How to Fundamentally Tackle Culture

Article - by Hamid Soltani

 

The Term ‘Organisational Culture is a Misnomer for Many Professionals

A common trend amongst many cultural specialists is to adopt a silo approach and at best, focus mainly on the linear (systemic) side of the organisational behaviour. For a variety of reasons, they feel somewhat challenged to address the non-linear (complex) aspect of the organisational behaviour and generally fall short of bringing together the diverse behavioural needs across all stakeholders to establish comprehensive cultural sustainability.

​

Executives and management on the other hand often cleverly use the term ‘Culture’ as a voiceless culprit to absolve their responsibilities for bad management and intentional neglect.

In spite of its touchy-feely appearance, ‘Culture/ Behaviour’ is merely an ‘Organisational Capability’ and it should be part of the ‘Enterprise Business Architecture’ domain of activity and definitely not HR. This is not to say that HR has no contribution to make, but culture is more about the business capability management that requires the involvement of the entire organisation.

​

This is why many executives pay lip service when it comes to such an important organisational capability. Addressing culture is often dismissed when it comes to real action. Do you remember the Royal Commission to the banking sector? Cultural problems were the evil culprits behind every wrongdoing that was identified by the commission. Guess what, since then nothing measurable or fundamental has been achieved by organisations to prevent future occurrences of such behaviours.

​

HOW TO MANAGE CULTURE:

​

•  Intelligently and clearly define what culture actually means. A meaningful standard should be adopted to defuse any misconception.

​

•  Define how such required behaviours can be created for each stakeholder group in order to support their needs.

​

• Use a multidisciplinary approach to create a SUSTAINABLE link between all required behaviours. Start from the core behaviours and expand out with each iteration.

 

• Create a comprehensive behavioural model. This is what I have termed as the ‘ORGANISATIONAL BEHAVIOUR LANDSCAPE MODEL’, This is the fundamental blueprint for all sustainable behavioural interrelationships/influences and will ultimately serve as the ‘central intelligence’ for all organisational decision-making activities by management and staff.

 

• Define meaningful metrics for how to measure and track cultural behaviours and calculate trends.

​

• Define statistical techniques and tools for measuring cultural outcomes and behavioural networks and dependencies. This requires special expertise in order to bring the maximum benefit to the organisation.

 

• Continuously refine the model to incorporate new dynamic influences of change from internal and external variables.

​

BENEFITS TO BUSINESS FUNCTIONS:

​

• Customer Experience, Employee Experience, Regulatory Experience and Shareholder Experience can be viewed together as one set of interrelated behavioural mix and sustainably monitored/ improved using meaningful metrics.

​

• Business Strategy team can obtain holistic insights into the organisational behavioural complexity. They also benefit by understanding which strategic approach works better for the organisation.

 

• Organisational Risk Management becomes far more intelligent in understanding the root causes of their Risk and mitigation strategies.

 

• Organisational Change and transformation can holistically understand their domain of change to help them intelligently measure and monitor the impact of change on all their stakeholders.

 

• All management practices and decisions will be made based on the Organisational Behaviour Landscape Model.

 

• All business areas such as HR, IT, Finance, etc. will be using a single model, a common language to understand how they all come together and impact one another.  

 

​

​