Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours | Bruce Daisley
- [/] +organizational culture: Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours | Bruce Daisley •workfutures.io
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'At one stage Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.'
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from the transcript
- Briner 'I’m not saying you can’t change behavior. There’s hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let’s just dispel that. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is, culture is not a good route to doing that. It’s not a good way to do it. In fact, it’s very poor way to do it.'
- 'let’s say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviors. I totally agree. They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way changing them? And from my understanding is culture is pretty useless. And I’ll tell you some of the reasons why. But you actually mentioned one of the problems that we talked about, of counterculture. One thing is, people assume organizations have a culture. That is highly contentious.'
- it’s making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organization is minuscule. So you’re not in a position to judge it. But I guess as know, cognitive biases, we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around everything kind of make may help us make sense of it. It’s kind of a bit ridiculous. It’s a bit like it’s going to the north of England and saying, oh, I went to Sheffield where I lived for six years. Oh, everybody was really friendly to really friendly culture. It’s just nuts. Where you know, how can you possibly have enough data to make that kind of judgment? Are the norms of behavior? Sure. But then like your example, the WhatsApp group in the metropolitan place, the question is, how many people doing that? Is it shared? Is it not shared? What actually is the problem with that? So the first issue around culture is: is there a culture?And people never really ask that question. They just assume or you just can feel it. It’s just a vibe. You can kind of sense it. No, you can’t.'
- If you define culture as 'the way we do things around here' then saying you want to use culture to change the way we do things around here is circular reasoning, and it's circling in the wrong direction.
- Circling the other way: change the behaviors and culture will follow.
- 'So if there’s a group of people behaving in a way, and maybe there is a norm for that behavior, what you need to do still -- let’s just put culture out of the picture -- and say, we still need to change those behaviors. Then the real question is, how do we change behavior? And as I say, there’s hundreds of years of research into this in many different kinds of fields, from psychology, from health psychology, to social policy, which is almost never used in organizations.'
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body
This week I had an enjoyable ding-dong of a discussion with Professor Rob Briner. (You can listen to it as a podcast below).
At one stage Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen.
To be fair I’d already acknowledged that I agreed on what he was saying that behaviours are more important than culture. Also I’m more than a culture fan, I promise.
But it’s a sign that it’s an outstanding discussion. Rob’s key point was that the idea of culture is vague and subjective.
Rob says that culture is ‘a description. So if you want to change something, you don’t change the description of it, you change the cause of it.’ He says we should be specific about what we’re trying to do and why.
‘ It’s easier to act your way to a new way of thinking than to think your way to a new way of acting,’ was the way that one management thinker, John Shook, expressed this in a famous study of the NUMMI car plant in Fremont, California in the 1980s. The notion that behaviours are hard to change and require much more deliberate action that changing slogans is easy to accept.
Rob Briner takes this further and explains how any of us should be thinking about bringing evidence to our work with teams. For me a key takeaway was a recognition that discussion about culture often seeks to be a short-cut to do behaviour changing work at scale across an organisation. A leader diagnoses that some employees aren’t behaving in an enterprising way, and they announce that henceforth the culture will be more entrepreneurial. In this regard the demand for a scaled solution gets in the way of us staging an effective intervention.
In truth the most effective organisations need to think about how they allow local decision making - unlocking local autonomy in their teams.
A wonderful discussion. Check it out on:
Rob asked me to share the following bio:
Rob Briner is Professor of Organisational Psychology (Queen Mary University of London) and a Research Director at Corporate Research Forum (rob@crforum.co.uk). He has been promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Management, HRM and Work Psychology for almost three decades. His recent research with Corporate Research Forum includes reports on Evidence-Based HR and how HR can more effectively drive organisational performance.
He also leads CRF’s Work Psychology Network which has produced reports summarising the best available and most practical work psychology theory and evidence around a range of topics including motivation and performance, assessing potential and behaviour change in organisations.
He has also produced a series of short posts on LinkedIn where he explores various popular ideas about behaviour at work (e.g., learning styles, psychological safety, growth mindset, happy-productive worker) and asks about each: Is that really a thing? That question is answered through a combination of critical thinking and using reviews of scientific evidence.
There are some good comments on the LinkedIn posts about the episode: here and here. (Feel free to connect there btw).
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