Three Vital Lessons on Organizational Culture from a Village in Ukraine

My wife and I spent last weekend in a rural village in Ukraine, visiting her friends and relatives.

The Ukrainian countryside is just a short flight and a few hours drive away from our urban home in southern Sweden. But in some ways, it’s a world apart.

It’s a place where horse-drawn carriages are one of the main modes of transportation and nearly every family grow their own crops in small fields beside their houses.

It is also a community characterized by incredible hospitality.

In the village, my wife and I walked straight into friends’ houses, without so much as knocking on the door (whether we had told them we were coming or not!). Three or even four generations, great-grandmothers and great-grandchildren, welcomed us to their home. In some cases the dining table couldn’t fit everyone, so we were asked to sit, surrounded by standing, inquisitive family members who made sure we felt at home and enjoyed all the Ukrainian delicatessen they had prepared.

To a person coming from the extremely individualistic setting that is urban Sweden, where relatives seldom meet and you might need to plan six months ahead to meet up with friends, this was a very different environment.

To Understand Your Culture, Dig Deeper

As you might already have assumed, what I just described to you is an expression of culture.

Behaviors that are celebrated and have become the cultural norm within a specific group, so much so that they are taken for granted.

However, just being able to identify cultural norms is not necessarily that helpful.

Unless you understand the underlying beliefs, assumptions and deeply held values that shaped those norms and behaviors, you wouldn’t know why they exist. You wouldn’t know how to replicate that aspect of culture in another community and you wouldn’t have any real idea of how to change the culture.

The same thing goes for your organization.

The Different Dimensions of Culture

When an organization navigates a crisis or a season of change (whether based on growth, acquisitions, a new vision or strategy) the leadership will often identify a need to address cultural issues. Realizing that some of the cultural norms and behaviors of the past might be unhelpful or even harmful to its future.

For that change process to be effective, you cannot just focus on the desired future. Instead, you have to begin with deciphering and understanding the current state of the culture. To know where you are so that you can build on the strengths and deal with the issues, to move towards your desired future.

Culture is multi-dimensional and has to be understood as such. It is formed in a joint learning process in a group or an organization. It takes place in the heart — inner life — of an organization, where beliefs and assumptions are learned, values are negotiated and motives uncovered. This process is organic and it continues indefinitely. These beliefs, assumptions, values, and motives become taken for granted and begin to shape behavioral norms. Deciphering these different dimensions is an important but often complex process.

There are however three things we can learn about culture from the rural village in Ukraine, that helps us begin this important journey.

1. Get an Outsider’s Perspective

It can be hard to identify your own cultural norms because you take them for granted and perceive them to be just the way things are, in lack of other perspectives.

Many people living in the Ukrainian countryside might not be aware that their cultural approach to hospitality is anything special, or that you would get a very different experience in many other parts of the world.

The same is true in your organization. That is why you might need to get an outsider’s perspective to begin to decipher your own cultural norms. Whether a new employee coming from another context, a leader from another organization or a consultant. Someone who can help point out the things that are so obvious to you that you can’t even see them yourself.

2. Learn From a Village Elder

For me to get an understanding of the cultural norms in the Ukrainian village, I speak to my wife’s grandfather. Having lived in the same village for many decades, he has experienced wars, famine and the struggle for independence. His experiences offer important insight into the underlying beliefs and assumptions that have shaped the culture.

Some time ago, we were working with a client that navigated a tough season of change and a need to evolve their culture. As we were talking about key events in their past I realized that we could trace specific moments in their history, where through significant joint experiences spearheaded by the founder, they learned beliefs and assumption that shaped the culture.

Looking at these significant experiences, we could discern beliefs and assumptions that had been instrumental in creating their success, but also things that had become detrimental to the organization along the way.

To understand how and why the cultural norms in your organization were shaped, and the underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values that lead to those norms, you need to hear from the people who know and understand its history.

3. Identify Conflict and Discrepancy

One of the most important thinkers on organizational culture, professor Edgar H. Schein, found that to decipher the less obvious aspects of an organization’s culture, you need to focus on the ways espoused values conflict with behavior and priorities.

In a Ukrainian village, the family is large, close and held in high esteem. However, it is also a culture that suffers from detached fathers and where alcohol abuse is a plague that holds all too many households in its grip.

Somewhere in these aspects of the culture, you find conflict. A discrepancy between the values people would say they hold dear and the behavior that has become accepted. This conflict gives a hint of underlying beliefs, assumptions, values, and cultural norms that are so powerful that they have triumphed over the espoused values.

Chances are, you would find these conflicts and discrepancies in your organization as well.

Conclusion

To build a healthy culture and address the heart issues you encounter in your organization, you have to dig deeper, beyond what you might be able to see with your mere eyes. As the famed author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince;

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”