A Failing of Corporate Culture

Corporate Culture is an amorphous concept.  It is hard to correctly identify, hard to change, impossible to pinpoint, and yet permeates everything we do as an organization.  In fact, it is one of the most important factors of success or failure.  Create a successful corporate culture and often the world is your oyster.  Corporate Culture is not the sole key to success, but it is definitely a pillar on which much depends.

I am employed at a spectacular place to work, but with a terrible corporate culture.  That may sounds like a strange thing to say so let me explain.  I believe in the people I work with.  They are nice, talented, and hard working.  The technologies are world class, tried and true.  So what is the problem?  Originally I thought it was a methodology.  Then I thought it was lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities.  Then it was a lack of trust.  However, I realized it was all of these things and more.  We have a very poor corporate culture.  

So what is “Corporate Culture”?

Corporate Culture describes and governs the ways a company's owners, managers and employees think, feel and act.  Wow, that is a pretty basic statement, but it has profound implications.  It has always been my belief that the success of an organization is ultimately determined by the type of culture and environment in which employees work.  I am pretty sure that everyone wants to succeed, so if a corporate culture is so important to achieve success why do we find ourselves in such negative corporate cultures?  In one word:  Management.

“Business success is generated from the bottom up; Corporate culture is created from the top down.”  - Bob MacDonald

The Role of Management

There are a lot of things that go into creating a positive corporate culture, but the single most important thing is people.  Executives, upper managers, middle managers, workers, etc.  We all play a role in creating a culture good or bad.  However, it is only the strata of managers that can define a culture, the rest of the organization must live in it.  

The standing joke in my office is that “beatings will continue, until morale improves”.  This is said in jest, but the underpinnings are not.  People here are not motivated, nor are they valued as individuals.  Things get even worse when you insert the bureaucracy, standard operating procedures, and antiquated methodologies employed.  Employees are not empowered to make decisions and have been conditioned to become automatons.  Dissatisfaction and apathy is rampant.  Management, often focuses only upward in order to appease their supervisors instead of focusing on the people that report to them.  This compounds the issue, as the lowest level workers, affectionately “where the rubber meets the road” feel helpless to change anything.  What are these employees, arguably, the most valuable employees in the organization, to do?  Well the most common guidance is to leave and find employment elsewhere taking their intimate knowledge of the product and process with them.  Whats worse, is it is often the more talented and experienced people that leave first.  This leaves a void of top talent.  Those that stay are either those that are completely apathetic, not performing up to their potential, or worse, fall into the self-explanatory phenomenon known as “quit and stay”.  

The corporate culture is falling quickly into a downward death spiral.  Even as new employees are brought on, the culture saps the motivation out of them.  They quickly either jump ship for greener pastures or they concede and fall in-line with the culture.  Both of these outcomes are detrimental to the organization as a whole.

How to right the Sinking Ship?

Well, this is the big question.  I have been looking for advice on the internet which has lead me to a lot of different articles, blogs, stories and the like.  Most often the solution is to fire everyone in management and start over.  Fortunately, that is not good option option nor should it be.  Cleaning house doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better corporate culture.  That doesn’t mean that letting some individuals go isn’t part of an overall solution, but the wholesale liquidation of management often will hurt more than working to change an organization’s culture.  

I think there are three keys to creating a successful corporate culture.  

1.  Know what you want to be.

2.  Trust the people that work for you

3.  Constantly reevaluate and course correct

The next parts of this blog will follow the process of self discovery and how a non-manager tries to solicit change within an organization that is both set in its ways and is in the downward spiral.  With some significant changes, the company can bounce back, employees regain the passion that is so critical to success and a positive corporate culture can flourish.  The challenges are great and I cannot promise that I will be successful or even that I will not throw the towel in. However, as things stand right now, I see too much potential in both the people and products that I work with to let the apathy reign.  I guess I am new enough that I still care.