Culture Clash
As I wrap up my time in my current role, I've been reflecting on the impact I hoped to have on my team and my company, and where I fell short of my ambitions. I'm not quite naive enough to think that shifting the way people approach their work is easy (or even fully achievable), but I vastly underestimated the strength of cultural inertia and organizational calcification. Relevant reading and musings below.
1. The Curse of Culture
Company culture is a hot topic right now, as there's a lot of competition in the employment market (and the market in general). A lot of companies point to their culture as their source of success. This oldie but goodie from Ben Thompson (which I got to via this gem and this gem) has a great take:
As with most such things, culture is one of a company’s most powerful assets right until it isn’t: the same underlying assumptions that permit an organization to scale massively constrain the ability of that same organization to change direction. More distressingly, culture prevents organizations from even knowing they need to do so.
Yikes. Who doesn't love a nice self-inflicted hamstringing and blinding! So, how does a company avoid that fate? Through progressive, inspiring leaders maybe?
When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the same coin; neither can really be understood by itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture...
Great. A Catch-22. Of course companies select leaders that "fit" the company culture, and then those leaders are unable to see how that culture might be hampering their company's success or productiveness. And if they did see it, why would they do anything to try to change it? They were chosen to perpetuate that culture, and are rewarded for doing so... until the bottom line starts to suffer.
2. Proof of Conway's Law
Culture is a fuzzy thing, but org structures aren't. You can see the little tree diagrams in Workday or whatever terrible tool HR has chosen. So how do culture, org structures and what a company produces relate? A joint study from researches at MIT Sloan and HBS which includes a very nice summary:
...Products tend to “mirror” the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization’s governance structures, problem solving routines and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions.
If you want examples of this Conway's Law in action, just look at the main navigation for any college's website, or a CPG company's list of products. You'll probably get a nice peek into their organizational structure, and it's exceedingly unlikely that it matches how you engage with them as a customer (or just as a regular human).
Organizational coupling can be analyzed along a variety of dimensions, however the most important of these fall into three broad categories: Goals, structure and behavior (Orton and Weick, 1990). Organizational structure, in turn, can be further decomposed to capture important differences in terms of membership, authority and location. All these dimensions represent a continuum along which organizations vary in the level of coupling between participants. When aligned, they generate two distinct organizational forms, representing opposite ends of this continuum.
Goals, behavior, membership, authority... sounds like culture to me!
Our work suggests that managers of the innovation process must strive to understand the influences on their design choices that stem from the way they are organized. These influences are seldom explicit, but are a result of the interplay between a firm’s problem solving and information processing routines, and the space of designs that must be searched to locate a solution.
So the fuzzy thing of culture gets solidified through organizational structure, and the organizational structure then informs the end product. Which is probably why re-orgs are popular responses to stagnating growth, acquisitions, strategic changes, etc. Leadership's attempts to address the organizational constructions, but the cultural blueprint they're modeled after remains. Changing team structure (membership), reporting structure (authority), or seating structure (location) shifts the who around, but he what and, more importantly, the how remain largely untouched. Reorganizing teams and redefining goals are tricky tasks, but cake compared to shifting organizational behaviors. Behaviors are the root of a culture, and they're complicated and irrational and superbly human—they're the reason sociology, psychology, ethnography and scads of fields of study exist.
3. Trust > Control
Some companies are hip to Conway's Law and experiment with different organizational structures to help their teams create better products. For example, Spotify's product organization framework:
Most organizational charts are an illusion. Spotify’s main focus is community over the structure, rather than hierarchical structures. They found that a strong enough community can get away without volume structure. If you need to know exactly who is making decisions, you’re in the wrong place.
They cracked it! Kinda. The use of community as a foil to structure is interesting. Communities are networks built on relationships and trust—you know, people stuff. And building relationships and trust is an inefficient business, but it leads to resilience. Structures are fragile, but communities aren't. They can survive changes in membership (departures, deaths), changes in authority (democratically elected officials, despots), changes in location (diaspora, deportation). Structured teams are great for finite games, but communities are better suited to infinite games. Most companies still think they're engaged in the former (or at least they're set up as though they are), but some companies are discovering they're engaged in the latter.
4. Conversational Transformation
Ok, so, as mentioned previously, the highest ranked leaders (creatures of the culture) aren't likely to know what needs to change in the face of a shifting landscape. Erika Hall on her approach to digital transformation:
“Digital transformation” is the consulting term for overhauling a business operation to stay afloat as everything is being digitized and interconnected. This term became popular because “Oh shit! What the hell is even happening?” doesn’t fit on a Powerpoint slide as neatly.
Most companies/leaders at least have the self-awareness to know that something disturbing is afoot and want to protect themselves, but might not have the wherewithal to react appropriately to threats.
Everyone wants to innovate. No one wants to change.
Ayup! The looming specter of disruption/obsolescence/millennial tastes/whatever is hard to conceptualize, never mind tackle head-on. But everyone agrees that [insert your boogie man here] needs addressing... through innovation! It's a favorite corporate buzzword that usually references an ideal state or, worse, an ideal output. But in reality, innovation is an approach. One that relies on individuals with disparate expertise and diverse perspectives to respectfully collaborate and solve a tough problem.
People who engage in conversation tacitly agree to cooperate towards the implicit purpose of the exchange by taking turns and helping each other through rough patches. An awareness of the surrounding context (what we call “reading the room” even when there is no room) is essential. We converse much differently with a stranger in distress than with an old friend over coffee.
Fruitful collaboration and healthy conflict can be achieved through good conversational design: helpful, contextual, human.
5. Leading Without Authority
For all the cultural reasons mentioned above, the folks most likely to push for change aren't in formal leadership positions. So if not them, then who?
With flatter management structures, increased outsourcing, the move toward collaborative cultures, and the ongoing formation of cross-functional teams, the criterion for the job of leader is changing. More and more people are assigned to leadership roles in which they have no positional authority.
Well, what is a would-be change agent to do? A few rules of thumb from Forbes for how to "get others to willingly cooperate and engage, rather than following directives because you’re the boss:"
But in your role as Chief Influencer, the “warmer side” of nonverbal communication (which has been undervalued and underutilized by leaders more concerned with projecting strength, status, and authority), becomes central to creating the most productive workforce relationships.
Talk to people! A conversation is the fundamental unit of human relationships, and conversational norms and behaviors are key components of culture. Colossal structures like cathedrals inspire awe because they're not at human scale. Sweeping company changes, like re-orgs, feel startlingly supernatural as well. Perhaps that's why they fail to achieve their objectives. Maybe real cultural change can only happen at human scale, at the pace of 1-on-1 conversations. But how well does that match the pace of technological and market shifts?