Intro
Corporate culture is not as mysterious as we often make it out to be.
To see this, however, we must first admit certain things leadership often does not want to admit. Chief among these—surprise, surprise—is what actually determines culture.
From Schein to Marx
Executives tend to treat culture as a sort of branding exercise, as something they can simply speak into existence. This attempts to reduce culture to stated values, to the middle layer of Schein’s popular culture model.
Schein’s pyramid begins at the top with visible artifacts. This is followed by a layer of stated values, beneath which are assumptions or unconscious beliefs. As this so strongly suggests an iceberg, we will here show it as such.
This model is useful as a congruence check. While itself a valuable exercise, it leaves us hanging by not going further. After all, where do assumptions come from? When asking a similar question on Twitter (er, I mean “X”), Matt Barcomb pointed me to the Results Pyramid. Googling this brought me to the book Propeller. Here, corporate culture is defined as the sum of the experiences, beliefs, and actions that enable an organization to achieve key results.
In other words, business value (results) is created by getting people to change their behavior in value-adding ways (action). People take action informed by their beliefs, and their beliefs are largely driven by their real-world experience. Beneath assumptions, then, lies experience. This gets us closer, but we still need to go deeper. How do we change people’s experience?
My own preferred model is the Marxist concept of “base and superstructure”. The idea here is that culture and cultural byproducts are largely (though not only) a manifestation of underlying economic realities and incentives. Thus, if we want to change the cultural superstructure, then we need to target the underlying economic base.
We need to change what is being operantly conditioned by the punishments and rewards in the environment. The base is a given power dynamic acting in the world. It generates superstructure as an experiential lens and culture grounded in the prevailing base dynamic. Superstructure stems largely from the economic base, the structure, and also from past superstructure. The model is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s refreshing. And most of all, it’s honest.
People largely do what they are incentivized to do. This isn’t some earth-shattering revelation. We already know this—we just often act like we don’t. Consider for instance the famous Goldratt quote from The Haystack Syndrome: “Tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way…do not complain about illogical behavior.”
Executives want to keep culture change initiatives confined to superstructure, to things like narratives and values and branding. They want culture change while keeping the existing power dynamics that actually generate culture unchanged. In other words, they want culture change for free.
While dodging what determines culture and leading with what doesn’t, they simultaneously pretend the issue is “complex”. With apologies to the Cynefin, saying something is “complex” is often just an excuse. To change culture, the company’s operating system (how things actually get done), we must first admit that culture isn’t talk—and that includes corporate values.
It is here that I take issue with Schein’s model. It is not that culture is more than values, as Schein asserts, but that, as Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales found in their 2015 study, a company’s stated values are largely irrelevant to its culture. In the concept of base and superstructure, stated values are superstructure. Yes, there might be a formal, stated culture, but that doesn’t mean as much as we tend to think. It doesn’t matter as much as the structure (the economic base) at play.
What mostly determines a company’s real culture is: 1) what people are actually rewarded for; and 2) the perceived integrity of leaders, which depends on their behavior (not their messaging). Borrowing a model I originally learned from Accenture, this allows us to update our iceberg, improving upon the Schein pyramid and bringing it more in line with the concept of base and superstructure.
Words and Music
What is incentivized is policy—all else is lip service. When the lip service does not match actual incentives and leadership behavior, the organization is incongruent. As Gerald Weinberg put it, its “words and music don’t match”. When we listen to the lip service, we let the words drown out the music. That’s a mistake. We need to listen to the music. The music dictates the culture. It’s the signal. The words are often noise. When we get better at ignoring the words and finding the music, things get a whole lot simpler.
Executives should realize they do themselves a disservice when their words don’t match the music. Remember the Results Pyramid above. If what executives tell us doesn’t match our experience, then that will impact our beliefs about them and about the organization itself. When executives tell us culture is square when the music is triangular, that impacts their own perceived integrity and trustworthiness, which ironically is one of the determining factors of actual culture.
When words and music don’t match, it smells like, well, bullshit.
When executives pretend their superstructure branding is what determines culture, they assume they have some spell-casting power they do not actually possess.
When executives ignore this, they not only waste time and money on culture-change initiatives that are doomed to fail, but they tarnish their own reputations as well.
Borrowing a concept I learned from Senn Delaney, when leaders convey such incongruence, they cast a negative “leadership shadow”. This negative shadow darkens their reputation and creates a culture of drama and mistrust.
Conclusion
Companies actually tell us loud and clear what their real culture is…when we listen to the music.
If a company incentivizes staying busy above increasing throughput, then it is telling us that in all honestly people staying busy is more important than throughput. That’s the culture.
If a company says it values agility while only rewarding velocity, then that’s the culture.
If a company claims it prizes innovation and fearless risk taking but punishes failure, then it’s a risk-averse culture, regardless of the lip service.
Or, to quote the great Alan Cooper, if a company says it values UX while asking UX Designers to justify their ROI, then they don’t actually value UX or design, end of story.
We need to learn to listen to the music.
We need to admit that culture isn’t talk.
Charles Lambdin 