By answering the Questions for the Reader in Chapters Three and Four, you have begun this self-assessment. But your ability to decipher your own culture is limited because so much of culture is tacit. What techniques other than self-reflection are available to you?

For example, as has been pointed out, it is common for companies to espouse teamwork, and surveys often reveal that employees wish there were more teamwork, more trust among employees, and so on. However, examining the artifacts typically shows reward, incentive, and discipline systems that put a premium on individual accomplishment and competition among employees for the scarce promotional opportunities that are available. If the company really wanted to become team-based, it would have to replace those individualistic systems that have worked in the past and are deeply embedded in people’s thinking. If the company cannot or will not create group incentives and group accountability, the end result could well be a drop in morale as employees discover that what they hoped for is not happening.

In other words, what is often labeled as the “desired culture” and is measured by employee surveys that ask “What do you have now?” and “What would you like to see in the future?” is nothing more than a set of espoused values that may simply not be tenable in the existing culture. We can espouse teamwork, openness of communication, empowered employees who make responsible decisions, high levels of trust, and consensus-based decision making in flat and lean organizations until we are blue in the face. But the harsh reality is that, in most corporate cultures, these practices don’t exist because the cultures were built on deep assumptions of hierarchy, tight controls, managerial prerogatives, limited communication to employees, and the assumption that management and employees are basically in conflict anyway—a truth symbolized by the presence of unions, grievance procedures, the right to strike, and other artifacts that tell us what the tacit cultural assumptions really are. These assumptions are likely to be deeply embedded and do not change just because a new management group announces a “new culture.” As we see in the later chapters, if such assumptions really are to change, we need a major organizational transformation effort.

A useful exercise is to ask yourself now, as an adult, what groups and communities you belong to and identify yourself with. Pay special attention to your “occupational community.”⁴ If you are an engineer doing engineering work, chances are you have a whole set of assumptions about the nature of the world that you learned as part of your formal education and in your early job experiences. On the other hand, if you have always been interested in selling, took a business course in school, and are working your way along in a sales and marketing career, you probably hold assumptions reflecting that occupational community. Notice that, as a salesperson, you often disagree with engineers and may even become angry at their outlook, forgetting that you and they see the world through the differing lenses of your own cultural educations. Your political beliefs, your spirituality or religion, and your personal tastes and hobbies all reflect the kinds of groups you grew up in and belong to in the present.

We know this intuitively and realize that we are products of our environments. What a cultural perspective adds to this insight, however, is recognition that your current outlook, attitudes, and assumptions are also a reflection of present group and community memberships, and that one of the reasons you and others cling to your culture is that you do not want to be a deviant in the groups that you value. In other words, one reason why cultural assumptions are so stable and strong is that they are shared and that the need to remain in the group keeps them active. To look ahead, let me point out that when we advocate “changing” culture, we are, in effect, asking that entire groups and communities alter one of the shared characteristics that may be central to their identity. No wonder it is so difficult; no wonder people resist change so much.

In conclusion, personal reflection about your present group and organizational memberships is a good start toward cultural analysis, but it still leaves unclear how much is actually shared. Having argued that a survey will not answer this question for the various reasons given above, how then should you proceed to do a culture assessment? If you do need to understand better how the corporate culture and its various subcultures will aid or hinder you in solving your business/organizational problems, how then do you proceed?

In the 1990s “AMOCO Oil” restructured its internal engineering operations by combining all of engineering into a single service group. Previously, the eight hundred engineers involved had been working for various business units, refineries, and exploration and production units as members of those organizations. In the new, centralized organization, they would work as consultants to those organizations and charge for their services. The formal rules were that all engineering services would be charged for, with the fees to the various internal customers sufficient to cover the costs of running the eight-hundred-person engineering unit. The business units that would “hire” engineers to build and maintain the exploration, production, refining, and marketing activities could either use the internal central group or go outside for those services. However, the engineering services unit could only sell its services internally.

