One field of organization development that has fascinated me is renewing corporate cultures. The experience is like the experience of getting married and meeting and understanding the culture of the family of your husband or wife. Growing up we take family culture or the family shared values and norms for granted thinking that what we believe in and our behaviors are typical of everyone else’s experience.
FAMILY CULTURE
Then we encounter another family culture and are amazed at the difference and similarities. This realization allows us to make deep and real choices about what values we will espouse and those we have to consciously leave by the wayside. Renewal in corporate culture would take the same path, generate awareness, make clear choices then take the steps to renew culture.
SHARED VALUES
Culture has been defined by the dictionary as “the sum of attitudes, customs and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another” or simply shared values. Shared values or culture is at the center of the 7 S framework of Mckinsey. His framework that includes strategy, structure, system, skills, staff and style recognizes that shared values ( though seemingly intangible ) in fact plays a crucial role in people retention and motivation and in organizational effectiveness.
BEST FRIEND AT WORK
I also remember with fondness one of the questions in the survey for “best place to work”. Do you have a best friend at work? For a best friend is part of what makes a work place attractive, having a person whom you trust to share your joys, your problems and your difficulties at work. Corporate culture is at the heart of the functioning of the great place to work practices.
COMPANY CULTURE AS MISSION
Many companies today ask me after many years trying to influence and impact corporate culture, whether culture can in fact be measured. Many Chief Executives of family corporations typically start their enterprises with a desire to make a contribution. This “mission” influences the values they want to inculcate in the workplace. I have seen successful enterprises succeed in measuring the success of the other 6 S but culture or shared values remain a mystery.
SYMLOG FRAMEWORK
I recall years ago, how as a professor at the Asian Institute of Management, I attended an accreditation program of a San Diego based company SYMNET who held the franchise for SYMLOG. Its work centered on Leadership, Team and Culture diagnosis. They were promoting the life time work of Dr. Robert Bales, professor at Harvard University. For over 40 years he undertook research to measure effective and ineffective cultures.
- BALES WORK
Dr. Bales discovered that the central value of effective cultures is teamwork. He studied three dimensions that make for effective and ineffective cultures. These were friendly versus unfriendly behavior, supporting established authority versus opposing established authority and dominance versus submissiveness. Through research he discovered that there are universal norms and behaviors for effective cultures and the extent and level they have to be present for the culture to be effective.
Aside from a Symlog study being able to graphically show through a bar graph how close or far an organization’s culture is from what is effective and therefore can reduce or enhance frequency of these behaviors, it can also show the distance of current culture to the most effective point ( MEP).
Ancilla has conducted SYMLOG surveys for different Philippine companies from consumer, oil and gas, energy, telco, insurance, BPOs. We are always amazed how the SYMLOG report captures the nuances of what is happening in the culture and what can be done about it.
SYMLOG also has an instrument to measure effective leadership based on the same framework. It has successfully modified behaviors of executives when accompanied by a coaching program.
PERSEVERANCE IN CULTURE BUILDING
As we all know, cultures are built over time and for effective cultures to develop and prevail. I have seen the payoff of companies who cling with tenacity to the inculcation of their corporate values. The corporate values represent the anchor and unchanging core of the “Built to Last” framework.
One leading company I joined in the eighties had a practice of “patronizing your own products”. It was a popular mantra, taught the first week of an employee’s corporate life in the company. At that time, the company had an elaborate yet effective one week orientation program with focus on values and a tour of nearby plants and facilities. It became so ingrained in me that when I go to the supermarket, I would tend to gravitate around the company’s products. In fact several years later, even after having joined another company, the products have become part of our family lifestyle thus difficult to change.
Renewing corporate culture becomes a measurable challenge, the foundation for helping create successful institutions that can last.
[Tita Datu Puangco is the President and CEO of Ancilla Enterprise Development Consulting, an innovative provider of Enterprise and Organization Development solutions in the ASEAN region. These solutions include strategy planning and execution, leading change breakthroughs, managing corporate academies, executive assessment and coaching, value and culture development and setting up of human resource systems. For your letters/ feedback, kindly email: tita.datu76@gmail.com, For other inquiries, please call 8810-3129/0920-9218332/0917-8348176]
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