American View: Are You Uniting or Dividing Your Organisational Culture?
I’m always apprehensive when choosing pop-culture references for my column because I can never be sure how they’re going to land. After I decided on my topic, I wanted to open this column off with an allusion to Shelly’s sonnet Ozymandius. On a hunch, I ran an informal survey that revealed that 100% of my UK mates knew exactly what I was talking about while 100% of my American amigos vaguely recalled the name but couldn’t remember anything about it …
Ironically, those poll results did more to support my thesis than the allusion itself probably would have. For your consideration, I’m arguing today that organisational cultures fracture and degrade as leaders and key influencers in different locations and from different generations of hires develop their own “dialects” based on shared lore and experiences. This can be mitigated when senior leaders attempt to “unify” their culture through shared experiences and exacerbated when those same leaders fail to maintain their synchronization efforts.
My favourite example of this occurred several years back. I was doing program management work at a FORTUNE 500 megacorp and was irritated with how alienated our department was from the rest of the organisation. We had no professional development program, few opportunities for training, and no employee orientation. The only way we could find out what our company’s purported “values” were was to read them on the company’s consumer-focused public website … and even then their “values” reflected lines of business that we weren’t in.
Part of that was doubtlessly because our “department” had previously been an independent company. Our corporate overlords had purchased us a few years before and had (supposedly) finished “fully assimilating” us the year before I was hired. That’s what the old timers told me, anyway; they still thought of themselves as employees of the old company even though all its branding and livery had been replaced.
That said, neither the old incarnation of the department nor the new “fully assimilated” version had offered any sort of cultural grounding. When a new worker joined, they were issued a facility ID card, handed a third-hand cheap laptop, and handed a sticky-note with their new domain user ID and password. Once they logged in, they’d find some automated emails from HR about signing up for benefits. That … was … it.
Even our ridiculous onboarding to Yahoo! back at the turn of the millennium was better than that … and our Yahoo! “onboarding” consisting solely of watching a twenty-minute video of old company television adverts. Nothing else. Still, as feeble and ineffective as it was, it was something.
As a former military unit commander, I found this situation intolerable. I was tasked with doubling the size of our team and had been bringing aboard new hires for months. To compensate for the company’s lack of effort, I invented my own company culture onboarding program and ran it under the table for my new colleagues. I explained the weirder elements of our office, described out department, and larger corporate cultures, and provided our new hires the context they needed to understand some of our seemingly nonsensical practices. I also taught our new colleagues the unique language, operating practices, and power dynamics of our office so they could avoid making the most common “newbie” blunders.
I did what I felt was necessary, and still felt it wasn’t enough. I griped to my boss; he gave me carte blanche to pursue any training resources I could find withing the mother company. That was all I needed to hear. I started digging.
A few weeks later, I stumbled across exactly what I’d been looking for: the hidden home page for our mother company’s mandatory leadership training program. I’d love to say that I uncovered it through hardcore hacker techniques; in reality, I noticed a random banner ad in the corner of an obscure intranet page one morning, and finally found the program I’d been after all along on a corporate HR site.
According to the site, the company required all workers of a certain rank to attend a mix of in-person and remote learning courses on organisational standards, values, practices, and expectations. In fact, HR demanded that every qualified worker in North America complete the first on-site, instructor-led session within one year of being hired or risk having their employment terminated. I was about two weeks shy of my one-year anniversary. Whoops!
Per the instructions on the site, I signed up for the next available session and received an automated confirmation that I’d been added to the queue. I perused the live class location options and it seemed that the only active classroom left was in New Jersey. That wouldn’t be a problem; the site said that corporate HQ was paying all the travel costs. So, cool.
At lunch that day, I asked my boss what he remembered of the course. My boss cocked his head and stared at me like a dog that had been shown a card trick. He not only hadn’t attended the course, he said, but he had no idea what I was talking about. We shared a moment of dread.
As soon as we got back to the office, I showed my boss the program’s home page. My boss was gobsmacked. He really hadn’t heard of it and hadn’t sent any of his qualifying subordinate managers to the program as required by corporate policy. My boss ordered me to run it to ground and get everyone on our team square with the company. I set off … and very quickly realized I was poking around in a program manager’s nightmare.
First, I learned that no one in our entire department had ever heard of the “mandatory” training requirement, let alone attended it. Next, I discovered that all the phone numbers for the program office were either disconnected or now went to unrelated offices. None of my emails were returned (even though the addresses were all still active in Exchange). The site listed for the last of the active instructor-led class sessions hadn’t posted a new session in eighteen months.
After weeks of chasing ghosts, I concluded that the entire program had been defunded and its staff made redundant … while its program site continued to welcome accidental visitors like Ozymandius’ stone legs in the nameless desert. Artefacts that accidental visitors marvelled at yet had no context for. Curiosities that somehow hadn’t yet been decommissioned because no one in IT remembered they existed.
Clearly, someone high up in corporate HR had dreamed up, built, and deployed exactly what the company’s leaders needed to synchronize their understanding of company culture, protocols, expectations, and jargon. Someone had cracked the code and delivered a killer solution. Then some sort of disaster happened; maybe the team was culled in a random layoff. Maybe the group was broken up in a “strategic realignment.” Or maybe the program’s sponsor was taken out in a petty political feud and his programs were gutted out of spite. Whatever the cause, one of the most important programs our mother company had created in recent memory had been inexplicably and mysteriously abandoned. [1]
The program seemed to have been killed shortly – perhaps a year – after its launch. If I had to guess, I’d bet my money on the idea that some brilliant student of human behaviour had created the mandatory new leader curriculum and ran afoul of one or more senior executives who couldn’t perceive its value. That doesn’t surprise me, as I’ve seen something similar happen nearly everywhere I’ve been. Misguided senior leaders the world over seem to share the delusion that human beings are little more than replaceable cogs in the machinery of production and profit. Interchangeable and mindless “work units” that only need to be told what to do.
Those people are just plain wrong. Organisational cultural drift is a real occurrence … and a real threat to operational effectiveness. People need to know how to communicate effectively if they’re going to cooperate. Clashing perspectives, processes, priorities, and jargon create friction that degrades effectiveness and creates counterproductive rivalries between sites and workgroups. Organisational orientation and synchronization are essential.
This holds especially true for multi-site, multi-state, and multi-national organisations. Each site will, inevitably, develop its own subculture based on language or dialect differences, shared mores, local work conditions, and leadership changes. If the mother company doesn’t make an active effort to regularly synchronise the critical elements of its desired organisational culture, the locations will fracture until they’re more of a loose confederacy of aligned interests than branches of the same company.
Cultural maintenance takes effort. Engagement. Communication. Reinforcement and clarification of critical values. It’s worth it … if you know what the heck you’re doing. If you don’t, well, that’s when you get executives jumping ship and releasing braggadocious press releases that, when distilled down to their essence, read “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
[1] Ooooh, this would be a great place for a Mary Celeste allusion …
Keil Hubert
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