Manjari Raman: This is how we do things here
OUT OF THE BOX/ And that is why we succeed, or fail
| Or does success bring in its wake a culture that begets more success? Either ways, fresh research shows that leaders can take control of the debate by consciously choosing to leverage organisation culture in such a way that it helps the successful execution of strategy. |
| What is the difference between leading-through-culture and plain-vanilla leadership? The former "is a view of leadership in which the leader is responsible for setting the context for others to do their very best work," says Jennifer Chatman, a professor of management at the Haas School of Business. |
| "It can be a less visible view of leadership. Not based on formal authority, but on helping people make decisions and trade-offs on their own, without having to ask their boss." |
| Culture-leveraging leaders focus on strengthening norms, rather than the rules that determine how people act. Chatman points out that social control mechanisms like norms "" legitimate, shared standards against which the appropriateness of behaviour is decided "" have a powerful psychological influence on how employees behave "" an influence that often exceeds that of formal, codified directives. |
| That should come as no surprise. Anyone who works in a "nine-to-five" job, but seldom leaves work before 8 p m, when everyone else goes home, knows just how powerful a hold norms have on behaviour. |
| Most leaders recognise the crucial role that culture can play in an organisation, but few take into consideration its direct impact on strategy implementation. According to Chatman, there are two reasons for the blind spot. |
| First, there has been too little empirical evidence that explores the link between culture and its impact on the bottomline for leaders to sit up and take notice. Two, as culture is intangible and hard to quantify, leaders find it hard to discern its specific impact. |
| "Culture has become so faddish that it is simultaneously everything and nothing. The challenge is to identify the culture that exists in an organisation, and the gap between the current and ideal culture," points out Chatman. |
| One area where leveraging culture seems to be showing results is in the beleaguered US airline industry. While big, impersonal mega carriers like United Airlines, Delta, and American struggle with turbulence, Southwest Airlines has turned in 28 consecutive years of profit based on a low-cost, high-volume strategy that is transparent to employees. |
| According to Chatman, what makes the strategy successful is not so much that it is shared with employees openly, but that they implement it, day in and day out, in everything that they do without supervision or guidance. |
| Against an industry standard of 35 minutes, Southwest turns around planes within 15 minutes. Not because Southwest staffers have been told to do so "" other airlines would then be able to manage it too, by extension "" but because they intensely feel the need to do so. |
| Southwest employees think nothing of cutting across functions, job-descriptions, designations, and rules to ensure that no jet stands on the tarmac for more than those magic 15 minutes. That single-minded focus happens not because of coercion, but because of the company's culture. |
| In like vein, the leadership at JetBlue Airways, a no-frills airline that started up in 1999, is also investing in building a strong culture, and leveraging its strengths. To keep costs low, the airline's reservation agents work from home. Pilots multi-task and contribute skills like training or financial analysis to a common talent pool. |
| There are no cleaning crews so all employees on board a flight "" including CEO David Neeleman""pitch in to clean the plane once it lands. No one is asked, told or ordered to contribute "" it happens because everyone expects it of everyone else. And that happens because JetBlue's management has consciously built such a culture. |
| When it comes to leveraging culture, the small, unspoken things add up to a big boost for the bottomline. But they require a leader like Neeleman to lead by example and build up critical mass within the organisation for the successful execution of strategy. |
| Says Chatman: "Organisation culture is too important to leave to chance. Organisations must use their culture to fully execute their strategy and inspire innovation." She adds: "It's a leader's primary role to develop and maintain an effective culture." |
| That often means making hard choices that shake up the way an organisation traditionally does things in order to align it better to the current corporate strategy. |
| In the final reckoning, the challenge of leveraging culture comes down to matching this-is-how-we-do-things-here to this-is-what-needs-to-be-done-now. Sometimes, that is best done by bending old rules to craft new norms. |