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Cultural Alignment
How Culture Helps or Hinders Results
© Andrew Bass
(An extended version of this article, dealing specifically with sales culture in legal firms, appeared in the Novermber 2005 issue of Managing Partner magazine. Read Article).
The Myth of Sisyphus
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
- Albert Camus
It's a simple truth that to produce new results in a given situation, people need to do new things. This is true whether the objective is to win more business, collaborate better as a team, be more effective as a leader, handle complaints effectively, collect overdue accounts or achieve any other of a myriad of practical objectives. When behaviour change is required, the solution often reached for is to issue requests or instructions (how much easier would management be if that were all that was required) or provide training. But the results of training programmes are often disappointing. People can then conclude, incorrectly, that
1. Training is necessarily ineffective
2. You can't change behaviour much
Unfortunately, many training departments (again in all business sectors) perpetuate this dynamic by supplying training programmes to their organisation when they are insufficient or inappropriate means for achieving the desired results. And of course, external training providers may not be enthusiastic to push back against a client's request for a course that's unsuitable.
Training can be effective, and may be a vital part of a change programme, but only if culture and attitudes are taken into consideration too.
The key role of culture and attitudes
Most people can sit or stand up and speak intelligibly on the state of their daily work, current projects, issues affecting them and so forth, and indeed will talk shop with their colleagues for hours. However, many of those same people, when asked to sit or stand at the front of a room of 50 people and talk about the very same thing, are immobilised - it's as if their capability is somehow switched off when they change situation.
The following diagram provides a way
to make sense of this
of understanding the purposes and limits of training
of knowing how to change the situation for the better
Each level is switched on or off by the one above it. If a reluctant presenter has the attitude (reinforced perhaps by cultural assumptions) that to talk in public is to run the risk of embarrassment or humiliation, then their talking skills are disabled - they don't produce the behaviour. No amount of skill building will help such a person unless it also addresses their attitude. And to do this it will almost certainly have to address the attitude-shaping power of culture.
But what actually IS culture?
A lot of people talk about culture, but what do they mean by it? Put pragmatically, culture can be thought of as the way the following things are maintained, and transmitted to new members of the firm:
values (what's important to us as members)
attitudes (what we think of 'This' or 'That')
beliefs (what we think is true about the way things are)
practices (what we do round here, and the right way to do them).
Culture helps the firm's people define situations and determine how to respond to those situations. For example, members of a firm which values "efficiency" most will behave differently than those of an firm which cares primarily about "client service".
The key things is that there is a cultural override which is more powerful than requests, instructions or indeed training. When a training course is effective, for example, you can be sure that the culture already supports the desired behaviours, or that someone (managers, trainers, consultants) made adjustments to the culture in sync with the training.
Getting reliable information about your firm's culture
Culture can be slippery to diagnose, because cultural problems in most organisations are not difficult to spot - unless you are the boss. Various processes, such as the self-preserving desire of subordinates to filter bad news or dissent, almost inevitably insulate senior managers from knowing what's going on 'on the ground'.
In fact, if you consider situations in which you are in the client or customer role yourself (either business-to-business or as a consumer), you'll recognise many organisations where it seems that problems are obvious to everyone but the senior management - I can think of a well-known PC retailer which is a good example. In general, clients and customers usually have more of an insight into such issues than those charged with running the business. Some call centres are run like battery hen farms, and it's not hard to tell when one has to deal with the people who work in them. I favour one supermarket over another because it is obvious that the local branch of one is not happy ship and my requests for assistance are met with grunts, whereas if I ask for a product at the other chain, the staff take me to the relevant aisle personally - even at 11pm.
Similarly in a professional firm, clients notice the tone in the way the phone is answered, can tell if juniors are not supported by, or are even ground down by, their partners, and generally have a good idea about what it's like to work at the firm.
So how do you find out what is going on? One way is to phone clients yourself and ask themThis is also a situation where consultants you can trust are valuable - if they are competent, they can quickly tell what's really going on, through observation, 'mystery shopping', or more formally through interviews, surveys and focus groups, and can afford the risk of telling senior managers those things that internal people will keep quiet.
The key role of leadership
In any organisation people know whether something is 'real' by looking to one individual, or a small group of individuals. Whether we like it or not, people from external consultancies, or from the HR or marketing function, do not have the same effect (and all the competent ones we've met are under no illusions about this).
External consultants and trainers must act without formal power, and can only influence a change process to the extent that they can establish credibility and persuasive appeals to self-interest. This is entirely how it should be. It also means that there is no point in leaders spending time and money on outside help unless they are going to support an initiative with conspicuous and ongoing backing.
This means you can't delegate the leadership of change to your business support functions (though, of course, the support of those people will be crucial to successful implementation).
In the words of an experienced professional services marketing manager: "If you look at the firms which have really made big leaps in the effectiveness of their marketing, there's always been charismatic leadership from one visionary, or a small group of committed individuals working together". Without this, the old culture quickly reasserts itself.
Tilting the Cultural Playing Field
Without a strong supporting culture, many new initiatives and training programmes are condemned to the same fate as Sisyphus. They roll the rock to the top of the hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom.
It's vital to tilt the cultural playing field in the right direction. The first step is strong leadership, not only at the start, but also to ensure follow-though in all the subsequent stages:
Handling the politics - getting established opinion-formers on board.
Selling the idea to members of the organisation - an ongoing process of communication and education.
Putting in place the right cultural reinforcers.
Carefully managing the skill building process.
Recruiting, rewarding and retaining people who are enthusiastic about the new future of the business.
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