightest minds but it still needs to provide the framework and foster an innovation oriented “culture”.

Also, the existence of a particular culture cannot be ascertained unless something goes wrong within the organization and the established status quo within the organization is disturbed.

Japanese or American ways

Toyota Operating System or Total Quality Management? Lean or Six Sigma? Or perhaps combine both lean and Six Sigma? Well, there are a lot of frameworks in place for most things but it is upon the organization to decide which framework to adopt. Even when a particular framework has been decided upon, it needs to be tailored to fit in with the organization’s needs. This was exactly the approach followed by Honeywell with the adoption of the Honeywell Operating System which was drafted after dozens of Honeywell staff spent two weeks at Toyota production plants and customized to suit Honeywell’s needs.

But, why are these concepts related to organizational culture in the first place? Well, the basic purpose of the whole exercise was to foster a culture of continuous improvement. The results out of the exercise are there to be seen now as Honeywell has experienced significant leaps in productivity and employee safety. And, in this process, if you can guess which task was the hardest to accomplish, it was not with respect to getting the HOS framework in place after months of deliberation and analysis. The hardest task was to get workers, many of whom had been doing the same job for decades, to adjust to a more decentralized power structure. This is precisely where organization culture poses a tremendous challenge when it comes to altering it. There is immense resistance within the company to any change attempts and unless there is a buy-in from all stakeholders involved in such a change, the implementation just cannot succeed.

Cultural Diversity

Truly global organizations, the so-called “multi-national companies” or MNCs, adopt a policy of diversity to foster the development of the organization culture within their purview. Such global organizations develop a sense of multiculturalism wherein people from diverse backgrounds are roped in to bring in diversity of perspectives. It is a bit like signing players for a football club wherein players from different nations and playing styles are brought under a single umbrella. The effect that this has when it comes to changing the organization culture is very beneficial for an organization. In a case where workforce diversity is not encouraged, the organization’s growth would probably be stunted because of a lack of adaptability and then, the organization has to be happy with what it has. Why? Because as much as the organization tries to expand its horizons, the internal resistance is so profound that it cannot be conquered. Just like the case of a company I wrote about earlier wherein employees were dominated by a particular nationality which tended to be rather lax in decision making instead of being proactive. This certainly had an effect on the organization’s growth in other locations worldwide.

Yet where diversity exists, it also needs to be fostered in a right spirit under a common framework of values else the result would certainly be chaos. It does take a lot of efforts to achieve this but then if applied successfully, the results would certainly be worth the efforts.

Well, that just about brings me back to organization culture and the notion of old habits dying hard. It is for an individual to decide if a long standing habit is indeed good or whether it needs to be shed. In a similar manner, the organization needs to evaluate and re-evaluate its work culture to check its conformance against organization values.