Editorial
Why did I give my article this click-bait title? Because I wanted you to read it. Because I know that people want easy solutions to hard problems. Because I wanted to be playful?
Yes.
Organizational culture is a summation of how people behave within an organization. Some organizations hire for culture fit, some don’t. When Hewlett Packard hired me almost 30 years ago, they hired for culture fit. I couldn’t believe my good fortune — an organization that valued trust and respect and many other values that aligned with my own — I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Seven years later the culture had changed. Mergers and acquisitions, and leadership changes at all levels of the company meant people were behaving differently. The culture I was hired into no longer existed.
I’ve seen the sub-cultures that exist on teams change with the addition or subtraction of one or two people from the team. I’m sure many of you have, too.
How Do We Change Culture?
To change culture, we must change behavior.
How do we change behavior?
Just as we change our eating habits to be healthier, we figure out what the target behavior is and then we start acting that way We approach it in much the same way when we’re talking about the behaviors of an organization, except we’re considering different behaviors and trying to scale them.
What are our target behaviors within our organizations?
There are many different versions of what a desirable organizational culture consists of, many are very similar and have overlapping characteristics. Given the importance of knowledge across our organizations, let’s use the example of a culture that enables and supports knowledge sharing. Its focus is on sharing, collaborating and stewarding knowledge.
The following list of essential qualities comes from the ISO 30401 Knowledge management systems — Requirements standard. To create an organization that has a knowledge sharing culture people need to:
- Feel comfortable openly discussing issues and offering advice.
- Share knowledge and information openly and honestly to enhance socialization and flow of knowledge through the organization.
- Protect the organizational knowledge.
- Feel empowered to autonomously act on knowledge.
- Demonstrate accountability for their own learning and results.
- Offer their knowledge to others rather than keeping it to themselves.
- Collaborate with, rather than compete with, their colleagues.
- Invest time in reflecting and learning.
- Place value on acquiring new knowledge through their own experiences, whether they were successes or failures.
Management and leaders can’t just say “feel comfortable” or “collaborate” to encourage people to behave this way. Specific experiences enable these behaviors (or discourage them if you’re doing it wrong).
Related Podcast: Melissa Daimler on How to Intentionally Design Corporate Culture
How to Improve Culture
The five tips below (the title didn’t lie!) will help you improve the culture in your organization as a whole and set the stage for better knowledge sharing.
1. Recovering Intuition
Intuition is an important part of who we are and how we know things, and yet we have been educated to believe it’s unimportant and to be ignored. However, everything starts with self-knowledge — and intuition is an important part of that.
You and your colleagues need to work on having a basic level of intuition and self-awareness. Why do you do the things you do? What pushes your buttons? How do you like to work? When do you like to work? What does good communication look like for you? What is your intuition trying to tell you?
None of this is about making people conform to your wishes and desires. It’s about you understanding yourself and being clear about your boundaries. Boundaries can change and evolve and are not carved in stone. It is up to you to recognize them and live within what’s acceptable to you and to be aware of what your intuition is telling you.
There are a variety of methods to get to know yourself and start listening to your intuition: journaling, meditation, making/creating, therapy and retreats to name a few. What is critical in this step is being open, curious and compassionate with yourself and those around you. And listen to your gut.
2. Communication and Conflict Management
People working together are not going to agree on everything, nor should they. Dealing with conflicts constructively is good for collaboration, problem solving and innovation, not to mention building trust, respect and a healthy organizational culture. Unfortunately, these skills are rarely taught in schools and universities.Anyone who wants to learn these critical skills must seek out specialized courses and programs. One popular approach is Non-Violent Communication (NVC), developed by Marshall Rosenberg.
NVC is about honesty, listening with compassion for ourselves and others, taking responsibility for our emotions, and being curious rather than judgemental. It helps us reframe our interactions with others so that we can find the middle ground where a win-win is possible.
Once we have improved our conflict management skills and intuition, we are better able to develop our communication skills, the skills we need to work more effectively with others. These can include active listening, creating a sense of belonging, and connection, all of which are lacking in many organizations. We can improve these skills through practice and experience (like most things). Becoming better at them often requires curiosity and more listening than speaking. Holding the space for people so they can express their concerns and questions without judgement.
Related Article: Communicating Change: Overcoming Resistance Through Empathy
3. Confidence, Courage and Bravery
As we learn new skills it is important to have the confidence to use them in our interactions with others. This takes courage and bravery. In the beginning this will mean feeling the fear and doing it anyway. Trusting that our vulnerability and honesty will be respected and honoured. If we have created real psychological safety where people have the confidence and skills to disagree and discuss differences of opinion without it deteriorating into some kind of kindergarten-like tantrum we will have succeeded. Our confidence, courage and bravery will be rewarded with progress towards our goal.
4. Facilitative Leadership
Facilitative leadership skills are about curiosity, vulnerability, trust, respect and sharing context. Everyone is (or can be) a leader. Leadership is not about where a person is in the organizational hierarchy.
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Facilitative leadership brings all the previous skills together and adds purpose, curiosity, problem solving, creativity, critical thinking, and courage. Facilitative leaders use these skills in our roles within the organization, regardless of what that role is.
5. Big Picture: Putting the Pieces Together
At this stage people are seeing the big picture and the interconnectedness of things, they are crossing the boundaries between the siloes. They are learning to consciously make strategic choices based on curiosity in order to find the most sustainable decisions, challenging assumptions as they collect data and information.
Related Article: How to Integrate Arts-Based Interventions Into Your Work
How to Turn These New Skills Into Practice
Typically we turn to courses to learn new skills, but realizing these skills as a part of the organization’s culture takes practice. Embedding these skills into daily processes, meetings and activities is key and the way to do that is arts-based interventions.
Rather than falling back into old patterns of behavior, arts-based interventions (also known as arts-based experiential learning) is a way to signal a new way of doing things, with the bonus that the activities themselves help build the skills we’ve just been examining and support the culture change because the behaviors and patterns are changed.
Making arts-based interventions/arts-based experiential learning a part of the organization evolves the behaviors of the individuals and therefore the culture of the organization moving the culture towards one that is focused on knowledge sharing, collaboration, flexibility, and innovative problem-solving.
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