Jim SinurHave you ever noticed how exciting and flourishing organizations hardly ever last long in light of history? It’s rare that organizations grow big and endure with a positive following of constituents. It’s really hard to fight keeping a good culture that clients and employees enjoy while growing large and successful. I would maintain that it’s when management loses sight of what their changes do to the organizational culture that negative results creep in through processes. How you establish business processes that support great culture that can make a difference.
Let’s examine the different phases of organizational culture that seem to be on a continuum. These phases generally occur in sequence, but he starting points can differ. It’s rare that any intermediate step is skipped, but some can be and should be avoided.
The Family:
This is where the atmosphere is agreeable and all employees, vendors and clients are rife with optimism and glee. People are generally looking out for each other and the communication is really high quality. Everyone wants the organization to succeed in the worst way and people gladly pitch in where ever they can. There are picnics and holiday parties and a great deal of holistic caring. The movement is onward and upward..
The Team:
The organization grows to a point where the personal touch ends up suffering a little bit. People start specializing and losing touch with some of the other functional areas of the company. People are still agreeable, but they tend to cluster in teams that support themselves and some of the old contacts, when they were a family, still hold things together. There is still an onward and upward sense of bonding
The Machine:
This is where the organization has grown to a point where it needs more significant structure, so that investments are managed to profitability in a better way. This is where methodology and process is established. This is the key tipping point where human touch can be lost in the implementation of the methods and processes and behavior patterns are set. Care must be taken to infuse people engaging goals, rules and capabilities. This is a very delicate balance and the incline is steep.
The Jungle
This is where individuals have learned to take care of themselves at the expense of other team members and functional organizations. Individual goals are emphasized to the detriment of the whole. Customers and employees are taken for granted and management wants to create an atmosphere of competition amongst all parties. Supervisors that can wipe tears are put in charge of the employees, but the downward culture slide continues. The financial result trumps all and greed is the emperor
The Advanced Jungle
This is where very person is for themselves and mentors even eat their young. By in large, managers/employees only care about whom they beat and how well they beat them. If you can put them in jail or out the door, you are reaching your full potential. People are digging for dirt or covering the backsides instead doing what’s important. This is truly a sad state. Many die in this avalanche of bad behavior. This truly a “shark tank”
I have represented these cultural phase on an upside down “U” shape to show close to the edge of the cliff we can get as process designers and to be careful about how to engage people. Over time cultures can experience entropy. The moral to the story is to build people and teamwork into our processes going forward, so we avoid the nasty slope..
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement
5 responses so far ↓
1 shalz July 23, 2009 at 4:09 am
This is so very true, irrespective of the size of a company. Is this a bell curve? What are the timeframes and % of employees that you would put under each phase – for example if a company had a life of Y yrs and max strength of E employees, then would it be fair to assume that:
Current Strength = 10%E, 10%Y (from start time) ->Family
Current Strength = 20% E, 20%Y (after family time) ->Team
Current Strength = 30% E, 30% Y (after team time) -> Machine
Current Strength = 60% E, 25% Y (after Machine time) -> Jungle
Current Stregth >>100% E, 15% Y (after Jungle time) -> Advanced Jungle
2 Jim Sinur July 23, 2009 at 8:41 am
I’m not sure that it is a normal bell curve or should be, but I have seen a change over my life time from skewed left to skewed more right. I have seen a strong correlation to size and time of existence, but there are also exceptions. I’m sure there can be some more science applied to this. Maybe some surveys would shed more light on the science part of it.
3 Jaisundar July 25, 2009 at 3:55 am
Extending that line of thought, I think a large organization with huge number of employees can also have numerous such curves that apply to its ‘departments’ and sub units.
Puts a nice perspective to why some companies seem to disintegrate when they grow rapidly – I’ve seen a few from close. One org I was associated with grew rapidly, crossed a sort of a threshold and then rapidly fell apart. It grew from 10 employees to about 800 in under 6 years and then things started going wrong. Many things were wrong, but one very important factor I think is it wasnt able to control a ‘shark tank’ situation you are talking about.
4 sally murfitt July 30, 2009 at 5:08 am
So are you saying that progression to the shark tank is inevitable?
Or are there wasy to pull back from the brink?
I certainly recognise your model and wonder whether sharks sticking plasters on gaping wounds is going to make a difference to the eventual outcome?
5 Jim Sinur July 30, 2009 at 5:44 am
Sally,
I tend to be optimistic about things and say that the shark tank can be avoided, but it is easy to slide into lower forms of culture. I worked for a large company that maintained the balance of team and early machine. My buddies who still work there say that the culture is still positive. I think it takes conscious leadership focused on long term resutls as well as short term profits to create a great culture.
Jim