It's the Culture, Stupid

Story: It's the Culture, Stupid (from the Boulder Daily Camera)

When my family arrived in Boulder some years ago, our big kids were little and our little one wasn't born. We wanted to meet people and keep the kids busy, so we signed up for every kid activity under the sun.

Skating lessons at the downtown ice rink: delightful! Swimming with Curt Colby: tremendous! Avid4Adventure, Bits, Bytes and Bots and Renaissance Adventures: magnificent! The kids had a blast. I enjoyed meeting the parents. Everyone was happy.

There was only one dark spot on our family activity schedule that year: my daughter's ballet class. The ballet school was unfriendly and poorly run. It felt like a stereotype, a striver's dream, built for parents hell-bent on seeing their kids dance in the Joffrey.

The school had a music program in addition to dance classes. We tried that one, too. Ick! Through the heavy wooden door I could hear the teacher screeching at my third-grader. No thanks! The school was broken, and the malevolent culture was palpable to me as a parent. That's the thing about organizational culture: it's loud.

Years later, I heard the back story. The original, grassroots, warm and inviting music school had undergone a disruptive and unpopular change in control some years before. When we hit town, the effects of that unfortunate series of events were evident. When a culture is broken, clients can tell.

There's an old New Yorker cartoon that shows a CEO barking to an underling, "Get me a corporate culture by Monday morning!" The joke is that, of course, every organization already has a culture. We may love it or hate it or be oblivious to it, but it's there. Whether the culture supports our goals is another question.

I got a call from a CEO this week who said, "I must be crazy calling you now, when conditions are so tough in the marketplace. But I think we could be working together more effectively in my company.

"Our employees aren't rallying around the mission just because we're under competitive pressure. I guess I don't blame them. We need to figure out how to manage in this new environment. I can't afford to have my best people quit on me now, and I need every person's best efforts."

I give the CEO credit, because it would be easy to say "I'm not expending one iota of mental energy on soft-and-squishy people issues now, when our company is under siege." The CEO understood that turnover and motivation and culture are all related. If employees don't care about the game plan, a Dave and Buster's gift certificate will not do much to change their views.

As a newcomer to the broken music-and-dance academy (now out of business, no surprise) my gut told me that the culture was awry. The CEO's gut told him the same thing about his organization.

He decided to act rather than wait for the malaise to magically disappear on its own. He told me "My instinct says that I'd better dig into this topic now, before it badly disrupts my business."

Instinct, gut -- if you can't pay attention to those trusty scouts, who can you listen to?