I’ve been using Edgar Schein’s definition of corporate culture for years. (Ever since Esther explained it to me.) Schein rolled around artifacts and several other ideas, but Esther clarified them for me.
Culture is:
- What people can discuss
- How people treat each other
- And in organizations, what the organization rewards.
All this means we can use the idea of culture for any group of people. From all of society, to a specific team, and everything in between.
That’s why this question matters. If we want to clarify what people can discuss, how people treat each other, and what our organization rewards, we need to be able to do certain things. Those things reflect the problems we see in the current culture.
Sometimes, those things mean we need to have the courage to speak up, especially when it’s uncomfortable. (See What Kind of a Culture Do You Want to Create and Reinforce?)
Other times, culture is how we express joy—even if we run out of beer.
At work, rewards definitely drive the culture. And in society, I expect the rewards to be a little different. Not specifically monetary, but more reputationally.
If we have a culture we do not want, how do we change it to be a culture we do want? That takes thought about the problems we see and the actions to solve them.
Clarify Your Thinking to Choose Your Actions
I used to have loud, vehement discussions about politics with my conservative dad. He used to say, “I’m fiscally conservative and socially liberal.”
What he meant was this: He did not care about the state of anyone else’s marriage, because their marriage had no effect on his. He wanted low-income housing in every neighborhood, because he thought homelessness and poverty was a problem of not seeing alternatives. (When I explained poverty was a problem of insufficient money, he kept telling me everyone had a fair shot. I disagreed, especially regarding the myth of the welfare queen. He didn’t believe me then, and he’s dead so I can no longer argue with him.)
Before he died, we managed to agree on enough facts that we could discuss other topics well.
But if we can’t clarify our thinking, our actions probably won’t work well. That’s because we’re not solving the right problems.
Actions Reflect Problems
You and I might not agree on various societal problems and how to solve them. However, I will say this: If I did not have Medicare and terrific secondary insurance, I would probably be dead by now. (Cancer is ridiculously expensive to treat. I’m not saying the expenses are wrong—I am saying they exist.) I am very happy I have this healthcare. And I wish everyone else had access to it. I try to be worthy of the investment the healthcare system makes in me.
You might not agree with me.
That’s fine. I am sure we can find other problems to solve that we can agree on.
And that’s the point of the culture. Which problems do you want to solve? Those problems need to be sufficiently important. The important problems help us decide when we are willing and which actions we might take.
Every team of people has a culture, whether it’s a group of friends, a school board, or our greater society. The more we choose the problems we want to solve, the more likely we can choose the actions to take to create the culture we want.
It is worth our time to think and act, to make the culture we want. Culture change is never easy. It’s almost always worth it.