It is part of the meal, it is generally considered to be good for you, and yet plenty of people still push it to the side of the plate. Some turn their nose up at it, some leave it untouched altogether, and others eat it simply because they have been told they should.
Culture is often treated in much the same way. It is something that sounds important, something organisations know they probably ought to have, and something that regularly appears in strategy decks and leadership conversations before everyone gets back to the “real” work.
The problem is that culture is not a side dish. It is integral to how the whole organisation works.
Culture shapes how decisions get made, how people behave, how leaders lead and how teams perform. It influences how an organisation responds to pressure, how willing people are to challenge established thinking, how effectively teams work together and how successfully change is implemented.
You do not have to launch a culture programme to have a culture. Every organisation already has one. The question is whether that culture is helping the organisation perform at its best, or quietly getting in the way.
One Thing, But a Lot Going On
There is another reason broccoli is not such a bad comparison for culture. A head of broccoli might look like one thing from a distance, but look more closely and you see that it is made up of countless smaller parts, all connected to one another.
Culture works in much the same way. There may be an overarching culture across an organisation, but it is experienced through individual teams, leaders, locations and functions. People bring different experiences, expectations and perspectives, while the history of the organisation continues to influence how things are done today.
That makes culture more complicated than a set of values written on a wall.
An organisation might say that it values openness, collaboration and accountability, but those words only become meaningful when they are reflected in everyday behaviour. What happens when someone challenges a senior leader? How are difficult decisions made? What happens when performance falls short? Do people feel able to speak honestly about what is not working?
These experiences are culture. They tell people what really matters, regardless of what the organisation says should matter.
Not a Side Dish
Organisations rarely decide that culture is completely unimportant. More often, culture gets pushed down the priority list because there are other things that appear more urgent.
There is a transformation to deliver, a restructure to complete, a new strategy to implement or a difficult commercial challenge to navigate. Culture can become something to address once the important work is finished.
But the important work is happening through the culture.
If people do not feel able to challenge decisions, that will affect the quality of the strategy. Teams struggling to collaborate will affect the success of a transformation. If leaders behave differently from the behaviours they expect from everyone else, that will affect trust. If people are accustomed to protecting their own territory rather than working towards a shared goal, that will affect performance.
Leaving culture alone does not mean leaving it out of the equation. It simply means allowing the existing culture to continue influencing what happens.
Why You Can’t Force-Feed Culture
There is another common approach to culture that is not particularly different from forcing someone to eat their broccoli.
An organisation decides what its new culture should look like, defines a set of values and behaviours, launches a programme and expects people to get on board. There may be workshops, communications campaigns, new posters and a refreshed section of the website.
The problem is that culture is not created by telling people what it should be.
It is shaped by what leaders consistently do, what the organisation rewards, what it tolerates, how decisions are made and what people experience in their everyday working lives. If those things remain unchanged, changing the language around the culture is unlikely to change the culture itself.
You can put broccoli on someone’s plate, but you cannot make them enjoy it.
The same is true of culture. It has to be experienced, reinforced and modelled if it is going to become part of how an organisation actually operates.
Intertwined With Performance
Perhaps the biggest problem with treating culture as a side dish is that it separates culture from organisational performance, when the two are intrinsically connected.
Culture affects how effectively an organisation executes its strategy. It affects how leaders make decisions, how teams work together and how people respond when circumstances change. It can create the conditions for high performance, or create friction that makes performance considerably harder.
That does not mean culture is the answer to every organisational problem. Nor does it mean that every performance issue is a cultural issue.
It does mean that leaders should understand the relationship between the two.
Rather than asking simply, “How do we improve our culture?”, it is often more useful to ask: “What is our culture enabling us to do, and what is it getting in the way of?”
That changes the conversation.
Culture stops being something that sits alongside the business and becomes part of understanding how the business actually works.
The smartest know you shouldn’t leave broccoli. And the smartest know the perils of leaving the culture.
Whether you choose to pay attention to it or not, it is already influencing how your organisation works. The question is whether you understand what it is doing, and whether you are prepared to do something about it.
What’s next
Want to finally get to the bottom of your culture? Take a look at our hand-picked Top 10 list of culture advisory firms in the UK
Prefer your content in audio form?
Potential, realised
At Coode, we look at strategy through a human lens because success depends on how people work together. When leadership teams achieve real alignment in how they lead, they unlock performance that may have been present all along but not yet fully realised.
To explore how Coode helps leaders define culture and align it with their strategy and context, visit our services page or get in touch here.
Stay in touch and subscribe to de-cooded, our regular digest of business insights from the perspective of leadership and culture.