Culture: Define and evolve your secret sauce

In my previous post, I talked about the definition of culture, its ingredients and how it supports your organization’s success. I concluded that:

1. culture enforces and feeds what makes you successful; and
2. culture is a living system that supports and nourishes itself.

Also, back in 2007, I wrote an article that emphasized why you should care about your organization’s culture. Now, it is time to focus on how to explicitly define your culture, and document your secret sauce.

Recently I had a good discussion on whether one should even attempt to define one’s culture, given Heisenberg and the uncertainty principle. Though it is a valid argument, there are benefits to knowing thyself. If you are an acronym heavy culture, develop cheat sheets to help newbies navigating through your acronym soup. Or shift your email/IM heavy culture with voice and face-to-face communications to spur collaboration and minimize misunderstandings. Yes, change occurs, and your culture naturally evolves. Knowing what is the keystone of your success, and what cultural elements you need to evolve mindfully is the focus of this article.

Now, without further ado, let’s identify the key aspects and interactions of your culture through the following steps:

1. Calibrate your compass
2. Identify your key ingredients
3. Let them simmer
4. Distill and serve

Step 1: Calibrate your compass

When the going gets tough, when hard decisions need to be made, where do you turn to? What do you use as your guiding principles to ensure your decisions are aligned to support your firm’s success? For IDEO, it is their hot groups (The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm) and how their culture supports the success and creativity of these groups. For Amazon, it is their customer focus and desire to become the most customer-centric company on earth, but also the recognition that they are in the manufacturing (logistics, warehousing, fulfillment) and distribution business (Strategy 101: What business are you in?).

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t emphasizes the Hedgehog Concept to capture what distinguishes good companies from great ones.

The Hedgehog Concept is a simple crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

• What you can be the best in the world at;
• What drives your economic engine;
• What you are deeply passionate about.

Your recipe for success lies at the intersection of these three key dimensions, and your translation of that insight into a simple crystalline concept. Once you have your recipe, you are ready to place out your ingredients on the kitchen counter.

Step 2 – Identify your key ingredients

There are many ways to slice and dice what contributes to culture. In my research, I identified seven key ingredients that must be looked at individually, and then together as to how they support each other and your success recipe.

• People — Company employees are one’s first introduction to your culture. As first impressions count, who you hire, how they talk and behave will say a lot about your company at a first glance.
• Customs — All your rituals, stories, spoken and unspoken rules indicate what is acceptable, how one should behave in certain conditions and most of all, what behavior is valued by peers and management.
• Values — Values reflect one’s attitude and opinion towards people and things. These include what is worthwhile, desirable, useful and important, which in turn influences our behaviors and decisions.
• Structure — These include organizational structure, as well as unwritten lines of influences, power structures, information flow and decision processes. We have a tendency to compensate for incompetence in the form of bureaucratic structures followed with complex processes and policies.
• Work space — This represents the visual aspects of the company, its work space and environment that houses all involved. Everything from how the individual work spaces are designed, to meeting rooms, logos and other symbolic items (including dress codes) give insights into your culture.
• Processes & policies — Processes and policies highlights how your organization is controlled, measured and managed. How they support and align with the rest of your organizational identity will help or hinder your intended culture.
• Vision — Vision is all about the future aspirations, desires and possibilities. It acts as your guiding light to support your secret sauce to success. Though it may be vague, your vision weaves itself into the fabric of your organization’s culture.

For an individual analysis, start by asking questions, such as the ones I have suggested below. These questions can focus on the current state as well as the future desired state of your culture. For a group discussion, post-it notes are a good tool to capture, organize and prioritize information. If you are doing this as an individual, I like using the Cornell System of note taking to capture my thoughts. This allows me to record my information in the rightmost column, and add my insights and observations on the left hand column. Whatever the method you may use, make sure to capture current and future desired states of your culture separately to help with your simmering and distillation process.

Ingredients of Culture - Analysis

Step 3 – Let them simmer

Though the individual analysis gives you a good insight into each aspect of your culture separately, it is important to put it together as a system to see how the ingredients interact. Using mind mapping process, you can see the linkages between each ingredient and dig into how cultural traits support each other.

If your mind map lights up like a christmas tree all over, it is a sign that your cultural traits are integrated throughout. As a living system, this highlights a strong infrastructure, where each element supports and nourishes each other. If some of the main cultural ingredient branches are more integrated than others, it highlights the areas to ponder further. If there is hardly any linkages between the branches, you are probably looking at a very bland sauce…

Step 4 – Distill and serve

Once you simmer the ingredients together and gathered the needed insights, the next steps are driven by the outcome desired. To identify ways to improve the current state, or to develop a future desired state, focus on the traits and the interactions, and how as a system they support your success/hedgehog concept. By utilizing gap analysis (from where you are to where you want to be), you can develop action plans to get to the desired state.

As part of your analysis, it is important to identify cultural traits that are endless, that should be preserved as the keystones of your culture. These keystones represent your firm’s central building blocks that forms and bonds your firm’s identity. Understanding what is changeable and what is foundational will allow you to mindfully evolve your culture.

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