Do you have a team that needs its own unique culture?
In years of working on culture, the two most common questions I hear are:
Does culture happen organically or is it something leaders should shape with intention?
Does an organization have one culture or do different parts have sub-cultures?
To me, the answer to both is: yes, and ...
Culture does arise organically, to a degree, and organizational leaders can and must shape culture to support strategy.
Many organizations have a strong culture, which is good, and in every organization numerous sub-cultures exist.
This all came up recently with a client who asked me to assess the strength of several cross-functional teams that are critical to her company’s overall success. The cross-functional (or matrix) structure is necessary, but also inexorably challenging.
The overall company’s culture is strong: collaborative, curious, driven. All good attributes that support strategy execution.
But these particular teams are unique, and one of my recommendations was to nurture a different culture:
More bluntness
More intense mutual commitment and support
More urgency
More ferocious intolerance of internal barriers
Why these cultural attributes? Because they were needed in much greater measure for the criticality of the teams’ work and for the distinct challenges from the cross-functional composition.
Do you have a team that is so important to your organization’s success, and so unique, that you need to help it develop a different culture?