The Culture Matrix: Part 2

Friday, April 27, 2007

My blog from this past Tuesday introduced you to Marc Chouinard and his Culture Matrix process. Marc shared with us the two main factors that often are overlooked in any change initiative:

• Revealing and understanding the real “living” culture of the organization;
• Revealing and understanding the forces that will support or hinder the change initiative, called Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains.

He gave us the low down on the living culture on Tuesday. Ready to get smarter? Let's go...

Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains are culture dynamics we can reveal when we access the real, living culture (RLC) of an organization. He defines the RLC of an organization as “the coming together of what people believe they need to be and do to be successful in the particular context of their organization—the coming together of the workforce’s conscious and unconscious behaviors drivers.”

Culture elements come in pairs of contrasts.
Let’s imagine that your organization goes through a traditional culture assessment that includes the following statement: “working hard increases my opportunities within the organization.” Let’s say for the purpose of this exercise that the predominant answer to this question by your organization’s workforce is “Strongly Agree.” This means that your organization has an “assessed” culture of “working hard.”

Now, what does the concept “working hard” mean? From the angle of the RLC of your organization, the best way to define a culture element is to define its contrast. So, what is your contrast to the concept “working hard?” You can answer this question by asking yourself: “If I am not working hard, what am I?” The answer is the contrast.

Now imagine that I am asking this same question to each employee of your organization. Employees may say that the contrast of “working hard” is “being lazy” or “working smart” or “having a balanced work/life,” or anything else for that matter. The reality is that the answers will cover a wide spectrum. It is in these answers that lay the Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains of your organization. The contrast of a culture element defines a “force” that is either supporting or hindering your organizational objectives.

What the contrasts say about your employees
The contrasts to “working hard” say a lot about your workforce. They:

• reveal how the owners of this pair of culture element contrasts perceive the world around them;
• define the multiple sub-cultures of your organization (in this case in regards to the “working hard” culture element); and
• define the targeted change strategies that change agents need to ensure sustainable change.

Let’s go a little deeper with these contrasts.

“Being lazy”—this contrast says that the employees forming this sub-culture are hard workers. They tend to do a lot and feel good when doing a lot. They may also be very inefficient, because their measure of success is the amount of work they are doing or the amount of time they spend at the office, rather than the results they are generating.

“Working smart”—these employees tend to be result-oriented. They value efficiency. One of their measures of success is the ability to produce results within a regular or reduced schedule. They tend to judge the “being lazy” contrast employees as being inefficient or disorganized. On the other hand, because they are not working long hours, they tend to be judged by their “being lazy” colleagues as being lazy, because they are not working long hours.

“Having a balanced work/life”—these employees value their personal time and their activities outside their work. They tend to work regular hours and perceive “long hours” workers as having no personal life and as being workaholics. Their “being lazy” colleagues or managers often perceive them as being lazy or lacking ambition.

Performance-Drivers and Performance-Drains
You can see that “working hard” can be a Performance-Drain for your organization. It can lead to:

• The “being lazy” employees spending a lot of time at the office, without necessarily being productive.
• The “working smart” employees being frustrated and disgruntled because they are not recognized and rewarded for the results they are generating because they are not spending long hours at the office.
• The “having a balanced work/life” employees being de-motivated because they realize that their choice of lifestyle will prevent them from growing within the organization.

Conclusion
As you can see, it is the contrasts of “working hard” that define it. Each of the three contrast-based definitions carries very different and sometimes opposing meanings, values and perceptions. In this regard, each individual subconsciously gauges his or her level of “working hard” against their particular contrast and concludes to what degree their behavior will make them successful or not within their particular organization.

As Marc points out, if you don’t know these extremes, you can’t formulate a change plan that will work. This is because your workforce may agree “at the rational level” and diverge “at the subconscious level”—where behavioral drivers and motivators rule. That’s why we have organizations where everyone says the right thing and all are in agreement and still have zero alignment on what actions to take.

The Culture Matrix, through this multi-layered approach, dramatically increases the speed, the ownership and the sustainability of the change effort. It gives you access to the core of people’s subconscious drivers and motivators. As a change agent it allows you to target your communication and change efforts to the specific sub-cultures of your organization, using their own words. Very cool.