Question

Define the concept of corporate culture as rigorously as you can. Emphasize a definition that has practical use. How can a corporate culture be crafted? Changed over time?

Answer 1

Culture is under attack. It is currently being blamed for most implementation and execution problems. Culture "trumps everything," it is argued, usually without the empirical evidence to back up such a claim. Corporate culture can create a "culture trap," a very narrow way of thinking about culture and its role in organizational problems, that can lead to poor decisions and frustrations as managers try to affect culture and culture change with the wrong methods.

First, virtually no one clearly defines what they mean by “culture,” and when they do they usually get it wrong. Second, virtually no one has read the original research that shows why culture — when clearly defined — is so important, how it is formed, and how it changes.

focus on four of the factors and conditions that affect it:

1. Structure and Process. Large retail stores like Wal-Mart or Sears, seeking to achieve decentralized operations and create a culture of decision-making autonomy so stores can get close to customers and local tastes, might ask corporate and regional managers to leave stores alone and allow store managers to do their own thing. Interference with the stores, it is hoped, will decrease if managers are asked to butt out and let local decisions and actions prevail. But what happens when the next major problem arises? Corporate or regional managers swoop down on the stores, bringing centralized solutions. As an alternative, they could change structure instead. Increasing the span of control for corporate or regional managers, for example, would militate against involvement in the stores. Large spans foster decentralization and autonomy at lower levels by making it more difficult to actively meddle in a larger number of stores' strategy and operations. Behavioral change of top managers can foster behavioral and culture change in the stores.
2. People. Bring in fresh blood and thinking. Rotate managers with different views of competitive conditions or operations. Supply different, needed skills or capabilities from the outside. New people, ideas, and strategies can lead to behavioral and performance changes that, in turn, can affect new ways of thinking and culture change.
3. Incentives. Randy Tobias once remarked that the culture of the old AT&T rewarded "getting older." The culture, over time, became stifling and bureaucratic. Appeals to managers to change and team-building exercises didn't work. But CEO Tobias and others after him changed incentives to reward performance, not getting older. New people were attracted by the new incentives and the opportunities presented (see previous point) and the culture began to change. The same emphasis on incentives can be seen over the years at J&J, GE, and other companies. Incentives affect behavior and performance and attract new resources and capabilities, which can lead to culture change.
4. Changing and Enforcing Controls. It's important for companies to increase feedback, evaluate performance, and take remedial action. Emphasis should be on tweaking strategy implementation activities to achieve desired results. It's vital to learn from performance, including mistakes, and use the lessons learned to change incentives, resources, people, methods and processes, and other factors to foster strategic and operating goals. It's also necessary to hold managers accountable for performance results, a formal mantra of Robert Wood Johnson, Jack Welch, and many others. These actions or emphases will help to shape new behaviors, task interactions, and ways of thinking that will create or define a culture of learning and achievement.

But for a leader There are different steps to change culture;-

1. Begin. Someone in a leadership position in your organization (I’m counting on you, my reader, here) needs to make the initial decision that cultural change is a priority, that putting customers (and the employees, and vendors, and systems that serve them) front and center matters.

2. Codify your cultural decision in a very short statement. An explicit (but very brief) statement of what that decision looks like: How you’re going to treat customers. How you’re going to support employees. How you’re going to treat vendors. Because making a decision once isn’t enough: you need a clear way to refer back to it.

3. Change your hiring practices to reflect your (newly) stated values. Every single employee, from that moment forward, needs to be hired for reasons that are congruent with your newly stated values. This is very, very important.

4. Improve your onboarding: The way you bring employees into a company is all-important. As I like to say, you need to go overboard with the onboard. Overboard in stressing (ideally, have the CEO there, personally stressing) the purpose of employment at your organization, as opposed to the normal stuff stressed at orientation: how to handle the minutiae of your job description, signing in and out, and so forth.