Organisations are made of people.

I have a problem with organisational culture. What bothers me about culture is that when problems occur within an organisation, there seems to be a tendency to point to the culture as the reason for the issue.

McKinsey consultant Marvin Bower had a nice way to describe culture – he put it quite simply as:

“Culture is the way we do things around here.”

In other words, it’s a set of behavioural norms, systems and unwritten rules that dictate how work is done in a particular organisation. You have no doubt experienced the culture of every organisation you’ve worked in. You see it in the things people do and what people say.

You notice it when people often tend to work late, even though nobody has specifically asked them to. And when people arrive late to meetings, and nobody thinks it’s unusual. Or perhaps it’s evident in the regular morning teas or “cake days” that are held each week. Or in the difficult conversations that need to be had… but are avoided.

The challenge of culture is real, because when behaviours are commonly adopted as the norm, it’s hard to do something different. If everyone around you is going one way, it takes courage to go another. If you align with the culture, you’re likely to get along just fine. But if you do things differently, you may notice some tension as you go against the grain.

Culture is intangible.

The challenge with culture is that you can’t really see it. Yes, you can observe behaviours, you can hear what people say, and even the physical environment of an organisation can give you insights about the culture.

But it’s largely an invisible force. Culture shows up for me as a feeling – that feeling you have when you’d like to speak up about something, but it seems like nobody else wants you to. Or when you don’t want to work late, but you feel a tension when you leave work on time while others are still sitting at their desks.

When your behaviours are aligned with the culture, you don’t feel that tension. It’s only when you want to do something different that it’s likely to show up.

That’s why blaming the culture bothers me.

You can’t hold the culture accountable. You can only hold people accountable. So when people say that the culture is dysfunctional, what they really mean is that collectively, the behaviours of individuals and the systems within the organisation are contributing to dysfunction.

The easy way.

Blaming the culture is an easy way out. Things aren’t working, so many organisations embark on culture change programs. A culture change program is nice and easy because it means we don’t need to blame anyone individually. After all, it’s nobody’s fault. It’s the culture.

On more than a few occasions, I’ve heard senior leaders in organisations speak of the need for culture change. But authority reinforces cultural norms. The senior people in an organisation have a significant influence on the way people behave – monkey see, monkey do, as it were. The boss works late, so I will too. The boss turns up late to meetings, so timeliness doesn’t matter.

A senior leader pointing out the need for culture change makes me cringe. Because largely, they are the culture, or at least they have a big part in shaping what it is.

So who can we blame?

It’s true, we can’t blame Betty the front-line employee for the fact that everyone arrives late to meetings. But we can blame Betty for showing up late, can’t we?

Organisations are made of people. The collective behaviours and attitudes of these people create the culture. Without people (until the robots take over), there are no organisations.

So it makes little sense to me that we can blame organisational culture for anything. We can use it as a reason or an explanation for a given set of challenges. But we cannot hold it accountable, give it a one-out-of-five in a performance review or fire it.

Abdication of responsibility.

I think that pointing fingers at organisational culture encourages people to avoid personal responsibility.

Of course it’s true that the behavioural norms within an organisation influence how people behave. If nobody arrives at work on time, then you can be sure that this shapes the attitudes about punctuality in the workplace.

But organisations are made of people.

And every day, every employed person wakes up and makes a choice to keep showing up for their chosen organisation, consciously or otherwise. Individual circumstances play a part, but the choice is made nonetheless.

The decision to speak up in the meeting, or to provide constructive feedback, or to make an effort to arrive at the meeting on time – all of these are choices made by individuals, not cultures.

It is still important to be aware of how the culture can influence our behaviour when we’re at work. Maintaining awareness means we can make a decision as to whether we’re happy to go along, or to push against it, or to decide that one of the embedded systems or processes needs to change.

But in every individual instance where we chose not to speak up, chose not to make an effort to arrive on time for the meeting, or chose to withhold that feedback, culture didn’t do it.

We did.