Over the last year much of my thinking and conversations with colleagues have involved an examination of corporate culture and how it affects various initiatives and attempts to make organizational changes. Enter “corporate culture” in a search engine and you see millions of links to classes, articles, academic papers. All of them discussing, explaining, or positing about corporate culture. Certainly any organization that involves groups of people develops a culture over time, irrespective of whether it’s a social group, trade association, professional society, public sector entity, or corporation. Why is it important? Why would anyone working with business processes care about discussions around corporate culture?
It plays a significant role in the success or failure of company initiatives and changes. Paradoxically a strong corporate culture defends itself against “foreign” ideas and radical changes in much the same way as your body protects itself against infection. It forms antibodies that fight and neutralize the infection. Corporate culture matters! If the “foreign” idea is a suggestion that adopting a process focused approach to the business would enable it to function more productively and with increased attention to customers, the antibodies might take form in responses such as:
“In an economy like this one, we need to focus on marketing and sales, not business processes.”
“We’re doing all right. Now is not the time to go tinkering with our operations.”
“Sure business processes are important, but we have more pressing concerns at the moment.”
On the surface, suggesting that a company examine its business processes might appear as a sensible notion that anyone would understand and agree to consider. Yet, in talking with colleagues in a variety of industries, it has become evident that corporate culture has played an important role in stymieing business process management projects.
How can a business process initiative succeed when the corporate culture views the effort as something “foreign”? Below are some approaches that others have used to address this challenge.
- Study the existing corporate culture paying close attention to the mission statement, corporate values statement, and company goals. Find a way to frame the business process effort as a project that is consistent with the existing paradigm.
- Develop a business case for changing the corporate culture.
- Recruit an executive to champion the effort with his/her peers.
- Find a department with serious “pain points” and convince the department manager to allow a proof of concept effort.
- Identify a critical issue for the company and form a “skunkworks” team to solve the problem. Present the solution to a senior manager.
Each of these approaches can be successful if they are appropriate for the company’s environment and culture. Sometimes it is an exercise in “trial and error” to determine which approach will thrive within an organization. Each of the suggestions contains strengths and weaknesses as well as potential hazards.
During 2012 I intend to take a detailed look, along with case studies, at some of the ways in which you can succeed with a business process initiative in a corporate culture that might be less than supportive.
