This Is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am delighted to sit down with Jennifer Chatman from UC Berkeley.
Jennifer, you have studied culture for a number of years, what have you learned about leveraging culture more effectively?
CHATMAN - Well I have learned 3 things. First, organizations that promote the behaviours that enable them to achieve their strategic objectives are more effective.
Second, I've learned that cultures that are strong, in other words a culture where employees take it seriously, do much better because it means that people will be rewarded for adhering to cultural priorities and not so rewarded when things are not going so well.
Third, and most importantly, we've just finished a big research study looking over a six-year period and what we found is that the most effective organizations are those whose cultures are not only strategically relevant, are not only strong, but also emphasize adaptability so that they can cope with the dynamics of their environment.
MOORE – How do you know when you need to evolve a culture?
CHATMAN - Yes, that's a great question and most organizations are a little slow on the draw to be honest. Part of the reason is that culture breeds inertia, but really organizations that are on top of their strategy and are really solving for their strategy on a regular basis are continually thinking about how to prioritize certain strategic objectives over others.
Now, what this means it that often times things don't come off the table. In other words, if your organization is focused on being results-oriented and innovative, what may be happening over time is that you may be prioritizing results for a while more highly than innovation, but then at some point innovation comes up higher as well.
It is really incumbent on senior managers to be explicit in thinking about strategy and thinking about how that trickles down into behaviours throughout the organization.