The Corporate Culture Survival Guide

Edgar H. Schein, Peter A. Schein

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119212300
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Effective, sustainable cultural change requires evolution, not disruption

The Corporate Culture Survival Guide is the essential primer and practical guide every organization needs. Corporate culture pioneer Edgar H. Schein breaks the concept of 'culture' down into real terms, delving into the behaviors, values, and shared assumptions that define it, and explains why culture is the central factor in an organization's success—or failure. This new third edition is designed specifically for practitioners needing to apply these practices in real-world settings, and has been updated with new coverage of globalization, technology, and managerial competencies. You'll learn how to get past subconscious bias to assess whether or not your existing culture truly serves your organization, and how to introduce change and manage the change process over time for a best-case-scenario outcome. Case studies illustrate successful change in real companies, providing models and setting the bar for dismantling dysfunctional cultures.

Corporate culture begins with the founder, and evolves—or not—over time. Is your culture working for or against your organization? How can it be optimized? This book separates the truth from the nonsense to provide real-world guidance on initiating and managing cultural change.

• Understand when to assess your culture, and how to do it objectively
• Learn how cultures evolve and change over time, for better or worse
• Discover the reality of multiculturalism amidst the rise of globalization
• Evolve your culture to more effectively serve your organization

Each of us is a part of many cultures—what you do, where you live, where you grew up, what you enjoy, how you live; in the workplace, many different people with many different cultures come together toward a common goal—will these cultures clash or synergize? The Corporate Culture Survival Guide shows you how to create an overarching corporate culture that gets everyone on the same page to drive your organization's success.

Part One
Defining Culture Change Leadership

This book is intended to be both theoretically valid and practically useful. To accomplish both, we have divided the chapters into three parts and an appendix.

Part I suggests some basic definitions and spells out the core concepts of what we mean by culture, change, and leadership. We provide a dynamic generative metaphor for culture and show how leadership, culture, and change are part of one dynamic, living, evolving system. This is a new dynamic model not previously described and therefore we recommend some reflection time and encourage readers to discuss and improve upon the metaphor; it’s generative.

For those of you who want to dive right in to the examples and stories, you may want to skip ahead to the examples at the end of Chapter 2, and see how Chapters 7, 8, and 9 in Part III illustrate the new model with longer descriptions of change processes.

And, if you have a burning need to take action for yourself or your company, we offer the appendix to review four tools that may, at the pace you choose, nudge you into your own culture change leadership.

Chapter One
A New Metaphor for Culture Change Leadership

The world of work and organizations has changed dramatically in the last several decades since the first Corporate Culture Survival Guide was published. What we mean by “leading,” by “changing” something, and by “culture” have evolved into complex, dynamic, systemic concepts that are completely intertwined with each other.

If we don’t take these more complex concepts and their interconnection seriously, we will continue to have change programs that either fail completely or fail to deliver what they promised. Starting with “leadership,” we’ve seen significant movement from “command and control” variants to “transformational leadership,” “distributed leadership,” “servant leadership,” and, in our own thinking, to a broader concept of humble leadership (Schein & Schein, 2018).

The concept of “change” has evolved from a predominant assumption that successful change is a series of steps launched at the top of the organization and cascaded down through the echelons in a linear and programmatic manner. That model is still very much with us, but it has begun to compete with a growing number of “bottom-up” or “innovation happens everywhere” change models.

Historically prevalent change models, largely based on Kurt Lewin’s “unfreezing, changing, refreezing” are being displaced by the growing recognition that we are living in a VUCA world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in which change is continuous, whether we like it or not (Johansen, 2017).

And what about “culture”? This concept’s very ambiguity allows us to project onto it whatever is the most salient organizational theme of the day. The most common projection has been to see culture, alternatively called “climate,” as the feel of the workplace, which engenders a focus on “employee engagement” and various spirited tactics to get the company on the “Best Places to Work” lists.

We have to take such popular notions of culture seriously because they drive many of the current change programs, but we also have to make a strong argument that if we don’t make an effort to show what culture is really all about, we will not be helping organizations achieve some of their most important goals.

A more refined and complex concept of culture results from the changes in the nature of the work that defines many modern organizations. New forms of work have created new kinds of organizations, which, in turn, have revealed cultural issues that are new and different. Ultimately, leading culture change must be seen as an intertwined complex dance of iterative, inclusive, adaptive, nonlinear steps in 360 degrees, top-down, bottom-up, and edge to edge. Culture is not a function, a result, a lever, an outcome, a tool. Culture is the multifaceted learned structure and practice of the people who lead and people who follow, people who work together and build a history that shapes the future. A myth we should abandon is that culture is “something” that can be easily built, managed, and manipulated by leaders and “champions” to create “positive change” over the course of a sprint, hackathon, quarterly initiative, or even annual planning cycle.

