Forget “Culture”, Focus On Building A Strong And Thriving Organization
Reverse engineer company culture by managing for organizational performance along 5 dimensions
Most entrepreneurs and business executives are aware that company culture matters. But many find it hard to get their head around the topic and stay focused on it in particular for two reasons: first, culture as a concept lacks definiteness, and second, it’s beyond the realm of common management thinking.
Historically, management has focused on optimizing processes and technology related to input goods, supply chains, distribution chains, task and production efficiencies.
Today, given the technological, societal and economic shifts that are changing the way people work and live as well as the demands for businesses in the information economy, the performance of the organization as a social system is the newly emerging management paradigm.
This brings people and culture into the limelight.
But the problem with culture as a concept in business is, it’s highly unpractical in the day-to-day of building and operating a company.
Culture is too complex and too amorphous in nature. That’s why even culture expert Edgar Schein calls culture a “bottomless pit” and suggests that company leaders use the term less.
Another major issue is that common management thinking perceives culture as a simple hack to attract new hires, motivate employees, and make people want to stay, but not truly essential for driving business results.
Yet culture isn’t a tactic. It’s the game!
The rise of culture as a theme in business is about a broader shift of management paradigms in the post-industrial age, rather than being hip by defining sleek company values and creating a fun work environment to be an attractive employer for millennials.
The deeper (economic) value of building a strong and healthy company culture lies in its leverage for the contemporary organization in regards to sustaining competitiveness, enabling effective and efficient value creation as well as creating the context for high-performance.
Nonetheless, what culture lacks is a better conceptualization and a workable approach for company builders that outlines what matters and helps to create a lens for the organizational development and performance.
So here it comes!
The best way to approach culture is not to make it about “culture”.
For entrepreneurs and company executives culture should neither be about employee happiness as the order, nor about purchasing employees’ motivation and loyality with perks and benefits.
People are more likely to value and stay loyal to authenticity and clarity in leadership over forged harmony and niceness that don’t truly map the values, norms, and priorities of the organization.
It’s the beauty of our time however, that taking a people-oriented approach to designing organizations and managing work stands as the great opportunity for handling complex value creation processes and support pure economic needs of the modern organization.
But don’t fake it.
Also, for company builders and managers it’s hardly of interest to get lost in theoretic discourse about what culture is or isn’t.
Instead make it about building a strong and thriving organization.
Rather, for entrepreneurs and company executives the real game needs to be about building a highly functional organization and developing appropriate ways for managing effectively in the digital age.
That’s the context why culture truly matters today and why it’s not a topic solely for dreaming business romanticists.
It’s about taking a deliberate approach to building the organization in a way that enables, accelerates, and sustains business performance.
The simple logic that’s emerging as the new focus for management is that how you perform as a business is largely dependent on how you perform as an organizational system of individuals and teams.
It’s never either or. The feat is to build the business AND the organization.
Using that logic companies can generate a virtuous cycle of high performance by mastering and balancing the development of two basic areas: the number-driven business side as well as the human-centered organizational side.
The way to internalize the power of this cycle is the following:
Building winning products, deploying business strategies, and constantly delivering value in the context of ever changing customer demands requires the development of world class competencies and performance in business areas such as strategy, product management, marketing, tech, finance, and operations.
These things are crucially important on the business side. It’s eventually where products are sold and how money is made. Most of traditional management’s attention is directed to this side.
Yet, this is just half of the equation for successfully achieving the above.
The other half of what it takes to eventually evolve as a prosperous business is represented by the organizational side. Here it’s about building a winning team, managing the energy, productivity and effectiveness of individuals and the collective network of teams as well as developing critical organizational capabilities.
Applying great energy and effort towards building the organization serves as a powerful multiplier for performance ability and helps the organization to create intense focus towards achieving results on the business side.
The punch-line is: company building is about building a strong organization that ultimately is the business.
If the above sounds intriguing and about right, the question is how do you develop the organizational side?
Combining the areas of Leadership — Management — Org Design and Human Resources along five objectives to build and manage for organizational strength and thriving.
Of course, the organization and the business are not separate from each other. They’re naturally one and the same entity. Yet many of the things that are essential on the organizational side are not present on the classic management scoreboard.
The key in building the organization is to combine and align the interwined areas of Leadership — Management — Org Design — Human Resources.
This helps to frame building a strong and thriving organization as a continuous process of developing and adapting the answers, systems, and organzational capabilities around five guiding questions that link these areas to five higher level objectives fueling organizational performance.
The questions guide the attention towards what matters. The paraphrased objectives serve as the high-level dimensions requiring continuous development:
- How do you achieve, coherence, alignment and commitment around the company identity, direction, and decisions?
Is about creating Organizational Clarity
2. How do you create an information and knowledge superconducting environment enabling for highly effective and efficient collaboration?
Is about achieving Organizational Effectiveness
3. How do you build and develop an outstandingly capable and driven workforce with personalities that fit the organization?
Is about developing Organizational Excellence
4. How do you create an exceptional team environment that enables everyone to be at their best (mood, behavior, motivation) and highest level of focus?
Is about building Organizational Cohesion
5. How can you contribute to individual and collective employee well-being in meaningful ways?
Is about contributing Organizational Comfort
Here is what each dimension entails:
The Objective: achieving highest level of coherence, alignment, and commitment around the company identity, direction, and decisions
Creating Org Clarity is the main domain of Leadership requiring the engagement in continuous and authentic (over-) communication around all major and minor things going on in the business as well as setting the expectations around them.
The Objective: creating an information and knowledge superconducting environment enabling for highly effective and efficient collaboration
Creating Org Effectiveness is the main domain of Management and Organizational Design driving the continuous development and improvement of communication, shared ways of working and systems within and between departments as well as appropriate organizational structures and systems.
The Objective: building and developing an outstandingly capable and driven workforce made up of personalities that bring the appropriate talent and personality into the organization
Human Resources or People Operations is in charge for developing and ensuring processes and systems from hiring, performance review, people development to dismissal of employees in line with the organizational value system of the company.
The Objective: creating an exceptional team environment that enables everyone to be at their best (mood, behavior, motivation) and highest level of focus on contributing and creating impact
Building team cohesion is the joint task of the Leadership team, Managers, Human Resource managers as well as the collective members, establishing the behavioral dynamics and context for interacting with each other in a safe space supporting strong interpersonal relationships and creating trust and psychological safety among individuals and across teams.
The Objective: contributing to individual and collective employee ease and well-being through meaningful perks and benefits
Organizational Comfort is an additional domain strongly linked to Human Resource activities, aiming to remove hassles of life and support team health & wellbeing, workplace fun and attractiveness. Considerations for contributing to organizational comfort include food and beverages, support around health and wellbeing, language courses, supporting office facilities.
Frameworks are nothing. Walking the walk is everything.
Integrating the efforts in developing as well as continuously adapting the answers, systems, and capabilities in the interwined dimensions in a coherent way is the never-ending process of building a strong and thriving organization.
Embarking on this journey is not for the faint-hearted. It requires a strong commitment and constant work.
The reality is that building a successful businesses is hard. Building thriving organizations is even harder. But it’s the real game!
At the end, what makes a business really successful is the highly coordinated, purposeful interplay of human interactions. However, it takes hard work to create the context and environment for those interactions to really thrive.
That is what culture is eventually all about.
Constantly improving and iterating your strength in the outlined dimensions is the way to create the context for a desirable organizational culture to emerge that helps you drive business performance in the most powerful way.
