Org Culture: A Different Perspective
Is it always good to have a strong Org Culture? Not every single time.
“Organizational culture” plays a very important role in our day to day operations. During hiring, we specifically look for ‘Culture Fit’ as one of the key aspects. Culture is mainly driven by leaders where their small actions form a “Guiding Principle” overtime. This guiding principle helps to make individual decisions much easier at all levels as it outlines what’s important for the org or the leader who owns that org.
In my experience, I have seen leaders optimizing their decision based on various pivots. One leader purely focuses on strong business success and creates more agility in the environment and thereby a very quick growth trajectory for individuals. This gives the “excite and exhaust” phenomenon at the same time.
On the other hand, a leader may focus on balancing both employee and customer satisfaction equally being important. This style ensures a stable environment at the cost of losing agility. Both of them are good options depending upon which growth phase the organization is at.
With all positives about having a culture, is there anything negative about having a strong culture ?. Yes. Culture typically enhances group thinking, this can be detrimental as everyone will be streamlined to think in a similar way, causing more rigidity and killing the thought diversity in the system. You are in the same feedback loop and losing another perspective.
This is similar to having cookies in your browser and based on your preferences, you are always fed what you want. This gives some level of false confidence that our approach is always right.