Executive team culture
By Kim Jong-nam
Many people agree that organizational culture is very difficult to change. Furthermore, it is often thought that any attempt to change it will take an unpredictable amount of time and may even be ineffective. It is true that many obstacles can stand in the way of change. But this doesn't mean that change is impossible. One crucial ingredient for a successful culture change is changing the culture of the senior leadership team.
Often, organizations that are struggling to change their corporate culture also suffer from apathy in their highest ranks: their senior leaders have formed a culture that is uninterested in their corporate culture. Here are some observations that I made during my recent workshops.
1. Individual executives often have different definitions for organizational culture. Because of this, they will also differ on how important organizational culture is, how best to approach it and even whether they need to participate or not in changing it. This leads to misalignment among executives.
2. Some executives think that organizational culture is like the atmosphere of an organization. Thus, they resist culture change because they believe that it is a concession to the culture that young millennials and Gen Z hope to have. If they remain under this misunderstanding, they will continue to not participate.
3. Other executives are unsure whether performance or culture “comes first.” They often ask whether merely pursuing performance will result in a desirable organizational culture. Having a clear understanding of the relationship between organizational culture and performance is a must for executives to become high-performance managers.
4. Some executives think that organizational culture is created not by the small number of executives, but by the larger number of rank-and-file employees. They, therefore, believe that managing the personalities of employees is equivalent to managing the organization's culture. This kind of executive sometimes expresses skepticism about whether it is even possible to manage human beings' inclinations.
5. Many executives think that organizational culture is driven by particular policies in their organization and ask why the leadership team also needs to participate in changing corporate culture. They ask why the HR department is not effectively managing policies to solve this problem and question whether their own participation is really useful.
6. Some executives object that the real issue is that their organization lacks a clear direction, branding, and/or strategy. They ask what they can do in this kind of scenario and what should be addressed first. Many businesses are in complex and unclear environments like this.
7. In many contemporary Korean organizations, executives say that more than 80% of their employees are non-Korean because their factories and regional subsidiaries are located abroad. They ask what they can truly do in this case and how.
8. Many executives want to know how the scores of their organizational culture diagnoses were calculated and how priorities should be set according to the data. It should be noted that many organizations do not give even basic instructions to executives about how to interpret these results and how to decide what steps they will take.
These kinds of questions and doubts are ever-present; not addressing them will make changing the culture even harder. Sometimes these objections are made in genuine good faith, and the executives' opinions are thought-provoking. However, other times, executives simply don't understand what organizational culture is and what it means for their organizations.
In this case, if the executive team is uninterested in changing the organizational culture to begin with, not addressing their questions and concerns will create even more apathy. As a group, the executives will suffer from misaligned opinions, and their employees will see all of the promises of change as empty words. Given this, in order to make organizational culture change effective, some strategies are necessary to help executives actively participate. The culture of the executive team always significantly affects and even leads the culture of the whole organization.
At the very least, a basic organizational culture training or workshop should be held in order to help executives understand what the culture diagnosis results mean. I have seen many occasions on which executives have not received basic training about organizational culture ― its definition, how it emerges, its relationship with performance, its diagnostic methods and change management. If this is not done, the change effort will be messy and ineffective.
Additionally, executives' opinions and plans should be aligned with those of other change leaders such as change agents, who are generally lower- or mid-level employees and team leaders. Team leaders are the leaders who lead organizational culture change on-site.
Organizational culture change is a whole-group activity. This means that there are people who lead and people who participate. Executives are the leaders, not people who are just there to ask questions or express dissatisfaction. We should look into the culture of the executive team to help them become true change leaders.
Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of Culture Engine (www.cultureengine.co.kr), which specializes in organizational culture change via consulting, training and coaching.