Understanding Corporate Culture Restructuring.
In business parlance, corporate culture is often treated as a monolithic entity, a singular phenomenon that universally affects an organization’s operations, employee morale, and overall performance. However, this singular perspective overlooks the complexity and diversity inherent within organizations. A more nuanced understanding acknowledges the existence of subcultures within the broader corporate culture. Here’s why we tend to oversimplify and why we should recognize the richness of corporate subcultures.
The Dominant View of Corporate Culture
The conventional understanding of corporate culture generally revolves around shared values, beliefs, practices, and norms that pervade an organization. This view is straightforward, easily digestible, and provides a unified framework for understanding and addressing behavioral dynamics within a business. It also helps establish a company’s identity and may be a powerful tool for leaders to inspire employees, foster unity, and drive organizational success.
However, viewing corporate culture as a singular entity is akin to looking at an iceberg only from above the waterline. The visible part might represent the official, stated culture promoted by management, but a more complicated network of subcultures often exists beneath the surface.
The Neglected Subcultures
Subcultures within a corporation can emerge from various factors such as functional departments, regional offices, tenure, leadership style, and even social circles within the company. These subcultures can have their norms, rituals, and beliefs that might differ — sometimes significantly — from the overarching corporate culture.
The concept of subcultures is often ignored for several reasons:
Simplicity: It’s simpler to consider culture as singular. It makes establishing and managing the company culture seem more manageable. Simplicity is one of the main reasons companies have an issue with diversity and inclusion. Managing complexity takes time, effort, patience, transparency, skill, and trust, often seen as too expensive or time-consuming.
Control: Leaders might perceive acknowledging the presence of subcultures as a threat to their control over the organization’s norms and values. If the company is autocratic, this is a significant factor because recognizing subcultures implies diversity, inclusion, and delegation of control and decision-making.
Unity: There’s a fear that recognizing subcultures could divide employees and disrupt the sense of unity within the company. This fear can become even more of an issue if, for example, the company’s cultural restructuring desires to develop uniformity in the name of simplicity; then, there will be significant conflict and a loss of creativity and innovation.
Communication: A single corporate culture aids in internal and external branding. It’s easier to communicate a unified narrative to stakeholders. Yes, communications require more thought, preparation, and clarity when recognizing the subcultures, but it is worth the time and effort.
The Value of Recognizing Subcultures
While the reasons for focusing on a single, unified culture are understandable, recognizing the existence of subcultures can offer significant benefits:
Resilience: Companies that understand and leverage their subcultures can be more resilient in the face of change. Subcultures can be incubators for innovation and adaptability. Recognizing subcultures can help you limit silos if managed correctly. When you limit the number of silos in an organization and encourage cross-departmental collaboration, shifting to market conditions and supply chain interruptions is much easier.
Employee Engagement: Acknowledging subcultures can improve employee engagement, as employees feel seen and heard in their specific contexts. We have been discussing employee engagement for well over 20 years now, and there has been little impact on the numbers. However, we will see significant changes if an organization can encourage multi-sub-cultural interaction.
Conflict Resolution: Understanding subcultures can help identify and address conflicts that may arise due to different norms and values within the company. Leadership must be willing to allow transparent, honest, and constructive communications between the subcultures to enable conflict resolution. Everyone must be willing to participate, and there should be no secret subcultures within the organization at any level.
Diversity and Inclusion: Recognizing subcultures supports diversity and inclusion efforts. It values the unique contributions and perspectives of different groups within the company. There is power in diversity and inclusion that will provide more innovation, growth, and profit when approached genuinely and transparently.
The view of corporate culture as singular is a simplification that overlooks the richness of experiences within an organization. Companies can foster a more inclusive, resilient, and engaging work environment by recognizing and engaging with subcultures.
However, this doesn’t mean that the overarching corporate culture is unimportant. It’s about achieving a balance — where the broader corporate culture provides a unifying foundation, and subcultures enrich it with diversity and dynamism. In addition to not recognizing subcultures, there are other reasons that culture restructuring plans fail. Below is a short list of what I believe are the critical ones.
10 Reasons Culture Restructuring Plans Fail
Creating a solid and vibrant company culture is crucial for the success and longevity of any business. A well-crafted culture-building plan can inspire and engage employees, foster innovation, and drive organizational growth. However, despite the best intentions, many culture-building initiatives fail to deliver the desired outcomes. This section explores ten common reasons business culture-building plans often fall short, helping you identify pitfalls and take proactive measures to ensure your culture-building efforts thrive.
Lack of Leadership Commitment:
One of the primary reasons culture-building plans fail is the absence of genuine commitment from organizational leaders. When leaders do not actively champion the desired cultural values and behaviors, employees become disengaged, and the culture-building efforts lose credibility.
Inadequate Alignment with Business Strategy:
Culture-building plans must be aligned with the overall business strategy. Employees may view the culture-building efforts as mere rhetoric rather than a genuine commitment to organizational success when there is a disconnect between the cultural goals and the company’s strategic objectives, if any are present.
Poor Communication and Reinforcement:
Successful culture building requires consistent and effective communication. If employees are not adequately informed about the culture-building initiatives’ purpose, progress, and impact, they may feel disconnected and fail to embrace the desired cultural changes.
Lack of Employee Involvement:
Employees should be actively involved in shaping the company culture. If culture-building plans are top-down and do not provide employee input and participation opportunities, they may feel excluded, leading to resistance and eventual failure of the initiatives.
Absence of Measurable Metrics:
Culture-building plans need clear and measurable metrics to assess progress and success. Without quantifiable indicators, it becomes challenging to track the effectiveness of the initiatives and make necessary adjustments along the way.
Inconsistent Application of Cultural Values:
When the company fails to uphold the cultural values it promotes consistently, employees lose faith in the authenticity of the culture-building efforts. Inconsistency erodes trust and undermines the impact of the initiatives.
Lack of Resources and Support:
Culture-building initiatives require adequate resources and support to succeed. Insufficient budget allocation, limited training, and a lack of dedicated personnel can hinder the implementation and sustainment of culture-building plans.
Resistance to Change:
Resistance to change is a common obstacle to culture-building efforts. Employees may hesitate to embrace new cultural norms, fearing disruption or loss of familiar practices. Overcoming resistance requires proactive change management strategies and a supportive environment.
Failure to Address Existing Cultural Barriers:
Culture-building plans must address and overcome existing cultural barriers within the organization. Ignoring or neglecting these barriers can impede progress and perpetuate an incompatible culture, rendering the initiatives ineffective.
Short-term Focus and Lack of Patience:
Building a strong culture is a long-term endeavor. Expecting immediate results or abandoning culture-building plans prematurely can lead to failure. Patience, persistence, and focus on long-term goals are essential to foster sustainable cultural change.
Conclusion:
Building a thriving culture is complex, but businesses can increase the likelihood of success by recognizing subcultures and avoiding these ten common pitfalls.
No, it is not simple, but genuine leadership commitment, alignment with business strategy, effective communication, employee involvement, measurable metrics, consistent application of values, adequate resources, change management strategies, addressing cultural barriers, and a long-term perspective are all critical elements for successful culture-building plans.
By proactively addressing these challenges, businesses can create a culture that drives employee engagement, fosters innovation, and ultimately contributes to long-term organizational success.
