How we create a Working Culture

To be able to “take a look in the mirror”, to observe our own behavior, it can be useful to borrow taxonomy and models from frameworks on National Culture, such as Hofstede or Erin Meyer – the culture map. It is useful for many reasons. First of all, you are probably part of an international organisation operating in international context. So your corporate culture is flavored by different national cultures. And these frameworks allows us to put words on and understand the behavior we observe. Is it related to communication? Or is it behavior in regard to decision making? How do we think about and act in regard to power and management hierarchy?

When we go back to understand Corporate Culture, we can work on the values, beliefs and behavior in the day to day business. Inspired and guided by Edgar Schein, we can discern between the “espoused values” (that we find in the values statement, for example being customer centric, innovative, demonstrating integrity) and the actual behavior. Understanding the gap between the espoused values and real behavior allows us to identify what managers and leaders need to do to support a culture shift.

The road to changed behavior is paved with courage, honesty, and reality-checks. Not always easy, because when we try to put our finger on the desired behavior, it is not so easy to articulate. You may want employees to be “more entrepreneurial”. But what does this mean in real business situations? How do you actually want people to behave in regards to customers, or internal decision making, risk taking etc. The number of different kind of situations are many, and interpretations of meaning equally so. The value comes from the experience of exchanging on the topic, not from an absolute definition of culture, values and behavior. In the end, it is about how to do business, and how to work together.

Simple, but not always easy.