95. What Is Organizational Culture?

It was Peter Drucker who said culture eats strategy for breakfast.  

This episode, lead UpSkiller Michel Shah, joined by Upskillers, Mimi, Flora, and Sylvia, dive in and talk about: 

• what is organizational culture
•  what contributes to organizational culture 
• how to cultivate it
•  how important is organizational culture for us today
• importance of shared values
• The ABCs - the rudimentary pieces to move your organizational culture forward

Stay tuned for part two of the conversation next week!

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Transcript

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It was Peter Drucker who said culture eats strategy for breakfast. The author of over 30 textbooks on business really ahead of his time when he was thinking about these important concepts pointed out in that one quote, just how important culture is. So we're going to dive in and talk about what is organizational culture, what contributes to organizational culture and how important is organizational culture for us today. I'm joined by Upskillers, Mimi, Flora, and Sylvia for this conversation. And I want you to think about your own questions that you have, your own concerns that you have, and share those with us for us to have a follow up conversation on, Welcome to Upskill Talks, I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, lead Upskill at Upskill Community. Upskill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact. Lead themselves and others in every episode through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenges and opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies. For you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin. welcome to the conversation, Mimi, Flora, and Sylvia. So what is organizational culture? The research will suggest that organizational culture is a shared set of beliefs. People in the workplace have attitudes, practices, behaviors. And certainly values, really what it means is the purpose of the organization, what we say, how we think, what we do and how we interact with each other within and across the organization and particularly with our stakeholders. So really, that's it. It's really all that you think, say, and do. but let's talk about a few of the baseline, the. ABCs, the rudimentary pieces that everyone can do right where they are right now to move their organizational culture forward. What would you say is step one? I have a step one that I want to offer. For me, it begins and it ends with the values. Step one is organizational values, knowing what they are, making sure that they're appropriate for the people, the purpose. The processes, the product, making sure that your values are appropriate within the organization. That's one, because some organizations have values that are just sounding really good, or they had fit a nice acronym or something like that, but they haven't really been thought out. They're not even agreed upon. They are no longer relevant. They don't really work. So I think knowing, making sure that your values are appropriate for you, revisit those values and then. Weave them and interweave them and integrate them into every single thing you do, making sure everyone in the organization knows your values and know how these values support the work that we do. I think that would be number one. It's wonderful that you laid out the values as a, as a starting point and these values have to be shared. But that sharing of the values has to be done with psychological safety and psychological safety comes from trust. And unless you, we intentionally create that psychological safety that comes from feeling included, from feeling valued, from feeling listened to and building the trust that is negotiated at the individual level, as well as from the leadership down. It is impossible to uphold those values. So one of the things that I always try to think is put those values in front of you and then think of the actions that actually support upholding those values. Will, um, working over time, all the time, be upholding those values? Perhaps not. But perhaps it meets, uh, a certain deadline and so on and so forth. So having that conversation and remaining, uh, to remain relevant, if you will, does the values still apply? It's a time to revisit, as we know in certain institutions that we know this is what is coming to pass. Yes. Yes. Yes. I think it's, it's really important, um, to, to talk about the relevance of the values because some organizations, they have had the values up since they established the organization 50 years ago, a hundred years ago. And for many of those organizations, the values are still relevant or they have been paying attention to them. They have been having conversations about these values and it is integrated in a way that it helps everyone work harmoniously. And Continue to share these values. There are many organizations who don't even know what their own values are. They're on the website, the tech team knows, the marketing teams know, but the operations team, the frontline team, the new people coming on board, sometimes not even HR knows the values. They're just in some documents and you ask a leader, what are the values? And they have to refer to a document to tell you those are not. Organization and values are shared. Those are, we say, those are just espoused on the website. Those are for marketing purposes. Those are not values that are lived by the organizations. And I think this is a time, it's a critical moment in history where organizations need to just take a quick look at what are the values that we have espoused? What are the values that we're talking about? Are we just sticking to these values because the acronym is really nice? And it sounds good and these are catchy words or people know that we have them or are we sticking to them because they're really working for us at this fundamental ground floor level. Everyone shares these, these values are critical for the accomplishment of the goals that we've set. You know, are we looking at our strategic plans and goals and going, this value doesn't fit anymore. Are we willing to look at it? I think really this is a time to imagine and reimagine our values because in the absence of shared values, we do not have healthy organizations and we're not going to therefore be able to build this healthy, inclusive culture that everyone has on top of their strategic goals right now. Flora, can I invite you