Corporate Superpower

Cultivating A Winning Culture For Your Business

Oleg Konovalov

• Éditeur: WildBlue Press
• Année: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781947290464
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Workplace Culture

Winner of the Readers' Favorite® silver medal! "Can help your organization create the culture needed to move to the next level of success."—Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers50, #1 Leadership Thinker, #1 Executive Coach in the World Culture is the soul of any organization, whether a gas station, church or international corporate powerhouse. A strong culture breeds loyalty, innovation, and success. A weak culture will breed cynicism, apathy, instability, and the eventual demise of the organization. Yet, culture is an often-overlooked aspect of business thinking and strategy. Positive culture can't be maintained without such critical factors as respect, job satisfaction, involvement, loyalty, shared affection, preparedness to change, and responsibility, which defines the engagement of everyone in an organization. Teamwork, innovativeness, professionalism, accountability, shared vision, and trust form the main asset of any organization, its metaphysical resources. They define the nature of psychological power residing in culture and have direct impact on a company's performance and achievement of its goals. Whether or not this potential is realized depends on how effectively it is exploited. In this book, a reader will learn what culture is, why it is important and how to fix it when it goes wrong. Leaders, management, as well as employees on the front lines will benefit from the discussion. This book is for those rising above the ordinary every day. "This book is among the most comprehensive, insightful and educational books I have ever read on how to build a world-class culture. This a must read on this extremely critical topic."—John Spence, Top 100 Business Thought Leader & Small Business Influencer in the USA

Chapter One

Live, Immaterial, and Functional

Since the time of Cicero, people have tended to take the phenomenon of culture for granted, often assuming that it is synonymous with organizational culture. However, a more specialized understanding of organizational culture began to coalesce some decades ago. In fact, it was first described as a group climate by Lewin, Lippitt, and White in 1939. Subsequently, in the mid-seventies, organizational norms, roles, and values were viewed in terms of the social psychology of organizations, although, at that stage, it was not explicitly stated as organizational climate or culture. Since then, a large number of definitions have appeared, serving to confirm the complex nature of this incorporeal being. However, we are still exploring this elephant in a dark room.

Culture does not exist in an isolated and purified environment without the presence of other people. Culture is a complex phenomenon, deeply interpenetrating all of our daily activities, which exists only in collectives of people, i.e. in states, nations, and organizations. Culture is a system itself. The word “system” derives from the ancient Greek word systema which comes from two words – syn, which means “together”, and histemi, which means “to set.” System is actually an idea which defines how process or ideology is to be set for the best possible performance or outcome. Cultural or ideological systems can be seen as a collection of roles which reflect human values and thus have a direct impact on organizational results. As a system, culture needs to be viewed using a systematic approach and not a mono-dimensional view.

Three Dimensions of Culture

Culture is multidimensional. One dimension is pragmatic and rational, regulating rules, norms, and codes of working in organizations. A second dimension is more irrational and incorporates the behavioral and psychological approach of the group’s members to their duties and to the organization itself. A third dimension reflects the transcendent side of culture, which can be viewed as the organizational cathedral, the reference point for the entire organization’s activity.

Regarding the strictly rational aspect, Aristotle wisely defined a state, as an interaction for reaching mutual goals. Not short-term tasks, but goals of successful survival, prosperity, mutual support, defense, and satisfaction of its own needs. Applying Aristotle’s definition to an organizational viewpoint, we can say that it is similar to the purpose of the state, just on a smaller scale – an organization is the interaction of its members ordered to reach defined goals that benefit the organization.

Organisational Anatomy (Konovalov 2016, 71) defines organizational culture as a catalyzer of performance. I will use this definition in the present discussion as being the most advanced and practically relevant to the aims of all organizations. Looking at the spiritual or transcendent side, we can consider company culture as the soul of the organizational body, which helps the brain (management) motivate the body for action, sense the environment, attract stakeholders’ positive emotions and energy, stimulate and encourage development, and drive the organization through tough times.

This third dimension is the dynamic power and spiritual core of the organization. It is built on symbols which shape the company’s psychological state and define the boundaries of its influence. We will discuss the role of symbols and values in more detail later as this is a tremendously critical and under-appreciated issue.

Each of these facets of organizational culture empowers and enlightens the other sides of the immaterial core of any company, and by doing so, gives life and vitality to a company. Culture also defines the boundaries of an organization. Within those boundaries, dependent upon the culture’s nature, the talents of the employees are revealed and allowed to flourish.

