My colleague Beth Mayer recently wrote about our experience at “Managing Yourself & Leading Others,” a professional development workshop we took through the Harvard Division of Continuing Development. Her post focused on the importance of flexing one’s leadership style and it was a part of the session that I found to be most helpful. However, another valuable part of the course was learning more about organizational culture and the importance of working effectively within the context and norms of the company.
Oftentimes when people think about corporate culture, they want to know what an environment is like. For Instance, sometimes people will ask what kind of culture does your organization have? Is it heads down all the time? How frequently do you meet as a team or have team lunches? These are valid questions, but culture is bigger than just the fun stuff.
Ed Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, defines culture as “a pattern of basic assumptions, invented, discovered or developed by a given group, as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore is to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”
So let’s break this down and look at this definition using an example with our team.
For instance, at Communiqué PR, we have certain processes that we routinely follow when we receive a phone call or an email from a potential new client. This includes learning about the company’s business and communication objectives, and asking a host of other questions before moving to the next phase of developing a proposal. We consider this methodology to be valid because we have an excellent track record of winning new business. Therefore, when new members join the company or team, they are taught our process of approaching business development.
According to organizational development experts, the more thoroughly a person understands an organization’s culture, the more effective he or she can be. Research has also found that there are some common characteristics where groups form cultural norms. These include the following:
- Innovation and Risk Taking: Does the group have a high or low tolerance for innovation and risk?
- Attention to Detail: How much attention to detail is expected? Is this of high or low importance to the group?
- Outcome Versus Process Orientation: Does the group care more about steps to take or the outcome?
- People Orientation: Does the group care about people’s individual preferences?
- Team Orientation: Does work get done in teams or by individual contributors?
- Aggressiveness or Competitiveness: Does the group value competitiveness or is this frowned upon?
- Stability: Does the group have a preference for maintaining the status quo over growth?
When you’re leading a group or team — or interviewing to join a new company — you might want to think about your own biases in relation to the cultural norms. For instance, do you have a propensity to innovate and take risks? Do you have high or low attention to detail? Do you prefer more outcome-oriented work or process-oriented work?
One good way to getter a better understanding of your personality and preferences is to take the Myers-Briggs personality test. This will help you better understand your personal preferences and style so that you have a better understanding of how you get energized, how you take in information, how you come to conclusions and how you approach the outside world — including your coworkers. Different personality types have very different preferences.
Finally, in our class we discussed how leaders create strong cultures. Researchers have found they are often a function of the stability of the group, the length of time they’ve existed, the intensity of their learning experiences, how they learn and are rewarded for learning, and how the strength and clarity of assumptions by founders or leaders of the group help. Rewards for learning might include positive reinforcement or avoidance conditioning.
In what kind of culture do you thrive?