into this conversation? Yeah, I have a question about that. Actually, there are so many organizations who have their values on their website and it looks so great. How do you bridge that gap between the espoused values of what the organization is striving to be? Like, it's, it sounds great, right, but how do you get your staff to be curious or collaborative or adaptable or whatever it is that you put there that's an ideal? So how do we get them to be that? Well, there are many different ways. One, you can choose them when they're that. We can start with that. Choose the people. So you choose people who share these values coming on board. That's one way to do it. Um, then we teach those. Make sure people know. Include this, evaluate based on this, discuss it frequently, make sure that conflict resolution processes, communication processes, planning processes, how meetings are held, how we meet. Thank you. Do lunch, how we deal with each other when, when someone needs support, all of those things should reflect our values and we should be talking about our values, right? We should be talking about our values. So this is how people, you choose people who share your values right up front. That's one way, but you know, sometimes a lot of HR, um, teams are able to do this. There are other. HR teams who don't even know what the organizational values are themselves. So they're not even able to think through that. Or they think about the values as just something that people need to memorize, but not really something that you need to live. You just need to be able to state it, but there's no need to demonstrate it. And I think that is the distinction that we see when it comes to values that people are really. Ready to state the values, but not willing to get to the next step to demonstrate these values. And the time has come for organizations to bring the entire team on board, to demonstrate in the values. That's how we build healthy organizational cultures. And if, if those values are not the kind of values that our teams can demonstrate, we need to get back and have a look and see what values are we actually demonstrating. Cause maybe the values that we espouse are not the ones that we're demonstrating. So maybe we need to update the ones that we espouse to be the ones that we actually demonstrate. And so that we can agree on these shared practices, these share values, these shared ways of working the how of how we do the how of what we do. Does that answer your question, Flora? That does answer my question. What do you think causes this gap between like, like we say we value this but we don't actually value this? A number of things could cause it, different things cause it in different situations. One thing that causes it is that the team who develops the values and so on, usually it's not the leadership team, it's the marketing team. And do we get, or an external consultant that creates things for us that sound good and read nicely on our website. And it's disconnected from the team that sits down to look at the strategic approach and the goals that need to be happening. That's one thing that causes it. Another thing that causes it is not, it's not interwoven into anything. So it's not, it doesn't show up on an evaluation report. It doesn't show up on how we do our work. And so over time as leadership changes and staff changes. It is forgotten. So if the team who did it in 1990 did all of this, they were aware of it. As you have retention issues and staff rollover, the new staff come on, they just get to the work and this is not baked into the system, baked into onboarding processes, baked into hiring processes. That's what I said. First, it's the best way to make sure everyone shares these values is to screen it at the front end, bring people on who already share the values. Right. So if, if whatever the value is, if integrity is a value check to make sure that the people coming on really have this as a strong standout value and people can attest to them demonstrating this value, then you bring those people on. The other thing is to include it in the process so that we don't accept anything that doesn't align with this particular value. So. If it's baked into the process, it's easier for the organization to have this as a sustainable value that lasts the way how it's structured. It's structured for sustainability or it's structured just for marketability. And so we have to think about what is the goal of the value? Is this for marketability or really for sustainable practices that lead to a healthy organizational culture? So let me hand over and ask some questions when we think about culture and when you hear organizational culture, what comes to mind? Let me just share my idea more than the, the definition is might be more the experience. Um, A group of individuals with a shared purpose and objective, carry out things, interact with one another, interact with others that they serve to, and usually characterized by values. Now, these values may be explicit in some cases when the organization makes those values explicit and others. Um, are created in an organic way that as a result of interactions and personally based on experiences, basically a sense of belonging and it requires learning on the part of individual that joins an organization at any point, but it's also, we have to be mindful and I think this goes back to some of the discussions we had before where a new person joins an organization and there is already an established culture. That you also have to buy into, and you have to also be welcomed into. And thinking of a place where I have worked in the past, it falls to leadership. But sometimes the leadership, it's not the only determinant of how a culture leads. It can determine to some extent in the sense of sanctioning certain behaviors or allowing certain behaviors to take place, but in general, it is negotiated almost one to one, day to day. And yeah, I have had to negotiate my space as a Black Latino. Non native speaker of English in many places where my experience has to be included in a way that I don't have to compromise on my values or the company doesn't have to compromise in theirs. Well, that's very great. Thank you very much for sharing. That was well thought out, Sylvia. And I'm just going to go back to a couple of the things you touched on, sort of this written and unwritten values. And I want to add values, rules, the rules that are within the organization. Some of them are written, some of