Culture is deep, extensive, and stable. It cannot be taken lightly. If you do not manage culture, it will manage you—and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening. But this is not easy. It is particularly annoying to managers that culture is not easily measured and controlled. In the occupational culture of management to be able to measure and control things is a sacred cow. If you can’t put numbers on it, it is “soft stuff ” not to be trusted or taken seriously. Cultural forces therefore pose an automatic problem because they cannot be controlled. However uncomfortable it may be, with globalism and new forms of multicultural organizations springing up all over, leaders and managers have no choice but to deal with some uncontrollable cultural realities. Of course, the leader and manager of the future will notice that the managerial occupational culture is itself evolving toward taking seriously the management of less controllable forces. People, markets, economic forces, production processes—all are becoming less predictable and less controllable by traditional methods, while information technology is opening up new ways of monitoring and “controlling.”

For example, consider the growth of multicultural task forces that are working on a joint project but are not co-located. How is work assigned? How is work monitored? How is work rewarded? One organization that offers to create such projects by linking people with skills to people who need a certain kind of work done also offers the managers an automatic monitoring device built into the software to periodically check up on whether the work is being done. Note that, in this new way of thinking, the proponents glibly make the assumption that all work is done on the computer. How would conversations be monitored?

Perhaps most challenging of all to the new leaders will be the reality that the concept of an organization and the concept of an employee are themselves evolving in directions that will make the location of cultural issues harder to identify. For example, if the surgical team has hired a nurse from a culture in which authority is very strict, when and how will the senior surgeon discover and learn to deal with the nurse’s inability and unwillingness to speak up to the surgeon when he or she observes a mistake being made?

If the team is working on a project that does not require face-to-face interaction, how will the leader find out whether communication among the team members is hampered by cultural misunderstanding or not, and what would he or she do about it if there are problems?

The solution to many of these issues is to find ways to build new cultures quickly. We know how to do this if the group can be brought together through joint forced interaction in Outward Bound and other kinds of emotionally intense experiences. One unit of Unilever has taken this to a whole new level by taking groups of young high-potential managers into remote places such as the deserts of Jordan or the riverbanks of the Li River in China.¹

Less intense would be Dialogue groups of the sort described in the last chapter, but those only work well if the members are motivated to try to understand each other; it is not yet clear how future leaders will induce such motivation when bringing people physically together is not only expensive but may seem superfluous to some members because they have come to believe that “any group of people of good will can work together.”

The upshot of this is that the leaders of the future will not know exactly what kinds of cultural issues they will encounter. They will not know whether the occupational cultures that are arising in all of the fields will be strong or weak, but if they understand cultural dynamics in general they will have diagnostic tools and approaches that will help them decipher the situations they may encounter. So a review of cultural realities is useful whether or not the issues are national, organizational, or occupational. As you review the sections below, occupational cultures may pose the biggest challenges as we look ahead.

Although culture manifests itself in artifacts such as overt behavior, rituals, climate, and espoused values, its essence is shared tacit assumptions that can be brought to consciousness—but that operate most of the time outside our awareness. As a responsible leader, you must be aware of those assumptions and manage them—or they will manage you.

The strength and depth of an organization’s culture reflect (1) the strength and clarity of the founder of the organization; (2) the amount and intensity of shared experiences that organization members have had; and (3) the degree of success the organization has had.

Culture is, therefore, the product of social learning. Ways of thinking and behavior that are shared and that work become elements of the culture and, with continued success, become tacit assumptions about the way things are and ought to be.

The strength and depth of an occupational culture reflect the degree to which it is “professionalized” in the sense of requiring a prolonged period of education and/or apprenticeship to be licensed to perform as a member of that occupation and the length of time the occupation has successfully performed its function in the larger society. Thus members develop common assumptions from their educational and socialization experienced and come to think alike even if they have not shared common experiences.

Therefore, you cannot “create” a new culture in an organization that has already evolved a culture. You can demand or stimulate a new way of working together or a new way of thinking; you can monitor people to make sure that they are using the new ways, but members of the organization will not internalize new ways or working or thinking and make them part of the culture unless, over time, the new ways are actually better. The Amoco engineers did not give up the core of their engineering culture, even though the change program required them to behave differently and thus forced some new learning on top of their culture.

On the other hand, in these new forms of collaboration that are springing up, culture is being created because the organization is itself being created. Thus, task forces, joint ventures, and so on will create culture in terms of what leaders demand, what the group discovers from its own experience and, above all, what works in terms of getting the task done and managing internal relationships.

There is no absolute criterion for a “better” or a “worse” culture. A given organization’s culture will be “right” for that organization as long as the organization succeeds in its primary task and can manage its internal relationships. If the organization begins to fail in accomplishing its primary task or if internal relationships break down, this means that some elements of the culture have become dysfunctional and will need to change or the organization may go out of existence. But the criterion of what is a right culture is always the pragmatic one of what enables the organization to succeed in its primary task and manage its internal relationships.

As the external and internal conditions of an organization change, so will the functionality or “rightness” of given cultural assumptions. Cultural elements then have to evolve with the evolving circumstances of the organization. Managing that cultural evolution is one of the primary tasks of leadership.

