Culture surrounds and influences the other four elements of organizational architecture, shaping thinking about strategy, structure, systems, and skills. Indeed, the most important business problems you will face in your new situation will likely all have a cultural dimension.
Your organization’s culture consists of the norms and values that shape team members’ behavior, attitudes, and expectations. An organization’s culture cues its people about what to do and not do. Often, as discussed previously, there are fundamental assumptions about how things work that are so embedded and long-standing that people are not even aware of their existence.
Cultural habits and norms have an especially frustrating way of reinforcing the status quo—no matter how much the status quo needs changing! So, it is vital that you diagnose problems in your group’s existing culture and address them early. Only then can the culture fully support the group’s strategy and align smoothly with the other pieces of the group’s architecture— structure, systems, and skills.
To understand your group’s culture, you must peer below the surface-level signals of group culture, such as logos, styles of dress, and ways of communicating or interacting, as well as the social norms, or shared rules that guide behavior. Search for the deepest assumptions group members take for granted. For a new leader who is trying to align the various dimensions of his or her group behind the identified strategy, the most relevant assumptions involve the following:
- Power. Who do employees think can legitimately exercise authority and make decisions?
- Value. What actions and outcomes do employees believe create value? Value can take such forms as making profits, satisfying customers, promoting innovation, creating supportive working environments, and so forth.
How do you tease out fundamental assumptions? To understand assumptions about power, look at how decisions were made in the past. For example, who deferred to whom? To understand assumptions about value, look at how people spend their time and what energizes them most. For instance, do team members seem to focus most on forging positive, collaborative relationships with one another? Do they make customer service a priority? Do they spend most of their time trying to generate promising new product ideas? Is precision in execution valued?