The behavior of leaders and group members based on various values they bring to a new group gradually becomes a shared property of that group and will shape its identity, the way it structures itself, the processes it adopts to get its work done, and the norms it evolves to make life comfortable for its members. Organizational cultures comprise all of these elements of substrate in which work happens.

Culture contains observed behavior, the rituals and rites that the group chooses to adopt, the espoused values the group chooses to promulgate, the learning and adaptive structures and processes the group evolves, the deep and taken-for-granted assumptions that give meaning to the daily behavior, and, in the end, culture even contains what the group defines as leadership.

The Beach as a Generative Metaphor

Picture yourself standing on a beach, watching from the side as waves crest and break on a gently sloping beach. Now, take a symbolic leap with us. The water, the ocean, can symbolize the ebb and flow of human initiatives interacting with the sediment of past interactions, which is culture symbolized by the sandy beach. If we think of culture change as human intentions to make things better, we can think of tailwinds blowing from the ocean to the shore as the forces toward change, and we can think of headwinds as blowing away from the shore toward the ocean, perhaps “resisting” the pressure to change, and their various effects are the natural and technological forces that compel and constrain human action.

Figure 1.1 The Beach as Culture Change Leadership Generative Metaphor
Source: Artwork by Ernesto Renda, 2018

When one is dealing with abstract ambiguous changing concepts, such as leading, change, and culture, no analogy or metaphor will really clarify all the complexity. As such, we need a metaphor that captures at least the dynamic positive energy of the concept. The dynamics of the beach with the forces of the water and the wind can serve that function for us.

Leadership can be visualized of as a wave or a set of waves. Wave energy traverses the deeper water as a swell, a gentle movement propelled by some existing or historical force (wind, tide, etc.). As the swell approaches a beach, the normal flow is disrupted, and the wave begins to crest. The wave starting to crest is how we will visualize leadership acting with an intent to create change. The wave cresting is the wave being led by a new combination of forces. The white froth or spray can be thought of as the leader or the leading edge of change.

Change is the outcome of the swash of the crested wave on the beach, the impact of the leader’s drive for change impacting the organization, and the backwash that then feeds the energy of subsequent cresting waves. The patterns of movement adapt to the forces of the water, the sand/shore and the wind or other atmospheric conditions. The water filling back into the wave, restoring its energy (continuing change) is in a constant feedback loop with the repeatedly cresting wave (sustained leadership). As you study the waves, the feedback and iteration between the leadership crest and resulting change is a flow, not a linear cause and effect. The continuous flow, with each crest swash and backwash perhaps looking much the same as the last, will nevertheless have new impacts on the sand or shore, even if it takes many iterations.

Culture is the beach, which created the conditions for the wave to crest (created the conditions for leadership) and is how we will visualize culture. Leadership and change impact the culture (contours of the sand or shore) gradually, perhaps not immediately visible—seeing the change may require observing a few breaking waves. Over the course of a 12-hour tide cycle, or a three-month season, the shape of the beach, the contours of the sand, do reflect the leadership (crest and swash) and change (backwash) process that has been played out. Just as the contours of the beach never remain unchanged, so, too, does culture change with the constant interplay of the crest of the wave swashing forward and the backwash moving sand in relation to the energy of the break and the corollary friction of the beach. Culture is both a friction impeding change and an accelerant shaping the gradual response to the leadership and change cycles.

Intent: Our visual must also capture the process of culture, change, and leadership, continually interacting as a historical process, which is also an intentional man-made process. The next symbolic leap we suggest is that the wind direction and force represent both the forces of nature, the environment in which the beach exists, and the human impetus. At the risk of being too literal with our symbolism, the shape of the wave, the relationship of the crest to the backwash, the relationship of wavelength and frequency, is directly related to which way the wind is blowing. Again, we think of this as human impetus, intention, and resistance. Tailwind shapes the dimensions of leadership, headwind shapes the dimensions of resistance. Change in relation to culture reflect both the dimensions of leadership and the dimensions of resistance.

In planning any kind of change it is perilous to remain at this level of abstraction. Imagine your CEO or board of directors suggests “we need to change our culture,” and you explain the beach metaphor, and ask them if they can articulate where in this model they want to begin, and what problem they are trying to solve by asking for “culture change.” Do they want to shift the sand around, or move some rocks, or clean up all the kelp debris left behind by turbulent wave activity? What winds are blowing and in which direction?

We suspect you will get some puzzled looks but hopefully it will illustrate this poi...