Changing corporate culture

By Kim Jong-nam

I work as an organizational development consultant and instructor for corporations in Korea. Whenever I’m invited to diagnose the client companies or facilitate training, what attracts my attention most is their organizational climate or culture. It’s chiefly because understanding corporate culture is just like understanding an ecosystem, which gives a lot of information about what can grow well inside, what shouldn’t be attempted, and eventually, how healthily their trees and flowers flourish under new circumstances.

After Samsung’s announcement that it will pursue a flat organizational culture and eliminate hierarchical red tape, many small- and medium-sized companies are also becoming interested in how to revamp their own organizational culture to make them more flexible and creative. Thus, I believe it will be truly worthwhile to think of what small steps we can actually take to participate in these endeavors.

What I would like to suggest as a means, in my opinion, is the simplest and most effective way of changing corporate culture. Since meetings in any company are part of their organizational structure and can act as a springboard from which to catapult and transform their culture, my observation thus far as a consultant, makes me believe that utilizing meetings can affect the way the corporate environment can be changed positively. As Peter Drucker said, an organization’s holding of excessive meetings indicates the company is a bad one.

Firstly, what we need to calmly think of is whose role should be changed first. You may be thinking of the answer now. It’s the leaders of organizations. Whenever I hold training courses or consulting interviews with clients’ employees, their all-but-unanimous agreements were toward their leaders, and in particular, their senior leaders. Corporate culture is like water which falls from the top to bottom: without changing corporate leaders, all the other measures and strategies will be meaningless and time-consuming.

Secondly, if leaders of an organization decide to change how they lead the meetings they initiate, they need to go further in terms of what and how they will change them in detail. There are three essential things they should be more open to:

1. The leaders of an organization should become experts in facilitating and generating discussions and involve their employees in meetings, whether in the generating of ideas or creative problem-solving. If not, they will face and remain restricted regarding openness and creativity to possible solutions.

2. Any employee who thinks they’ve been excluded in the decision-making process will lose energy and enthusiasm in sharing commitments and experiencing engagement. It is invaluable to include the employees’ opinions to make them feel the organization they belong to is really their own in order for companies to grow more productively.

3. Above all, an employee who will take a silent seat and not contribute in a meeting could feel like an unwanted visitor. It reminds us of the importance of employees playing their own roles in their meetings. Just like 3M emphasizes, leaders need to keep in mind that participating in a meeting means employees are conducting their official work.

As mentioned above, most people will agree that Korean companies have very hierarchical cultures, which hinder them from being more globally advanced. In order to ditch the organizational hierarchy, I would like to suggest that all Korean executives and managers be keen on changing their meeting culture, the microcosm of their corporate culture, to generate collective intelligence and cohesive power.

CEO and founder of META(www.imeta.co.kr), a corporate education company which focuses on developing high-potential employees, managers, and executives through consulting, training and coaching. It is based in Seoul. Write to jongnam@sas.upenn.edu.