Once again culture was thrust into the limelight of the media as NCAA President Mark Emmert recently handed out sanctions to Penn State University.
While they did avoid SMU’s 1987 “death penalty,” the NCAA president clearly highlighted the importance of culture when he said “for the next several years PSU can focus on rebuilding their athletic culture, not whether they will be going to a bowl game.”
It doesn’t matter if it’s Penn State, Enron, conclusions about some banks during the financial crisis, or a controversy that rocks a faith-based organization, non-profit or other organization to its core – culture matters.
Culture is unfortunately highlighted more often as a reason for why bad behavior was allowed to go unchecked than as an incredibly important factor for organizations achieving breakthrough results and astounding impact on society. The importance of culture is undeniable as recently highlighted in an IBM survey of more than 1600 CEO’s.
Some 75 percent of CEO’s identified the importance of developing a more open and collaborative culture as being critical for managing the complexity of business today. The focus on the importance of “culture” was also referenced in the recent annual innovation survey by Booz & Company. They found “spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.”
Culture is continually referenced, and you can find best practices, guidelines and other tips all over the place. Unfortunately, many of these approaches lack a clear process to build clarity and alignment in a way that propels an organization forward in support of their vision and strategy.
I tried many approaches as a business executive over regional and global organizations for nearly 15 years. Some worked quite well and are highlighted in the recently released book by Dan Denison called Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations. Others were refined through experience I built on when I was President of Denison Consulting, a leader in the organizational culture field that has worked with over 5000 organizations.
The overall process should work within a framework of four key areas. These areas have been successfully managed in organizations of all size, type, industry, and geography. These best practices ring true in education, healthcare, manufacturing, services, for-profit/non-profit, large/small, public/private and across all other industries and segments.
This is obviously a very simplified framework of the general process but I consistently see organizations of all types struggling with the process to improve their culture. It requires incredible discipline and consistency but it is possible to make tremendous progress in 6-12 months.
Jim Collins (author of Good to Great and Built to Last) said “a culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.” It will also help to further support a culture of discipline through collective clarification of values and behaviors any team member should expect from each other. You may not build a culture like Zappos where hundreds of employees, customers and suppliers share stories about your culture in an annual Zappos Family Culture Book but you will make clear and measurable progress and the process will also be fun and enlightening.
The Penn State Board of Trustees is embarking on an effort to evaluate and rebuild “the fundamental culture that is Penn State.” The culture change will unfortunately be in response to a terrible tragedy like in some other organizations.
Fortunately, many organizations see how they must build a culture advantage and relentlessly grow clarity and alignment as a team to reach their full potential. A great culture will not guarantee the elimination of horrible behavior but it will mercilessly eject those individuals to preserve the culture when it occurs.