them are known, and some are sort of unknown, or even some of them are explicit and some of them you just have to figure out. You have to notice. And you touched on, and this relates to both rules, norms, mores, whatever it is, the practices that run the organization and most importantly, the values. One of the other things you touched on is sort of welcoming us into the culture. And I thought that was very interesting how you framed that, how you worded that, because that is what this whole process of onboarding someone, we have like a proper HR term for it, onboarding, orientation, sort of all of these practices and structures are in place to help us to be welcomed into that culture. And certainly that has to do with some technical components of the role, but also that. Underline cultural orientation so that you understand the do's and don'ts of an organization. The do's and don'ts, sometimes you are getting on board into a, to a very complex organization and maybe the do's and don'ts of the organization as a whole. Do's and don'ts of particular teams or divisions, do's and don'ts of particular branches of staff and other branches of staff. So there are so many different intricacies that we navigate when we're talking about an organizational culture. And it's very important for us to state right up front that we do acknowledge that Organizations do not have a marginal cultures. And as, as Sylvia said, it comes down to that individual level where you negotiate your role in this cultural space one on one. So I'm going to just flag that up while we're here, that organizational culture is navigated at the individual level. At the interpersonal level and at the institutional level, really at the institutional level, we're looking at the structures like the, the, the organizational chart. The chain of command. Who is the leader, the leader of what? Different divisions and so on, but interpersonally among teams, between people and certain individually. You on the internal side, being able to become self aware to determine who you are and how you stack up in this particular space, how you are showing up, how you are impacting the culture and how the culture is impacting you on that very personal individual level. And that's separate from how you are impacting and interacting with others to impact the culture and how the culture impact impacts the team you're part of and how the team you're part of is impacting you and how you're impacting the team. This is a very complex thing that we're talking about and how the leadership structures and organizational structures and the ways in which. Staff or people who work in an organization are categorized or organized, how all of that contribute to the culture and impact you, your teams individually and interpersonally. These are all the things that we are looking at when we're talking about organizational cultures. So I know you can tell right away how complex this conversation of organizational culture is. So think Mimi says. Organizational culture encourages a sense of community of like minded individuals driven by similar principles. For Mimi, it makes the work feel exciting and purposeful. No one feels left out in such a culture. So Mimi, you're speaking to a specific culture where you feel enthusiastic, excited, and purposeful, and everyone feels part of that culture. And that's sort of an ideal organizational culture. That's an ideal. So, Let me ask the next question, what contributes to organizational culture? When a culture is positive, let's start with a really positive culture. What are the things that contribute to or constitute a super positive culture? The one that Mimi just talked about, where you're feeling like they're like minded individuals, you're driven by similar principles, you are feeling purposeful and excited. What gets us a culture like that? I think I'll go by your definition of, um, what is organizational culture to say it's, it's the sharing of values, of attitudes, of behaviors, of standards, of principles that gives us that You know, to say, yes, I'm part of this organization, you know, and do you want to go above and beyond, um, your role because of what is being given to you. And uh, not only that there's that expectation that you must do this, but there's also that support that you're also getting from the leadership, from your teammates, you know, it's. I know in some cultures, there's a hierarchy where they talk about, uh, there's a top down approach or top bottom approach. Um, and I'm speaking from my own, uh, culture as well. Um, most things are done, you know, like by a leader. And it's... then goes through the ranks to say who's second in command, who's third in command, um, and all that. But then I find that in the Canadian culture, it is, it is open, it is transparent, everyone is valued and you know, your input is Also, um, included. So I think we speak of that inclusiveness in this, uh, corporate culture here that you are valued and your opinion is also tabled and you're able to express yourself and how that sort of empowerment or decision making also helps others in that organization to take up your idea and. Um, use it or cultivate it, you know, like a plant where, um, it's taken up or maybe it's used today, or maybe it's used tomorrow, or maybe it's parked for, for a later date, but it's not invalidated. So, I, I think, um, that is sort of the culture that, um, that I, um, resonate with. Yeah, that is fantastic. So, the culture that I'm hearing you say feels positive for you and that you resonate with is one where your ideas are taken. Into consideration, whether they're utilized right away or tabled later, but you feel valued when your ideas are valued or acknowledged and that the hierarchy is not so important, but everyone gets to have a voice. So these are some of the things that we believe are contribute to a positive, inclusive organizational culture. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upskill Talks. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe. Leave a five star rating and a written review at Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify, Google podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to share Upskill talks with other leaders like yourself, so they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to upskill community.com to review show notes, and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, and again, thank you for joining me on this episode of Upscale Talks.