The Culture Myth
Is company culture just a myth?
Bill Boorman, one of the most perceptive and original HR tech industry observers out there, once said company culture is a myth.
I disagree, but I can see why he might say that.
Culture is perhaps the most widely used concept when discussing organizations. Arguably, it’s also one of the most widely misused. In part, the problem is one of definition.
What is company culture?
Google the term, and the sheer number of definitions out there should suffice to give you a headache. Read the definitions, and their vagueness and contradictions are guaranteed to make the headache worse. It seems as if the word “culture” can be used to mean anything and everything.
But a word that means everything means nothing at all. Without a clear definition, saying “culture” is just like saying “stuff” – it signifies nothing.
According to one of the widely used definitions, company culture is “the way we do things around here.
”But what “things”? Is this a statement about solving problems? Making decisions? The way we communicate? Or the way we dress? What is the scope we’re talking about?And who are the “we […] around here”? All the employees of a global corporation across countries and continents? Or just the ones working in the same country? The same division? The same team?
And how about the “way”? Are we talking about codes of conduct? Professional standards and practices? Written guidelines for specific situations? Unwritten beliefs and assumptions? All of the above?
“The way we do things around here”
“The way we do things around here” was coined by Marvin Bower, the legendary McKinsey managing director, who ran the famous firm for an impressive 17 years, and lived to the even more impressive age of 100.
Interestingly, Bower didn’t use the phrase in connection with company culture; it’s “company philosophy” that he defines in this way in his book, The Will to Manage.
The phrase is elegant, simple and memorable, but as a definition, it’s as vague as it gets. Having worked in management consulting, I can’t help but think it’s the sort of thing a partner can get away with but an associate might get fired for saying.
Moreover, it’s a behavior-based definition. It gives the impression that culture is primarily about “the way” things are done; in other words, that culture is about the “how.”
If that were the case, concepts like “culture fit” would be meaningless. Humans can adjust their behavior quite flexibly, so if culture was just a behavioral pattern, people could simply adjust to any culture as soon as they’re informed of its norms and expectations.
If that were the case, culture change wouldn’t take years in an organization. If that were the case, no one would ever have a culture shock.
Clearly, culture is more deeply rooted than that. Agile is a good example. A lot of companies want to build an agile culture these days. Often, their efforts start with learning and adopting agile tools and processes. They start with the “how.”
But read the Agile Manifesto, and you’ll see it’s all about values. It’s about the “why.” All the behaviors we understand to be part of an agile culture stem from these values: values like autonomy, collaboration, continuous learning and flexibility. As psychology professor Robert Hogan, the founder of the eponymous firm, Hogan Assessments, once said, “values are the DNA of culture.”
What are values?
In one word, they are myths.
As social psychologist Milton Rokeach, one of the most quoted psychologists of the twentieth century, put it in his book The Nature of Human Values, values are “enduring beliefs” about what goals and behaviors are personally or socially preferable over others.
In other words, culture is not about how you behave; it’s about how you believe you and others should behave. The two are worlds apart.
First of all, while a person may adjust their behavior based on external cues, it will be much harder for them to adjust their underlying beliefs and preferences about how people should behave and what goals they should pursue. In the command-and-control management style of the 20th century, managers might have contented themselves with controlling behavior. It was possible to build a great organization by being very effective in making people conform to behavioral norms. Japan’s economic revival is a great example for that.
In the increasingly self-managed organizations of the 21st century, controlling behavior is no longer an option. Companies like Google strive to empower and give as much autonomy as possible to each of their employees, a quest that’s synonymous with exerting less and less control over behavior. That is why values and culture are becoming increasingly important in the 21st century. In this century, culture is no longer just the way we do things; it’s the why we do things.
If you want to give people autonomy, then, by definition, you can’t force your people into compliance with that goal. You’ll need to hire people who actually value autonomy.
If you want your organization to adapt flexibly to change, but expect to achieve that without command-and-control leadership, you’ll need to hire people who are comfortable with challenging the status quo and genuinely value opportunities for change.
If you want to build an organization in which hierarchy isn’t the single source of truth, you’ll need to hire people who don’t attach too much value to the pecking order and their position in it.
Bill is right: culture is a myth.
But not in the sense that it doesn’t exist or that it’s irrelevant. Quite the contrary.
As Yuval Noah Harari said in his recent bestseller Sapiens, Homo sapiens came to rule the world as it became able to cooperate in larger numbers than any other species. Other apes and early humans couldn’t form groups larger than about 150 individuals. Above that size, social order based on intimate acquaintance can no longer bind groups together, and tends to disintegrate.
Homo sapiens, however, have found a way to cooperate successfully in larger numbers “by believing in common myths.” As Harari says: “Any large-scale human cooperation — whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city, or an archaic tribe — is rooted in common myths that exist only in people's collective imagination. ”Cultures, then, are myths in a much more profound sense: myths that guide human behavior with consequences that can make or break organizations.
Download The State of Motivation Report 2024. It’s free!
