When it comes to workplace culture, why is it so easy to point out the flaws in others while ignoring our own? Rhonda Brighton-Hall (FCPHR), Director of the AHRI Board, makes the case for honesty.
I had the pleasure of attending the Human Synergistics Conference in Sydney on Tuesday. It was a great line-up – from Olympic gold-medallist Katie Kelly (oh my goodness, how inspiring is she?!), to Michael Combs from CareerTrackers (who in his spare time has built a second brilliant business called CareerSeekers to work with refugees and asylum seekers), to Jen Whyte from Avnet Technology (who has done some fabulous culture work across different industries), to Shaun McCarthy and Rob Cooke from Human Synergistics (who really do provide some of the best thinking in the world on workplace culture and what to do about it).
We listened and learnt from these experts, people who are genuinely making a difference to our understanding and our collective ability to improve organisational culture in pragmatic and tangible ways.
Right in the middle of the morning, David Morrison spoke and he offered this simple definition of culture: “It’s the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.”
This got me thinking. That is why the stories we tell about culture so often have the current leaders as heroes – we talk our own workplace culture up, always describing it as attractive and positive and all things good. While others outside our tent – competitors, disgruntled customers, former employees, social commentators – call out the flaws and inadequacies in our one-sided versions, we power on believing our own stories.
They are, after all, what binds us together and makes us proud. We dismiss the flaws as ‘just one bad egg’, or ‘something taken out of context’.
The truth is, culture is as flawed as human beings.
Yes, it’s rich with positivity and potential and good intent, but equally flawed with fallibility, greed and self-interest. Once you have more than 10 people in one room with one goal and one way of working and treating each other, you’re open to pockets of ‘less than ideal’. Inside most big organisations, culture is good and bad, has good pockets and bad pockets, and possibly even good and bad days.
So, if it is inevitable that culture is flawed, why try to manage it? Well, because it is worthwhile to fight the good fight to make culture as good as it can possibly be for every stakeholder – every employee, every customer, every person we interact with – on every occasion we can possibly make it. To make it as open and inclusive and consistently good as we can get it. And to improve it even when we think it’s pretty good already.
How do we do that?
There’s lot of levers to pull, but a good place to start is by telling more honest stories. By making the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves as honest and complete as we can make them. By incorporating the flaws and inadequacies, the challenges and the issues. It’s in these real stories that we can find genuine opportunities to improve.
David Morrison added another point later in his presentation when he spoke about improving workplace culture. He said, and I paraphrase, “to disrupt culture and improve culture, you have to disrupt the very people who benefit most from it. The people whose careers were built on it; on whose success depends on it staying as is.”
The challenge is that includes the storytellers themselves. Culture is not simply a PR tool or a way of inspiring loyalty and pride. It’s a reality for whoever interacts with an organisation, and it needs to constantly be challenged to be better, and managed to be the best it can be.
Hi Rhonda, it warmed my heart to hear you extol the virtues of paying attention to the stories we tell ourselves, others and about others. Reminds me of the great work we did on narrative leadership when you were at CBA. Carry on….
Thank you for this article. Drawing a parallel between culture and the individual – acknowledging that flaws exist – is an excellent reminder. In making this comparison you have done so in a way that is compassionate yet also honest. This approach helps people to be more open and less defensive to reviewing their own contribution to ‘flaws’ in organisational culture. I will keep this in mind in my work as a mediator where it is all too common for participants to start their ‘story telling’ on the flaws in culture, leadership, in their team, in another team member etc.… Read more »
I think it is important to take an holistic approach to culture change/review.This needs to include an in depth study of how the formal structures and relationships differ from the informal.I found over the years that culture tends to be shaped by informal relationships.Equally synergy between different functions is often influenced informally,either positively or negatively.HR in my view needs to develop an understanding of these informal processes and relationships in the context of how they impact performance.
To address your question about culture, ( “why try to manage it ?”), another way to look at it is that if you choose to ignore the odd bad egg they become emboldened. They acquire friends. They multiply simply because they can. Good leadership gives everyone in the organisation the authority to call out bad behaviour and maintain standards.