Building Organisational Culture – One Employee at a Time

You walk out of the interview and you think you got the job. The
skills matched, the experience matched and you felt that it would be a
great place to work. When you hear that you did not get the job – you
are devastated. When you enquire you are told that they did not think
you would fit into the company CULTURE.

It begs the question – what is the role of culture in employment and
is it simply a punching bag to not employ people that are not like us?
Even the original people that started investigating the link between
performance and culture later changed their story to values – so we have
to ask what is this phenomena called corporate culture and how do we
make the most of it.

Researchers have for an exceedingly long time tried to prove the link
between organisational culture and performance and the interesting fact
is that your national culture and labour environment has more of an
impact on performance than the specific team culture.

Research shows that a leader determines team and organisational
culture. The interesting fact is that this leader will emerge internally
or externally to the team – no matter what external culture you impose.
So if you want to change culture you need a ready group of leaders that
have shared values and that transmit these to the teams that they manage
and form part of.

Even organisational development experts will tell you that after you
have taken care of hygiene factors and built basic values in an
organisation – you are stuck with the reality that you can do very
little about culture, except change the leaders. Leaders tend to hire in
their own image – a phenomena that many experts warn against. If you
need another boss exactly like your boss – then you are undermining the
value of diversity and may also mess up your company’s ability to
innovate.

The key differentiators of culture that have been found to impact on
organisational performance are competitiveness and innovation due to the
ability of these factors to increase the ability of the organisation to
respond to external challenges and change.

We also know that some things do not work. There have been studies to
show that rigid structure and processes in an organisational culture
leads to poor financial performance. A recent survey showed that people
that have a helping orientation perform better in customer facing role.
We also know that if every person in an organisation gets paid exactly
the same then they do not peform.

So culture as a measure is more often than not a way to determine if
you will be able to work with the boss – more so than being an objective
measure of how you will improve the performance of the organisation.
Objective performance in the organisation is not linked to the culture
of the organisation but how leaders manage the organisation – which some
will argue is then the culture of the organisation.

This begs the question if there is any value in building cultural
employee or personality types into your hiring practice and if there is
an ideal team that would produce more than a team that is not ideal.

More companies are using psychometric profiling; personality
profiling and other preference based relative scoring methods to assess
if a candidate is balanced and potentially stable in a position. These
are often administered quickly and the results are usually the
determining factor in seeing if the candidate goes forward at all.

Behavioural profiling will tell you what type of employee you will
get. The challenge is to be able to manage all types of employees in an
organisation – else you may have unbalanced delivery and may be missing
out on some different perspective. People also tend to adopt roles in
teams linked to the roles that others are fulfilling and you may find
that in one team a person is a lion and in another they are, a
mouse.

So if you are looking for the x-factor in your next interview
situation it may be interesting to go off the beaten path and ask your
candidate what time they get up in the morning, how tolerant and helpful
they are to others and how competitive they are. It does not matter at
the end of the day what your personality type is – but on how you
execute on this holistically as a package. We would all love to be
“perfect” but somehow we each have our own contribution to make and the
recruiter and performance manager must always ask that contribution can
this person potentially make to the organisation.