When leadership meets culture

6 min readNov 20, 2022

As many people will have noticed, there is a new owner in town for Twitter and that is having a radical effect on the organization, the remaining employees, and any remnants of psychological safety.

I’m also growing increasingly concerned about the long-lasting impact on other managers / leaders, using the new Twitter CEO as justification.

Organizations have several aspects where they do better and worse, so when a new owner is in town there are opportunities for that leader to assess the organization, its capabilities, its strengths / weaknesses, and the culture.

I will keep my opinions out of this article, but I do personally believe that treating people with respect, transparency and empathy are important values to me.

So how do you measure and assess an organization? There are many ways / approaches, some of them more meaningful / statistically valid than others but they tend to be quite interesting and food for thought either way.

Dave Snowden and Sense-Making

Dave Snowden is well known for his decision-making framework Cynefin around complexity. Another part of his work is Sense-Making and the software his organization offers ‘SenseMaker’. More information here.

The key message from Dave’s work (and the rest of the Cynefin co) is that culture cannot be built, it is emergent which means it cannot be ‘rolled’ out as part of a transformation. See OMG They want to change the culture

Dave’s approach to Sense Making takes a triangle as a way of making you decide where on the triangle you feel your answer fits over 6 different narrative captures.

As part of the capture, each point on the triangle has all positive qualities / words to it that for your brain into a system two thinking mode because having all positive qualities makes your brain itch and must slow down and think. This is a powerful way of capturing people’s feelings towards an organization, department, or team.

How the input gets visualized into landscape maps

Dave challenges the notion of the Likert scale type questionnaires and surveys because people often fill them in without thinking and the fact that filling out such surveys often comes with a level of guilt or lack of safety how open and honest people feel comfortable being, let alone the fact that strongly agreeing or disagreeing tells you little.

Westrum’s Typology of Organizational Culture

When it comes to culture, there’s a model I find useful from Dr. Ron Westrum, known as his typology of organizational culture.

The three typologies below have an influence on the way information flows within organizations, in some ways can be thought of as Conway’s law for organizations.

A typology of organisational cultures R. Westrum

Organizational culture is also measurable too, according to Dr. Westrum’s research / findings. Here’s the measures used (from 1–7) and the scores are averaged to give you a single score overall.

Westrum’s culture metrics (1 Strongly Disagree, 4 Neutral, 7 Strongly Agree)
1. On my team, information is actively sought.
2. Messengers are not punished when they deliver news of failures or other bad news.
3. On my team, responsibilities are shared.
4. On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.
5. On my team, failure causes inquiry.
6. On my team, new ideas are welcomed.

This model has featured in many books from Continuous Delivery to Accelerate.

Psychological safety

We know from Google’s studies on performance and psychological safety that organizations / departments / teams who have greater safety perform better.

One of the key findings that really made an impact on me was”

Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. Google RE:Work blog

Google identified five key dynamics that set ‘successful’ teams apart at least at Google. (source)

Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

Overfitting culture impacts diversity

An article on HBR around The NEW Analytics of Culture takes an interesting approach to culture and how to measure. One thing that really sticks out is thinking about culture from your own perspective vs the perspective of someone joining your organization and what that looks like if you are hiring people into your organization.

This raises an interesting question for how you hire, are you hiring to

fit your existing culture (do people align to your teams' norms etc.)
create adaptability (the ability to learn and adapt to culture over time)
diversify your culture (increasing misfits to create broader creativity / innovation)

Chris Matts and Failureship

Chris has authored several articles on his blog about the dark twin of leadership (Failureship). It is a polarising view and no doubt bound to upset some people, knowing Chris that is intentionally by design. Chris talks about culture with two perspectives Risk Manged Culture and Risk Averse Culture as a way for talking about how people talk, work, and collaborate with each other.

This quote stuck with me:

Transparency is when you give someone the information they need, in the format they need so that they can make the decisions they need to make to fulfill their responsibilities. Chris Matts blog post

Summary

If you are changing your organization's ways of working, driving out cultural / organizational change, you should think about the type of organization you want to create and not just the outcomes you are looking for. You cannot implement the type of culture you think you want; you need to let it emerge through the behaviors that are working and then through amplifying those.

When actions are taken by leadership, this sets a precedent for how others should follow. This can be a positive or negative thing depending on the actions taken.

Looking at people’s motivations is also an interesting lens to apply to what is motivating people and their own or systemic incentives. Especially when you consider what Dan Pink describes are the motivators for people: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.

If you aren’t keeping these things in mind when you are making changes, you may end up creating a toxic culture, learned helplessness or a high-performance organization.

The point I’m trying to make is that cultural change is complex and there is no obvious best practice to apply when it comes to changing culture and organizational behavior.

Experimenting / probing and getting feedback is critical to consider. Don’t be that person who takes suggestions from ‘experts’ and blindly applies them to your context without paying close attention. People do not simply take transformation and behavior change and follow / comply, people tend to need social proof from their peers rather than a shiny video, website, or presentation.

References