Indispensable Catalyzer

Production or providing of services can be compared with a complicated chemical reaction of long-chain utilization of resources by perfectly synergized functions. A chemical reaction is a change of two components – substance and energy. Substance, in this sense, represents all tangible and intangible resources and capabilities within an organization. Organizational culture is that energy which comes from the joint efforts and enthusiastic fulfillment of duties of all employees, and, as a result, adds spark and life to all processes. If the culture is positive and stimulating, then we can expect the desired reaction which results in a superior product and secures growth.

At the same time, we do not want culture to be a counterproductive energy, i.e. an inhibitor, which slows down substance transformation, making resource utilization costly and restricting the organization’s growth. In a more rigorous way, there is a fit between strategy and culture which has a direct impact on company performance.

In a positive cultural environment, we become more productive and positively attuned toward colleagues. We speak with enthusiasm to friends about what we do, how important it is, and how good it is to work for our company. If the organization’s members are effectively collaborating, positively and naturally attuned toward achieving company goals, this positive energy will aid in creating excellent products even if the materials used are less than perfect. Using culture to generate this level of enthusiasm and commitment is important for any company, established or start-up. Strong culture allows enhanced exploitation of people’s competencies, reaching higher behavioral consistency among employees, and overall preparedness for necessary change.

Immortal Soul

A strong soul defines a healthy psychological state and provides strength. If one is going through challenges at a stage when muscles are prepared to give up, the soul pushes forward and thus achieves success. Also, it is important to understand that a company and its culture cannot be separated just as a human being and a soul cannot function independently of each other.

A group of people, even when working toward the same goal, remains a crowd without this intangible, yet vital, element of culture. Culture serves as a force which forms productive and collaborative teams. Culture is born as soon as founders start actively interacting in the creation of a business plan and establishing a new venture, even before the organization is fully formed. They are imprinting the first characteristics of culture, its nature and shape. Unfortunately, the issue of culture is usually a neglected conversation by entrepreneurs and start-up enthusiasts, often at the cost of a slow and ineffective start-up. Entrepreneurs and investors need to look into the cultural properties of a new project as a matter of priority, for in so doing, they will define future growth prospects which can predict future performance.

Spiritual Core

The spiritual core defined by culture is responsible for a sense of belonging, loyalty, pride, and a number of other crucial factors of productive organizational citizenship. Residing in symbols and a proclaimed understanding of the need for effective interaction towards organizational goals, cultural identity in any organization is as unique as human fingerprints and cannot be replicated anywhere else.

When we talk about a person we admire, a common characteristic we note is that this person is able to pull him or herself together when facing difficulties. A person who exhibits such spiritual strength is able to deliver extraordinary performance and reveal inner creativity in the face of adversity.

The same applies in businesses where spiritual identity permeates all operations and processes, forming a solid dome above a company, allowing it to withstand any problem. However, if a company’s spiritual identity is weak, it is like being under a leaky shelter, eventually driving its people away.

A Rationality of Immaterial Being

A tree with roots that grow deep can withstand strong winds. The stronger and deeper the roots, the stronger the tree is. We cannot see these roots, but we can see the tree. If the roots are weak then the tree will have more of a withered appearance with a lot of dead branches. Likewise, organizational culture becomes strong only if it’s built on action and interaction, i.e. active and effective collaboration and mutual support, and not just talking about possible success.

Managers tend to neglect to form an understanding of organizational culture and the vital role it plays in making the organization successful. Most often, managers receive training about leadership styles, ways to motivate staff, and corporate loyalty. Rarely does this involve discussions of the foundational role culture plays in a company. As a result, businesses face constant loss of seemingly loyal customers, valuable employees, and enthusiastic investors. We are consciously digging a pothole for the companies by turning toward seemingly rational opportunistic transactions. However, pure rationality is not enough in the management of such sensitive issues as loyalty, staff motivation, and customer satisfaction. In terms of internal environment, culture bridges a gap between purely functional working relationships and interpersonal relationships which are a substratum for nurturing tacit knowledge, reciprocity, and willingness to understand others.

Rationally bound actions often result in quick gains but often become less successful in the long term. The metaphysical role of culture in this phenomenon is underestimated. Without culture, all these aspirations and seemingly feasible plans become unrealistic.

Organizational culture has a tremendous number of roles due to its trifold nature. Culture is everywhere and in everything, from how people support colleagues, care for customers, solve problems, respect company achievements, and even to how a cup of coffee is offered to a visitor. We can feel a company’s culture right from our first interaction with it. Culture gives a human appearance to the living body of an organization, thus making it attractive in the eyes of employees and customers. Its uniqueness can be seen in the organization’s determination, persistence in achieving goals, desire for development, and spirit of creativity and innovation.

