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Organizational Culture
What culture actually is, how it forms, and why it so often resists the intentions of the people who believe they set it.
Chapter contents
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Culture and Scale 3 entries Why small organizations do not have culture in the usual sense, what changes near fifty people, and how founders transmit or fail to transmit a standard.
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How Culture Reproduces 3 entries Transmission by imitation rather than instruction: the first month, promotion decisions, and what new people learn before anybody explains anything.
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Reading and Changing Culture 4 entries Diagnosing what is actually operating, why culture programmes fail, and the small number of levers that move a culture in practice.
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The Nature of Culture 3 entries What culture is as a working object: behaviours rewarded, tolerated, and repeated, and why the stated version and the operative one diverge.
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What You Tolerate 3 entries The standard is set by the worst permitted behaviour. Exceptions, the productive violator, and the gap between stated values and promotion decisions.
Entries filed directly to this chapter
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01
Culture at a Second Location
A second site develops its own culture within about eighteen months. The question is not whether that happens but whether the small number of things that must not vary actually hold there.
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02
The Culture Audit
Five questions, answerable in an afternoon from records the organization already keeps. It reveals the operative standard rather than the stated one, and the findings are usually uncomfortable.
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03
Inheriting a Culture You Did Not Build
A new leader has one period of unusual latitude and almost no information. Spending the latitude before acquiring the information is the characteristic error of a first year.
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04
Why Culture Programmes Fail
A programme addresses culture as a message. Culture is precedent, and precedent moves only when observed behaviour and observed consequences move, which no communications effort can accomplish.
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05
Reading a Culture Accurately
Surveys measure climate and self-report. What you want is behavioural evidence, and most of it is already sitting in records the organization keeps for other reasons.
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06
Crossing Fifty
Somewhere between forty and eighty people, informal coordination stops working. The transition arrives without an event, and the usual reading is that the wrong people were hired.
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07
Small Organizations Do Not Have Culture Problems
Below about fifty people, what looks like culture is one person's temperament operating with no counterweight. That is not a criticism; it is a description of the mechanism, and it has consequences.
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08
What Leaders Model Without Noticing
Your ordinary conduct is the ceiling. Not the deliberate example you intend to set, but the unconsidered behaviours you would not list if asked what you were teaching.
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09
The Exception That Becomes the Rule
Every exception is reasonable in isolation and the aggregate is a standard that applies unless there is a reason. There is always a reason, and the people best at constructing them get the most…
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10
Culture Is What You Tolerate
The standard is the worst behaviour permitted to pass, not the best behaviour praised. Everything above that line is aspiration, and the organization located the line some time ago.