It is especially important for you to understand that mission, strategy, and structure are all colored by cultural assumptions, even though most models of organizations show culture as an independent element. If you seek objectivity in those areas, you must find outsiders to work with you to help you identify your own cultural biases.

In the new organization each of the above content areas can be viewed as a culture creation problem and posed as a question. Can we get consensus on our mission, on how we will work together, how we will measure our progress, and how will we manage our internal power and intimacy relationships? The leader of the future must be aware that in a multicultural group the resolution of these issues can become a major stumbling block, especially around managing internal authority relationships.

Culture is a group phenomenon. It is shared tacit assumptions. Therefore, the best way to assess cultural elements is to bring groups together to talk about their organization in a structured way that leads them to identify their own tacit assumptions. The best way to do this is to first identify all the artifacts pertaining to the area you are inquiring about, especially observed behavioral regularities. Compare these to the espoused values of the organization and, if they don’t match, look for the tacit assumption that explains the behavior.

You can decipher your own cultural biases if you make yourself partially marginal in your own culture. “Travel” to other organizations (cultures) and work with consultants or colleagues from other organizations to reflect on your own tacit, taken-for-granted assumptions.

In the multicultural group the dilemma is how to assess multiple cultures simultaneously. The best bet is for the leader to get a sense of where there might be strong emotionally held differences and focus a dialogue on that area through a question that elicits behavioral data. For example, in one such group I asked the members to tell in order how each of their “home” organizations would handle it if their boss made a suggestion that they thought would lead to bad outcomes.

The motivation to unlearn and learn something new comes from the realization that, if you continue in the present way, you will not achieve your goals; you will experience “survival anxiety.” Survival anxiety is created by disconfirmation—information that something you want or expect is not happening or the wrong things are happening. That motivates you to do something else.

But the realization of what may be involved in learning something new causes “learning anxiety” because you realize that you may become temporarily incompetent, lose your current role, lose your membership in your group, or even lose your identity, if you learn something new. Resistance to change is a normal result of learning anxiety.

For change to occur, survival anxiety must be greater than learning anxiety, but just increasing survival anxiety does not work as long as learning anxiety is high because the disconfirming data can be denied, ignored, or rationalized away. Instead, the way to produce change is to lower learning anxiety through creating psychological safety for the learner.

Psychological safety is produced by providing a clear, nonnegotiable credible vision of the future, clear targets of what the new behavior is to be, opportunities for the involvement of the learner in the process of learning, adequate training, resources in time and money for new learning, and structural supports in the way of congruent reward, control, and discipline systems.

If you are the agent of the change, the key to managing transformative change is to balance survival anxiety with enough psychological safety to overcome resistance.

Culture evolves and changes through several different mechanisms that you can influence to varying degrees:

If you are in a mid-life organization that has clearly dysfunctional elements in its culture, you may launch a managed change program by creating a parallel system to assess the culture, identify a change program, and implement it. Planned change programs hinge on a clear and non-negotiable vision of what the new kind of behavior is to be and the involvement of the employees in figuring out how to get there. Employee involvement is the best way of ensuring a degree of psychological safety. If the new behavior produces better results, it will eventually lead to internalization of the values it is based on and will eventually become an element of the culture.

If you are in a mid-life or aging organization that has dysfunctional elements in the core culture and you do not have time for a managed change program, you may need to function as a turnaround manager, assess the culture to identify the dysfunctional elements, locate the carriers of those cultural elements you do not want, and replace them. This will be a painful process. Alternatively you may need to destroy the organization through bankruptcy, a merger, or an acquisition that forces major reassessment of cultural elements.

Always think first of the culture as your source of strength. It is the residue of your past successes. Even if some elements of the culture now look dysfunctional, remember that those are likely to be only a few elements in a very large set of elements that continue to be strengths.

If major changes need to be made in the way the organization is run, try to build on the existing cultural strengths, rather than trying to change those elements that may be weaknesses.

The reality is that everyone believes in his or her own culture and way of doing things. The goal in any multicultural collaboration must therefore be the creation of a new culture built out of joint learning by the new group members. Even in mergers and acquisitions where domination, separation, blending or conflict are possible initial responses, the new organization will not function effectively until it has evolved cultural elements that are based on new learning experiences from group members working together.

If you are the leader of a multicultural collaboration, first train yourself in being culturally sensitive by visiting other organizations or cultures and trying to figure out how their assumptions differ from yours. Develop your “cultural intelligence.” When the members of the group are first together, create activities that allow informal acquaintance and back these up with Dialogue sessions during which members can reflect on their new joint experiences or review their own prior cultural experiences around focused questions such as the one suggested above about authority relationships.

Do not expect that good will and joint experience will be enough to produce mutual understanding. Each member needs to learn to be reflective—to get in touch with his or her own assumptions—and this can only be done with the Dialogue format. Because we don’t know where globalism and technological evolution (especially in information technology) will lead us, the culture leader of the future must be prepared to be more culturally intelligent—more motivated to understand others and more flexible in his or her own behavioral repertoire.