Why negative terms are necessary in describing corporate culture

Dear Bob …

I take considerable umbrage with a recent Advice Line covering culture change.

[ Also on InfoWorld: Bob offers more tips on a reader’s culture change plan in “Treat culture change as engineering: Form follows function.” | Keep up on career advice with Bob Lewis’ Advice Line newsletter. ]

You said, in describing a hypothetical business culture:

“When there’s a crisis, our employees follow standard procedures to deal with it.” That’s the positive statement. The negative version might be: “When there’s a crisis, our employees show no imagination in finding solutions. They simply follow the recipe without thinking.”

Don’t worry that the negative version sounds insulting. It’s supposed to (but be careful about sharing these descriptions, which are for planning purposes only). The point is to help the management team recognize that all responses have positive and negative characteristics as a way of breaking through preconceived biases, like “process = good” or “bureaucracy = bad,” especially as in most cases process equates to bureaucracy.

The cause of a situation might not be the people who are being insulted. In the example above, it might be that managers refuse to let anyone try something that is not in the defined procedures. Or it might be a Dead Sea situation, where management’s actions tend to force out the competent employees. Or it might be exhausted staff from having to work massive overtime — or, or, or.

If it is acceptable to insult subordinates, it is liable to leak into actions.

– Insulted

Dear Insulted …

I’m not clear. Are you taking umbrage with “When there’s a crisis, our employees follow standard procedures to deal with it”? If so, I’m baffled.

I can understand your taking umbrage with the negative characterization were it aimed at you personally. In hindsight, a better negative characterization might have been: “When there’s a crisis, our culture encourages employees to simply follow the recipe without using their creativity or imaginations.”

One way or another, leaders who want to change the culture must first be able to characterize it. If all they do is characterize it in positive terms, then there’s no case for change.

The point of describing each cultural trait in both positive and negative terms is to make it clear to everyone involved in planning the change is that every cultural trait is advantageous in some contexts and disadvantageous in others. That’s important for keeping a sense of balance among everyone involved in planning the change.

Culture change generally isn’t a matter of fixing something that’s broken. It’s adjusting a trait that’s maladaptive — a very different matter. As nuance isn’t an effective component of persuasion, it works better to describe traits you want in positive terms and traits you don’t want in negative terms.

Something else to understand about corporate culture is that it isn’t a characteristic of employees in isolation. It’s a characteristic of the entire organization and in fact the primary tool of culture change is to change leader behavior (you provided some examples of leader behavior that might have to change in my hypothetical example).

When business leaders describe the culture in negative terms, if there’s any blame to be passed around it’s to be passed around the leadership team.

This is a complex topic. I’m trying to collapse an 18-page chapter — in itself something of a summary — into a blog post, so it isn’t all that surprising something was lost in translation.

– Bob

This story, “Why negative terms are necessary in describing corporate culture,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bob Lewis’s Advice Line blog on InfoWorld.com.