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Culture is often defined as “the way we do things around here”. Organisational culture is the leaders responsibility as “culture is the shadow of the leader”. If this is true the question is how is the culture embedded and transmitted by leaders? Edgar Schein in his book “Organizational Culture and Leadership” provide some clues. In the book Edgar lists the following:
“Primary Embedding Mechanisms
- What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis
- How leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises
- How leaders allocate resources
- Deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching
- How leaders allocate rewards and status
- How leaders recruit, select, promote and excommunicate
Secondary Articulation and Reinforcement Mechanisms
- Organizational design and structure
- Organizational systems and procedures
- Rites and rituals of the organization
- Design of physical space, facades, and buildings
- Stories about important events and people
- Formal statements of organizational philosophy, creeds, and charters”
As leaders we are responsible for our organisations and teams culture. We cannot blame others, we cannot blame the past, we must take responsibility to create a new future. Reflecting on the above lists what shadow are you casting?
Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Culture, Change, Business
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Culture is a funny thing. I work at a company with several departments across several floors in the same building. I have been leading one department for about one year, creating people that rock. They would die to get good results. They really do work hard every single one of them. They all love their work. The overall happiness according to a survey is 9.7 out of 10. I was headhunted to a new department that did not work as well. The culture is so different. People fight for their rights, they are suspicious to leadership, they are negative to a lot of the things they do, overall happiness is 6.4. And when I try to change this they freak out… It is amazing how different a culture can be within one company. Culture building is an extremely interesting topic, and it takes time to change. That is the cool challenge as a leader.
I could not agree more with Edgar Schein. Here’s a mini extract from my book ‘Sex, Leadership and Rock’n'Roll – Leadership Lessons from the Academy of Rock’ on the subject. It is a pithy story about how even low level symbols of culture are sometimes read as being more significant than the grand gestures:
We learn well from best practice – see Prêt à Manger example previously discussed. We can also learn just as much from bad practice. Finding examples of bad practice is usually easy. Look at the BBC’s ‘BPR’ initiative. I’m sure you will know that the business jargon BPR stands for ‘Business Process Re-engineering’. In this case however BPR refers to an altogether different process known as ‘Biscuit Paradigm Retribution’. This is where someone in the BBC noticed that the annual bill for biscuits was around half a million pounds. Now it takes a lot of time to eat that amount lot of biscuits!
So to implement cost savings, biscuits were struck from the Corporate Culture – which took the metaphorical and literal biscuit! A rather wise competitor CEO said at the time ‘It will be the worst half a million pounds he has ever saved.’ The amount of wasted time BBC staff spent moaning about the biscuit cuts will have easily outweighed the biscuit bill. But there is no column for ‘corporate indigestion’ on the balance sheet.
Thanks for the article on leaders and organization. My favorite (although they are all important) “Primary Embedding Mechanism” is “Deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching.”
I was thinking about this some more. I have been listening to a set of Audio CD’s about great military leaders. The phrase comes to mind, “Speed of the Leaders, Speed of the team.” As you look through history you see it over and over that the culture that the leader sets up impacts the who organization. Great leaders are able to impact great numbers of people in positive ways. ie. Churchill in WWII with the people of his country. Good challenge for us all to think about the culture that we are creating.
Great post, George. Thanks for reminding us about some of Schein’s important work.
In my experience, the first three on your list have far more impact than the rest. What leaders spend time and money on are they way we send messages about what’s important. Critical incidents are emotion incidents so the behavior and values we show there embed more deeply and more quickly than what happens in normal times.
Great post, I agree with your list, as a behavioural science practitioner I am an advocate of the importance of aligning leadership behaviour with your strategy. Coaching leaders to apportion their time based on what they are saying is a priority.
For example don’t tell everyone that you think quality is your number one priority, and then spend your time asking only about productivity. If you do your people will know through your behaviour that productivity is your priority, not quality as you may claim.
This looks like a good book to pick up. I’d have to agree with some of the other posters here in that a leader has a huge impact on an organization’s culture. In fact, in the Army we don’t often talk so much about “organizational culture” as we do about “command climate,” which is more reflective of the role a leader has in crafting a culture in an organization.
I think the key though is to recognize that culture is not some abstract thing that an organization or a company “has.” Instead, it is the “people” who make it up that have the culture. Since leaders influence people and it is the people who have the culture, this is the key reason why leaders have so much influence over the organizational culture.
Thanks for bringing this book to light,
-Kyle