I learned all of this from the internal OD manager assigned to this central services group, whom we will call Mary. She was charged by the manager of the unit with forming a “culture committee,” whose mission was to define the so-called new culture of this unit as it evolved into its new role. Mary decided that she needed an outside resource to think through the culture issues and hired me as a consultant to the project. We recognized that the individual engineers faced a major change in role and identity, from being members of a business unit to being freelance consultants who now had to sell themselves and their services, and who had to bill for their time according to a pre-set rate.

Mary recognized that creating a new culture in this unit was intimately connected to the existing culture in the larger company, since both the engineers and their customers were long-time employees of AMOCO. We also recognized that the engineers were coming from different subcultures, so it might not be easy for them to learn together and become one organization. In addition, once the engineering group was together, their occupational subculture of engineering would influence how they felt about their new role.

After several hours of conversation with Mary to plan how the culture committee could function effectively and what kinds of intervention might be needed, we decided that we had to do an assessment of AMOCO’s corporate culture in order to get a sense of what kinds of assumptions these engineers were bringing with them from their various corporate projects. Mary selected fifteen engineers as a representative cross-section of the new organization, and we announced a half-day (four-hour) workshop to explore the AMOCO culture and its relationship to this new organization. I helped design the workshop and facilitated it.

The meeting was successful in identifying a number of important assumptions. Mary, some of her colleagues on the culture committee, and I all felt that one or more additional groups should be run to flesh out the picture and check our perceptions of what we were hearing. Over the next several months, two more groups were brought together for half-day meetings, leading to a coherent picture of the present corporate culture.

The motivation for articulating this picture was that the senior management committee of this new unit needed to be involved if new ways of working and values were to be promulgated. Giving them feedback on the culture as we were beginning to see it provided the agenda for a working session with this senior group. They would elaborate the culture assessment and then make some decisions on what action steps they needed to take to define a new way of working, consistent with their new values.

I decided to give the cultural feedback as much as possible in terms of the language that the assessment groups had used. I also decided at this stage to present the assumptions around the major cultural themes that came out in the group meetings. Exhibit 5.2 is the document that was shared with the management group at a two-hour meeting to discuss “the culture of AMOCO.” The major categories of work, people/motivation, management, and climate were presented in PowerPoint, one at a time, with questions and comments from the group and from me. I also encouraged members of the group to comment on how accurate this was in their own experience. The document is long and detailed because we felt that group members had stated similar points in different ways and that it was important for management to see these various nuances.

The management group basically bought this picture and confirmed with their own examples that the themes were accurately depicted. This reflection on their own culture allowed the senior management members to think through their own role. They recognized that the most difficult aspect of the AMOCO culture was the basic fear of being associated with any failure, or of being blamed for anything that went wrong. Furthermore, from the point of view of an engineering culture, they realized how hard it is for engineers to convert themselves into consultants selling themselves and charging clients by the hour.

These insights made it clear that the top priority for the project was to develop a new image of how to work that was consistent with the self-image they had. The culture committee was charged with coming up with a new set of values and practices—the “new way of working”—which would then be promulgated throughout the organization. Whereas in the past defining a “new culture” was thought of as a set of general values such as teamwork, this new way of working was to be a concrete description based on the culture assessment and the business realities that AMOCO faced. The new way of working had to deal with the structural realities of how the engineering job was now defined, but at the same time it had to fit the larger “blaming culture” in which the entire organization was embedded.

During the project, a live issue came up that illustrated the power of a cultural assumption like “You must never be associated with any failure because it can be career-threatening.” A promising joint venture that was in the process of being created hit a major snag when it was discovered that the proposed project structure would put AMOCO engineers into situations in which they would be subordinate to project managers from the other member of the joint venture. The whole planning process unraveled because AMOCO engineers refused to work for someone from another company. They pointed out that, if a project failed, the manager from the other company could simply disappear, while their association with the failure would be negatively viewed within AMOCO. The fact that the manager was from the other company would not be viewed as a valid excuse within AMOCO.

To summarize, the impact of the cultural assessment was twofold. It made the senior leaders of the organization aware of the magnitude of the change task they faced, and it made them aware that just announcing a new set of values and goals would not produce the change they desired. Unless they could specify concretely what the new way of working was, they could not expect the engineers in the unit to adapt effectively to the new structural conditions imposed on them.

