Engaging Culture One Conversation At A Time

The following is a guest post by contributing editor of strategy+business Sally Helgesen.

The intense focus on corporate change during the last decade has given us a greater appreciation of the role that culture plays in organizations. Change efforts can succeed only if the culture is engaged; getting the strategy and other formal elements right is never enough.

And culture is vested in people — how they work, what they believe, how they behave and communicate, and what they ask of themselves. It’s the bedrock reality of an organization, its true ground. When culture is harnessed, extraordinary transformations can occur.

Many of this year’s business books recognize culture’s role as the essential driver of effective change. But frequently their suggestions for engaging the levers of culture are limited to exhortation: Be more open! Behave less hierarchically! Become a change agent! By contrast, the two books reviewed below offer highly specific ways of engaging culture to build more effective, productive, and innovative organizations.

Déjà Review

The first edition of Productive Workplaces: Dignity, Meaning, and Community in the 21st Century by Marvin R. Weibord is a highly personal, sometimes idiosyncratic account of Weisbord’s own quest to become a better leader, and a wise and timeless contribution to the literature of work that a quarter-century later is the year’s best business book on organizational culture.

In the new edition, updated and expanded, Weisbord recasts some of his stories from management history, describes his recent work with collaborative teaming, and offers both updated and new cases.

The new chapter on “Ten Management Myths” alone, in which the author summarizes five decades of experience, makes this edition worth reading. One myth is the belief that large-scale interventions and Day One transformations have the capacity to change an organization’s culture.

But Weisbord’s experience has convinced him that organizations actually change only one small step at a time. This means focusing on what is happening in the here and now. Culture exists and is manifest in day-to-day business.

Several of Weisbord’s myths are based on the premise that leaders make primarily rational decisions. He’s skeptical of executives who justify every action as dictated by profit, believing that their real bottom line is more often the desire to maintain and expand their power. He similarly questions the routine use of layoffs, which he describes as “trading skills, experience, future capability, and competitive advantage for short-term cash.”

It’s not that layoffs are necessarily wrong, but that they have become a habit in many organizations, a response embedded in and reinforced by the culture. Weisbord encourages cultures that take a case-by-case approach, honouring Mary Parker Follett’s “law of the situation,” which not surprisingly focuses on what’s happening here and now.

Weisbord sees an inherent tension between top-down management and participative cultures. He traces this dynamic back to Frederick Taylor, who was both an efficiency engineer and a fierce advocate of workplace democracy. Taylor’s struggle to integrate his holistic and systemic instincts with his desire to quantify and measure performance created an internal dialogue that Weisbord believes has shaped organizational cultures ever since.

He discerns a similar dialogue at work in Douglas McGregor’s highly influential Theory X (top-down control) and Theory Y (people can be trusted to do their work), viewing these two organizational types not as opposing ideologies but as polarities that express the full spectrum of an organizational culture that is ultimately rooted in the complexity of human nature.

Weisbord’s narrative voice in Productive Workplaces — which is both a history of organizational management and a personal story — is direct and free from cant, skeptical of big claims and sweeping changes. The author is a passionate incrementalist whose words demonstrate the humanity at the heart of his enterprise. The reissue of his classic book is cause for celebration.

Talk, Talk

The guiding premise behind Talk, Inc.: How Trusted Leaders Use Conversation to Power Their Organization is that the strength and consistency of an organization’s culture can be judged by the quality of its communications. The “organizational conversation” not only manifests the culture, it also plays a key role in shaping it. Talk, therefore, is a powerful tool for creating and promulgating more powerful and more aligned cultures.

The authors believe that effective organizational conversation always involves a combination of four elements: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. They fully describe each element, and provide case studies and actionable takeaways.

1. Intimacy means that talk takes place face-to-face: informally, between two people or in small groups. Leaders who communicate intimately do so by talking to people at every level of the organization in ways that are personal, authentic, and transparent with regards to intent.

They address real concerns in direct language that avoids euphemism and condescension. Because it is rooted in relationships, intimate talk demands that leaders “get real,” meaning that they have to listen and to be willing to examine their own underlying motives and presumptions about the people with whom they are engaging.

2. Interactivity means that talk is two-way: there is a give-and-take. Profoundly social by nature, interactive talk both elicits responses and provides a means for participants to pass on information. The authors note that interactivity is well served by social media platforms, which facilitate and sometimes mandate two-way communication. But they caution that such technologies are tools that, if misused, can just as easily be counterproductive.

3. Inclusion means relying chiefly on employees’ talk to generate ideas and content. “If you let them build it, they will come,” write Groysberg and Slind, who then provide dozens of examples for putting this principle to effective use, focusing in particular on the EMC Corporation.

When the data storage giant’s leaders needed supporting content for their submission to an annual Best Companies to Work For survey, they didn’t ask corporate communications to prepare the materials. Instead, they community-sourced it by putting the request out on their intranet. Employees presented and documented their own experiences, posting photos and videos and speaking through blogs, and EMC used their content to support the submission.

4. Intentionality means that talk is purposeful as well as flowing. Groysberg and Slind note that those who speak with intention do so with a sense of where they hope the conversation will lead and what they want to accomplish. Conversations that serve intentionality must therefore bring different segments together, giving participants a comprehensive sense of their organization and its place in the larger world.

All of this year’s best business books on organizational culture present fresh and actionable ways for building stronger and more resilient companies. They zoom in on the day-to-day behaviours, attitudes, and ways of talking and thinking that support growth and transformation — one meeting, one insight, one conversation at a time.

Sally Helgesen is a contributing editor of strategy+business. She is an author, speaker, and leadership development consultant whose most recent book is The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, co-authored with Julie Johnson.

This is an abridged piece from strategy+business’s Best Business Books 2012 featuring selections on a number of topics including strategy, marketing, innovation, and organizational culture. To learn more about the Top Picks in business reading from strategy+business, check out their article Best Business Books 2012.