Do the Right Thing

We all know culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture is that imaginary constant force like gravity that guides the organization to act either positively or negatively based on past customs and practices. Culture is the stories we tell.

I see a lot of emphases these days on creating the right culture in organizations. The trouble is, culture isn’t something you can create or dictate. Culture is a product of how people and leaders in an organization act, particularly under pressure to perform. Culture is the result you earn over time. Culture is not something that can be managed.

Almost all companies I see today have stated their values. I believe the aim to be true. The guidance these values provide is intended to drive behaviours that support the culture the organization desires.

That said, putting these values into practice doesn’t always resemble the intended principles.

Let me give you an example.

A former company was looking for creative ways to reduce its cost base. They had a neat system to generate, evaluate and implement ideas from all corners of the organization. One idea to eliminate a perceived waste was to challenge a certain type of spend that managers were making often and inefficiently. The new idea was those spend activities were to be reviewed monthly by the manager’s superior. That conversation would lead to coaching leading to better decisions around the use of that spend. This all sounds reasonable so far.

Here’s the problem. Each of these spend activities were worth hundreds of dollars. The managers making these decisions were accountable for their budgets worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Additionally, each manager had the authority to spend up to $50,000 for each transaction.

I wondered if we were encouraging micro-management. It appeared to me like a classic case of tripping over dollars to pick up pennies.

With this thought in mind, I compared this expected behaviour against the organization’s values and found it didn’t seem to align with the value of “Our employees are empowered to make decisions for the benefit of the company” or something to that effect.

While I suspected there likely was some waste, I didn’t feel that the managers were being empowered to make decisions on behalf of the company in line with their accountability and responsibility. I said as much to the leader responsible for the proposed change. He just smiled, said thanks for the feedback and advised me the initiative would proceed.

To this leader it was more important to be seen to be doing something, taking action to support the cost reduction initiative than to drive behaviour that aligned the organization’s values.

At the end of the day, the company carried on largely as they always had. Sure there were cost reduction actions implemented large and small. The underlying behaviours never changed. The organization suffered low employee engagement and mediocre performance. The culture remains exactly what they deserve.