Mary and I continued to work on defining the new way of working by locating engineers who could be role models, who had made a successful transition to being “for-hire internal consultants.” However, before this process went very far, British Petroleum acquired AMOCO and dismantled the central engineering group, launching yet another culture change of unknown dimensions!

Delta is the U.S. subsidiary of a large European pharmaceutical company. The vice president of sales had been in his job for thirty years and was widely credited with having built up a very successful sales organization. The culture issue came up around the question of whether to replace him after his retirement with an inside candidate, thereby reinforcing the sales subculture that had been built over a long time, or bringing in an outsider, thereby setting in motion cultural changes toward another type of sales organization. In this case, the goal of the assessment was not only to understand the present culture of the sales organization but also to evaluate it to see whether it should be perpetuated or changed.

I met with the top executive team and determined that they were indeed open to either alternative. What they wanted was an effective sales organization; they would measure this effectiveness by determining, first, how they felt about the culture that would be uncovered, and second, how the members of the sales organization felt about their own culture. The proposed assessment plan was for me to work my way down through the organization, doing individual or group interviews as seemed appropriate.

During the planning process with top management, an important issue came up. The current VP of sales expected me to do extensive individual interviews to decipher the culture. They had budgeted enough time and money to go through this lengthy process, based on their assumption that a picture of the culture would emerge from my processing all of this individual data. I had to convince him that it was not only more valid but far more efficient to work with groups, unless there was reason to believe that group members would be inhibited in talking about the culture in front of others. The result we agreed on was that I would interview individuals at the top level of the organization, where inhibition might operate; but as I got to the regional and district organizations I would run group meetings along the lines described above.

Exhibit 5.3 gives some excerpts from my report, which led eventually to the appointment of the inside candidate and reflected the decision to preserve and reinforce the existing culture. Notice that in this case the artifacts and values are more salient and the tacit assumptions are implied but were not made explicit. It is not necessary to have an explicit and complete picture of the whole culture and its tacit assumptions. The business problem may be solved without such an explicit analysis because the one or two tacit assumptions that are identified solve the problem.

The report illustrates how a culture assessment can be used to deal with a very specific question—in this case, a decision on senior management succession. If there had been more conflict or discord in the culture, the decision would have been more complex, but, as it turned out, throughout the organization there was unanimity that the present culture was well adapted to the business situation and should therefore be preserved and enhanced. The inside candidate was therefore promoted with confidence that he would preserve and enhance the sales subculture that had been identified and described.

I was contacted by an MIT alumnus who worked in the labs and knew about my work on culture. He introduced me to senior management, and we decided to create a one-day assessment workshop in which we would explore the geographic subcultures, using my workshop methodology. The assessment was done with senior managers representing both the research and administrative units. We assumed that since the problems to be identified were top management issues, the assessment group should be primarily top managers from both the labs and the Washington sponsors.

As we proceeded to identify artifacts and espoused values, it was revealed that an important set of structural differences not previously noticed had to be taken into account. The local units of the Naval Research Labs worked in terms of projects, and each project had discrete financial sponsorship from a particular government agency or Navy unit. Therefore, every local project had created its own administrative staff working in Washington to develop budgets, keep sponsors informed, and generally manage all of the external political issues that might come up.

What was originally perceived to be two potentially conflicting geographic units, one in Washington and one in New England, turned out to be nine vertically organized project units, each of which had both a New England and a Washington subunit! Furthermore, because it was so critical for each project to work smoothly, the geographic factor was overcome in all nine projects through multiple meetings and constant communication. Each project thus developed a subculture based on the nature of its work and its people, and there were indeed subcultural differences among the projects. But the original notion that there was a geographic problem had to be dropped completely.

The important learning from this exercise was that the focus on culture revealed some structures in the organization that had not really been noticed or were thought to be significant. Where geographic separation mattered, each project team had already done a great deal to ameliorate the potential negative consequences. The assessment revealed that the subcultures should be preserved rather than changed.