As Japanese writer Ryunosuke Satoro concisely stated, “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” By strengthening bonds between co-workers, culture makes them an ocean with a tremendously irresistible power to achieve phenomenal goals. If employees feel respected and appreciated, they no longer feel like separated drops but important parts of a greater whole, and as a result, they feel obliged to be productive, loyal, and engaged in company life. These critical attributes are seeded and nurtured by culture. Also, culture provides an adaptation mechanism which shapes and adjusts the mindsets of new recruits and revitalizes company veterans in line with organizational goals, thus securing stable long-term development.

Organizational processes and relations cannot be harmonic without a prominent positive culture. People-centered culture encourages an environment of collaboration, stimulating development of seamless and harmonic organizational processes. It is the key to balancing collective and individualistic behaviors and uniting them for one purpose.

Trust is the glue and stimulator of all relations, and no authentic business transaction can be executed without it. Trust is a macro-phenomenon which lubricates all internal and external processes. It strengthens relationships inside and outside the organization, helping to develop mutual support. A strong culture stimulates trust across the entire organization, building it from within and from without. By contrast, a weak culture is characterized by a breakdown of trust that will see the organization dissolve into isolated cliques with little to no communication between them.

Culture, and its transformations over a company’s history, reflects the experiences of surviving in a challenging organizational environment. It reflects how organizational members have gone through extreme moments, withstood external forces, collaborated, and learned from each other. Thus, culture derives from a combination of the reflection of bad experiences, best practices, and advantages of mutual support.

For instance, a co-founder of a British transport company suggested that:

“We took care to nurture a supportive environment from day one that eventually allowed us to survive, learn from losses, value the role of each team member, learn how to work through socializing and become stronger as one body. Expensive trucks are nothing without effective people.”

It is impossible to develop such human and social capitals without culture, which is critical for organizational existence. Human capital represents skills, talents, knowledge, experience, creativity, and know-how, which can flourish only in an environment of positive culture. By stimulating mutual support and development of productive internal and external organizational relations, culture is a great constructor of social capital which allows attracting resources embedded in external networks of relations. Culture makes an organization a social being and a responsible part of a society, which aids in attracting additional external support and the recognition of its contributions.

Functions of Culture

A modern American skeptic and writer, Phil Plait, in his talk The Goal of Skepticism, noted, “Give a man a truth and he will think for a day. Teach a man to reason and he will think for a lifetime.” (Plait 2010) By understanding the reasons behind the very nature of organizational culture and its functions, we obtain food to fuel our thoughts and actions for a lifetime.

Let’s imagine the product of a given business as a gold bar valued according to purity. It could be a product unit for producers, money or knowledge for knowledge-dependent organizations, the number of served customers for location-dependent organizations, saved lives for charities, or tax-paying citizens in a state. An equation to express the relationship between the gold and the activity which generates it would work by multiplying product units by hours worked, in which the product unit is something physical offered to customers. However, we also can add effort, motivation, or commitment into this equation as elements from another immeasurable and undefined dimension – the strength of organizational culture. The equation will then read: product unit x hours x cultural strength which will result in a gold bar of 24-karat value. However, should the culture be counterproductive, i.e. have negative value; the value of the final product will be significantly reduced.

It is common to think that a product only comes out of a workshop as the result of physical resources and energy. Such an outlook overlooks the psychological components of the organization. Understandably, it is easy to concentrate on what we can see, and touch; tangible items that we can fix. However, the real strength of any organization comes not from its physical resources but from more intangible, more qualitative elements.

We can define culture as organizational metaphysics. This is the physics of managing human emotions and senses. The difference between successful and unsuccessful business lies in understanding this.

The inner psychological state of the organization is reflected in the functions of culture. The functions are: the inner organization’s language, praxis or active doing, apoptosis or controlled cells death, homeostasis or cultural system regulator, and entropy or energy regulator. We will discuss these critical functions in greater details further in this chapter.

Language

Culture differs based on context. Whether we walk into a university, church, fishmonger shop, or a Navy ship, there will be differences in culture, an often-overlooked reality. The clearest difference is that each organization has its own unique language. By recalling Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (2008), we may say that the organizational universe is full of different discs with their own cultures and thus their own standards and languages. From this viewpoint, language reflects a nature, structure, and description of roles in a cultural domain.

Language defines the art of transmitting and reading signals between people. Language defines communication as a vehicle of transmitting messages and stories between people without losing the quality of human emotions and perspectives. It defines the use of acceptable and forbidden metaphors. Language describes values and allows them to be communicated to all corners of the cultural territory.

Consider legendary hero Jason and his Argonauts in their chase for the Golden Fleece. All their challenges and obstacles were successf...

Table des matières

• Praises
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• The Magic Colors of the Future
• References