Managing cultural change
by Tim Waldron

In our latest report on the UK’s fastest growing charities – Adapting to Success – a Director of Finance & Resources whose organisation had grown from around 10 staff to 130 wraps up the challenge of organisational change succinctly: “how do you continue to live out the values and beliefs of the organisation, and get everyone to feel the same way?” These questions would be a lot easier to answer if the task of managing change was just a matter of getting everyone to act the same way. As Adapting to Success illustrates, getting them to feel the same way is somewhat more challenging.

Organisations exist to draw people together and put them to achieving a particular end or common purpose. Objects are drafted. Strategies are drawn up. Goals are identified. Structures are populated. Systems and procedures are implemented. Performance is optimised and the organisation grows and evolves. Simple, except we all know it doesn’t quite work like that!

I remember a few years ago getting excited about a ‘photograph’ of an iceberg - tip above the ocean surface and the bulk of it below, awesome in its vastness. Colleagues swiftly disabused me of my naive belief in its authenticity, but the image has stayed with me as a metaphor. Strategies, systems and procedures, glossy supporter newsletters and professional websites are merely the tip of any third sector organisation. Below the surface, often seen only by those who get up close, are the organisation’s values, attitudes and beliefs; its leadership style and behavioural norms; formal and informal power bases and politics; sources of tension and conflict. Organisational culture – good, bad or indifferent, acknowledged or ignored - sits just below the surface.

Organisational culture can be understood as “the basic values, ideologies and assumptions which guide and fashion individual and business behaviour. These values are evident in more tangible factors such as stories, ritual, language and jargon, office decoration and layout and prevailing modes of dress among staff.” All these factors combine to determine how an organisation’s people feel about the organisation itself, and its leaders and managers. Stories told by interviewees in Adapting to Success of their experiences of the impact of organisational culture on their ability to manage change and growth illustrate the enormity of the challenge. On one level, changing a newly-merged organisation’s dress code is as simple as issuing a new policy, but try doing so without consultation and sensitivity and you’re likely to spark a swift and bloody revolt!

The starting point in all those stories is the same ancient maxim – know thyself. Because culture is a significant factor in determining how people feel about an organisation, their place in it and those they follow, leaders that seek to stand apart from it do so at their peril. As Steven Covey observes, “anytime we think the problem is ‘out there’, that thought is the problem.”

Whilst every organisation may have the appearance of uniqueness, organisational cultures invariably have similar foundations, being:

The Power Culture dependent on strong central figures, e.g. entrepreneurial start ups

The Role Culture in which individuals take on impersonal roles, guided by formal systems e.g. government departments

The Task Culture emanating from flexible groups geared to task achievement e.g. project teams

The Personal Culture with an emphasis on individual stakeholder interests and developments e.g. service deliverers

Standing on these foundations, the task of mapping an organisation’s cultural edifice is a matter of asking the right questions in the right places in order to obtain the full range of answers that point in the right direction. Questions such as:

What are the commonly held stories that circulate informally about the organisation and its people?

What kind of symbols or slogans does the organisation use to describe or represent itself?

Who holds the real power? Where do decisions get made and by whom?

What are the formal structures? Is it hierarchical or a flat structure?

How does the organisation monitor and measure what it does? Are there financial controls, performance measures and audits?

What are the rituals and routines? What is celebrated and what is not celebrated? Do people make each other coffee or go out together every Friday?

Having amassed the answers to these and other key questions, the change leader must analyse what they say about the underlying paradigm, the hidden beliefs and assumptions that are driving the organisation in order to frame an effective change management process. The great management consultant W. Edwards Deming explains the alternative: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

To learn more about change management see our workshop on Leading Change

Sources

David C. Wilson & Robert H. Rosenfeld, Managing Organisations
(McGraw-Hill Publishing 1990)

Steven R. Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
(Simon & Schuster, 2004)

Charles Handy, Understanding Voluntary Organisations,
(Penguin Business, 1988)