“Ethical people will create an ethical culture because culture is a reflection of its people,” a leader passionately proclaimed at a workshop I facilitated recently. He was struggling to understand how an organization of people who held ‘ethics’ as a top personal value could create a culture characterized by fear and mistrust. He’s not alone in trying to understand how good people can come together and give rise to a work culture that makes life harder, not easier. How can good people create a culture that isn’t good for them?
The title of this article is intentionally provocative. It is overly simplistic to describe an organization’s culture as “bad” – despite how it can feel to those trying to operate in it! Organizational cultures are complex systems of interdependent elements, including: people’s mindsets, beliefs and emotions; shared stories and norms; formal systems and mechanisms. These elements come together to create a culture that either enables human endeavour or hinders it.
Cultural Entropy
Cultural entropy measures how well an organization’s culture enables or hinders productive work. It measures the amount of conflict, friction and frustration that exists in people’s day-to-day work. It’s the time and energy spent creating work-arounds for systems that make work harder, not easier. It’s energy spent dealing with inter-personal conflict or feeling overly constrained by micro-management or rigid systems. The energy required to overcome cultural entropy is energy that is unavailable for value-added work. As entropy goes up, trust and engagement go down.
Cultural entropy stems from the self-serving, fear-based actions of leaders. That may seem harsh. It’s certainly not always that easy to spot. The self-serving actions of an individual leader can seem innocuous, but they put their own needs ahead of the organization’s. For example, a leader who prioritizes sales in his region to ensure his team achieves their targets, even if this jeopardizes sales in another region. Or the leader who holds onto a valuable piece of information rather than sharing it with others to make herself look good. Neither of these leaders likely got up in the morning thinking, “I’ve got to do whatever it takes to serve my needs at the expense of others.” The thoughts underlying self-interest and entropy-inducing behaviours are usually more subtle and often outside a leader’s conscious awareness. This lack of awareness is the key to understanding how good people can create a culture that isn’t good for them.
Conscious versus Unconscious
The disconnect lies in our conscious intention versus the impact of our behaviours on others. Our intentions are shaped by our personal values, the conscious values and beliefs by which we seek to live. Our behaviours are more complicated. Under stress, our behaviour is driven by fear more than our good intentions. We unconsciously re-prioritize what we value to fulfill an unmet need that sits with the fear. This is the fear-based, self-interested behaviour of leaders that fosters cultural entropy.
I have built my career on working with leaders to enhance and develop their people, teams and organizations. So, you can image my dismay as a newly-minted Principal at a management consultancy when the results of my first leadership 360° feedback came back with a lacklustre score in Develops People. I will never forget the comment from a young consultant, “There is no room for us to contribute. Lanja already knows the right solution.” Gutted. Despite my passionate desire to develop people, especially the young people on my team, I was doing the opposite. How could this be? Upon reflection, I realized that under pressure my conscious intention to develop people was taking a back seat to my need to prove myself in my new role and deliver “the perfect solution” for clients. Two of my personal values – client service excellence and developing people – seemed to be in competition. Driven by the fear of not being good enough in my new role, I had unconsciously prioritized my clients over colleagues. Until I received the feedback, I had no idea that my impact on the team was the opposite of my intention.
My experience of not recognizing the disconnect between my good intentions and unproductive impact is not unique. I see it in every organization and every leader I encounter to varying degrees. With every leader who remains unaware of their own disconnect under stress, cultural entropy endures. With every leader who whole-heartedly commits to developing greater self-awareness and self-discipline, especially when things get tough, entropy has a chance to dissipate.
How do good leaders ensure they foster a healthy culture?
As leaders, we are the cultural stewards of our organization. Our behaviours and their impact on others – both intended and unintended – set the tone of the organization. We signal what is acceptable and unacceptable by what we do, more than by our words.
Being fully accountable for the health of our organization’s culture requires each of us to develop awareness of the unintended impact of our stress behaviours. Feedback mechanisms like a 360 are a great resource for this. But we need not rely only on a tool to tell us what is written on the faces of our people. Pay attention to the mirror created by the people around you. Do they light up when working with you? Are they engaged, energized and putting in discretionary effort? If not, ask yourself:
- Who am I being as a leader that is reflected in the mood and energy of my people?
- What unintended impact might I be having?
- What’s going on for me that might be driving this disconnect between impact and intent?
- What, if anything, do I fear or need that may be interfering with my intention?
- What fear do I need to move past to behave in line with my intention?
At our busiest and under stress is when we most need to hold up this mirror. This takes discipline. It takes humility to answer these questions honestly even if the answers feel uncomfortable. It takes courage to face our fear and put the interests of our people ahead of our own.
Cultural entropy is created by the fear-based, self-interest of leaders. Healthy, productive cultures are created by the selfless courage and humility of leaders. Organizations don’t transform, people do. Are you ready to do the hard work?
