If the pathological culture is being established from the top, probably not.
But with principled leadership and monitoring, guidance, and procedures from HR, a great deal of this (and the legal, risk, and financial pain resulting) can be avoided, or at least, caught early.
I am just curious, what must happen to change pathological culture to a better one. New leader on top will fight against entrenched middle level managers backed by buddies of these in upper layers. Anybody bellow will be put in uncomfortable position and leave sooner or later. I would say, pathological culture is here to stay and eventually can be changed only by replacing large chunk of organization.
Yes. Cultures are systemic, and they are much more than just how your company has a pingpong table and happy hour every day. Culture is the template for behavior. It is what dictates what the standard response to difficulty is. Just as children learn from their parents, followers learn from their leaders. It is imperative to install leaders who understand this.
> Remember: this is not about you, nor it is about your career. There are real people lives and well-being at play. You’re not playing god here and you’re not free from mistakes, erroneous judgment, or faulty reasoning. You're human as much as everyone in your team/organization, with all the bias and limitations. Be humble.
Take a simpler thing: if a new CEO sets an example of taking a decent amount of time off and promoting that as what people should be doing, because they value mental health, then that will gradually trickle down into upper and middle management, and down to the rank-and-file.
Management types who resist that will be replaced or marginalized, because this aspect of culture matters to the CEO and this is something they want to promote. It won't happen overnight, but ultimately management will be filled with people who are taking solid amounts of vacation and push their reports to do the same.
A CEO that wants to push an engineering-first/safety-first culture will be firing executives and management types that try to hide problems or push through things that don't meet the quality bar that the CEO is looking for. This sort of shift will not happen overnight. It can take years. Whether or not a company like Boeing can survive this sort of change, and if they even have years left to make that change, is another question, of course.
But I argue the opposite: the CEO (critically, with the unwavering support of the board, which requires the support of shareholders) is the only person who can make this sort of shift.
I don't know, all it takes (imo) is a healthy culture, something that's taught to people when they start in a few bullet points about culture / values, and then further encouraged by the team (with probably a supervisor encouraging it if the staff doesn't pick it up themselves).
Corporate culture is defined in large parts by the people who started the company. It's the first few, and to a smaller extent, dozen, and smaller extend, 50, etc people that will define your corporate culture. At a large company, such as the one (I'm guessing here) discussed in the article, corporate culture can be VERY resilient to a few bad apples.
Maybe. Fixing the culture in that way is not obviously the company's biggest priority. We can agree that it's an ideal, but it also takes resources away from other things and may involve other tradeoffs (even firing some people) that could be worse for the business and employees overall. It's not the kind of decision that can just be made in a vacuum.
Absolutely. Finding a place with a good culture is hard. And even if you do, it's not uncommon for companies with a great culture to struggle financially and then employee a "shake-up" that destroys that culture overnight.
> It's a little akin to saying that culture is the President's responsibility. No, it's everyone's responsibility, and if you want to change it, the influential people in your org (country) must lead and reinforce that change.
To a point, but when HR gets involved and does not help, that IMHO is often due to the upper leadership being a big part of the problem.
I've seen HR blow off inappropriate behavior when the CEO does or is okay with it.
I doubt it. Culture is key. Being in the right place at the right time, having a network of folks interested in your welfare, etc is key.
Think of it this way -- how many smart people from school or childhood do you know who didn't amount to much, despite the raw ability to achieve. Now think about your work life -- how many times have worked for or witnessed a blithering idiot in charge of thing at your job or a customers org?
Agree, it's a combination of both, as well as some other challenges. Yes, it's a culture that seems to support these behaviors broadly across the organization, a leadership team that isn't demonstrating the right behaviors and managers that are emulating their leader's behavior. There are definitely opportunities to change processes, behaviors, beliefs/thinking to tweak the culture, as well as give their managers training on how to get the best from their teams and support the company strategy.
>Slightly. Ultimately, the high-level culture is set by the execs.
Depends on the size and the structure under which the institution operates. If there's autonomy within an institution execs might attempt to set a culture, but they can obviously not control it and the result will be a mix of organic bottom-up developments that diverge from section to section, and top-down guidelines.
At a company the size of Intel, with over 100k employees, it is almost impossible to have an iron grip on the entire workforce.
You're right, and I addressed this in another reply, but keeping a good company culture requires a very special leadership team, and it can't and won't last forever.
Yes, but culture isn't immutable. And a top-down, company wide focus on security and proper training is a damn good place to start.
The problem is getting middle management on board. It's no good if mid-level managers tell their direct reports to go to the training and then go back to business as normal with the same old priorities and no extra time/focus on the new security aspects.
Definitely. Culture is not trivial to get right, and the period of rapid growth when companies often mishire HR people is exactly when it is most needed.
I could see hiring a low level HR person in more of a clerical role and then hiring a community builder or evangelist or whatever to focus on culture.
But with principled leadership and monitoring, guidance, and procedures from HR, a great deal of this (and the legal, risk, and financial pain resulting) can be avoided, or at least, caught early.
reply