The Coalescent Culture

The paradox of organizational culture is that it is better to be exclusionary rather than inclusionary. Your culture should discriminate; it shouldn’t be a perfect fit for everybody.

Properly developed, against the unique parameters of the industry in which it operates, the customers it serves, the products and services it offers, the productive skill sets required, and the competition it must overcome, the organization’s culture will coalesce around an understood “way of doing things” that is almost self-assimilating.

That “way” is shaped by a defining value proposition and core operating principles (values) that clearly signal the behaviors and attributes prized by the organization.

Said another way, organizational culture cannot be universalized. This is so even as many organizations espouse similar values and pursue similar visions, just with different words. I suspect that organizations may share 90%+ of the same culture genome; however, the part that isn’t shared creates a dramatic difference in a culture’s outcome.

The unshared part of the culture genome is the organization’s core expertise and its unique value proposition, which truly differentiate the organization beyond vision-and-values clichés.

In other words, the expertise/value gene provides the instruction set for organizational culture, not the other way around. You can’t build culture without first understanding what type of people and skills are essential to create and sustain the organization’s value proposition.

Even more illuminating, an organizational culture exists despite the growing tension of the larger society beyond the workplace, which increasingly is fragmenting into polarized subcultures to which individual employees affiliate to one degree or another.

What does it suggest that employees can check their personal factions at the workplace door for eight hours a day and generally coexist collaboratively with their colleagues toward the common goals of the organization? (Of course, cause-oriented organizations value — if not require — ideologically aligned employees; however, for-profit businesses are foolish to kindle potential flashpoints inside their doors.)

Still, even as it makes sense to characterize organizational culture as quasi-monolithic, it’s more fragmented than we might like. So, it’s critical to find the relevant connections that allow the great diversity of the workforce to coalesce in service of mutual goals. Brand, of course is the most relevant connective tissue.

Just as important, we cannot expect organizational coalescence as a permanent state. Instead, we should understand that organizations are a continuously dynamic free-agent market of self-interests jockeying for shares of What’s-In-It-For-Me.