Why is it Critical For Leaders to Understand the Culture of Their Organizations?
Employee motivation, Leadership November 11th. 2009, 3:37amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
In today’s fast-paced, global business environment it is easy for leaders to want to focus their attention largely on business factors that can be measured. It is much easier to make sense of a complex world if we are able to measure where we stand in relation to some metric.
What many leaders fail to realize is that what is often considered the “soft stuff” plays a critical role in the long-term success of their organizations.
Because it is more difficult to measure these concepts does not make them any less important. On the contrary, they become the potential Achilles’ Heels of organizations who think they are sailing along, full steam ahead.
Take for instance the organization that, after feeling the effects of the economic downturn, has decided to change their business strategy in an effort to regain lost market share, increase revenues and secure a solid foothold for future success.
The leaders of the organization painstakingly deliberate the new strategy, the metrics are in place to measure progress in each of these key areas, and employees have a clear understanding of where the organization is going. Unfortunately, what the leaders did not consider is whether their current culture, the one that got them this far over the years, aligns with the new direction. If it doesn’t, the organization risks sending mixed messages to employees about what is valued in the organization.
For example, if the organization operates with the conscious or unconscious belief that individual success is critical to success their HR systems and processes (rewards/recognition, recruiting/selection, compensation, performance management) are most likely set up in a way that reinforces individual accomplishment.
If the new strategy calls for more team-based coordination and integration in order to be successful these existing systems and beliefs about “the way we do things around here” need to evolve to reinforce team accomplishments. If they do not the organization runs the risk of telling people to behave and think one way while reinforcing conflicting behavior. It is not difficult to see how this situation may lead to disaster.
Leaders at all levels must have a clear understanding of what the organization holds to be true and valuable when attempting to initiate change. Some change requires only minor tweaks in order to reduce conflict and the resulting resistance, while other changes require a cultural transformation. These large-scale changes no doubt create a lot of anxiety in employees because what they have believed to be true for many years is now being called into question.
Leaders who understand this are better equipped to prepare for these situations in order to help employees break free from their existing mental models. They must create a safe environment for people to test out new behaviors and to see for themselves that they are truly what will lead the organization to success in the future. Over time, as the organization begins to see that this new way of doing things, in fact, leads to success it slowly begins to embed itself in the collective understanding of how things should work.
