By Kayla Monroe

I worked with a company a while back that had just acquired another company. On paper, they had done everything right. They had a new org chart, benefits and policies were integrated (for the most part), and they had communicated all the changes clearly.

Six months later, they were still fighting about the smallest things, and no one could pin down why.

What culture actually is

If you ask most leaders what culture is, you'll hear about values, morale, or whether people like working together. So it gets handed to HR, because that sounds like "HR work."

Except it's not. 

Culture is how your organization behaves over and over.

What happens to the person who says the uncomfortable thing in the room.

Whether work moves through a process or through a relationship.

What everyone knows will happen when a commitment gets missed, which is usually nothing.

It's what people do every day without thinking about it, which is different from what they'd tell you they do.

There's no survey that tells you where the real decisions get made in your company. These are all things you can see for yourself. 

If you ask why people behave that way, you'll get to how it all came together.

• What you measure.
• What gets escalated.
• What you've decided isn't worth addressing.
• Who's in the room when the call gets made.
• What happened to the last person who told you something you didn't want to hear. 

Those are your systems, and your culture is what they produce.

Where culture work goes wrong

Go after culture directly and here's what happens:

You get a communication plan, you hold town halls, and you refresh the values and put them somewhere visible.  Then there's a lot of energy behind it for a few months.

But behaviors will always revert to what people are used to. 

The people behind the work put time, care and energy into it.  They just never built the systems, and the systems are what produce the behavior, so the behavior came back. What you're left with is frustration and a general sense that people just don't want to change. 

What was actually happening in that integration

The issue wasn't in the org chart.

Let’s start with meetings, because that's where it showed up daily. 

One company ran a meeting for everything and invited anyone who might be connected to the work, with time built for friendly conversation and what they considered relationship-building. The other met sparingly, invited only the people who had to make decisions, and got to the point.

After the merger both were still running as they were used to.

Half the organization sat in meetings they thought were a waste of a day, and the other half kept finding out about things after they'd been decided. Nobody said the cultures were colliding. They said the other side either wasted everyone's time or cut people out.

Underneath that was how far down a decision got made. 

One company pushed authority close to the work, the other sent everything up the chain, and neither had ever been explicitly identified as the right way.

So the same decision was getting made three levels apart depending on which company the person came from. I watched them blame each other for it. One side looked reckless, the other looked slow, and both were doing exactly what had worked where they came from.

Then there was pace.

One company shipped at eighty percent and fixed things in flight. The other didn't move until it was right, because in their business being wrong was expensive. Put those together and one side reads as sloppy and the other reads as slow, and neither one is either of those things.

And there was what people let go. 

One organization allowed employees to stand around chat for years, and the other had no tolerance for it.

So half the company was talking in the hallway about decisions the other half thought were settled, and the leaders who'd never tolerated that assumed it meant people were unhappy. It didn't mean anything of the sort. It was just what people had always been allowed to do.

Neither of the companies were wrong in how they approached things, but they were behaviors for a for a company that no longer existed.

Communicating the org chart harder was never going to fix any of it, because an org chart doesn't tell you who sits in the room, what good enough means, or what happens when someone starts talking in the hallway.  It tells you who reports to whom.

Most of this is visible before close, if anyone is looking.  

(I wrote more about it in my last issue of Growth by Design.) 

Why it surfaces in a transition

When nothing much is changing, your systems and your behavior still continue to make things move forward. The behavior might not be good, but it's steady, and you stop seeing issues because nothing's pushing on it.

Then you change the strategy and leave the systems where they are. The organization keeps doing what you built it to do, which is now the wrong thing. 

A company scaling fast still tolerates what it tolerated at forty people, and at three hundred that's a different organization.

A new CEO arrives with a clear direction and finds that nothing about what gets rewarded has changed, so neither does anything else.

Two companies merge and both sets of habits keep running side by side.

Where the levers actually are

Who makes decisions. What you measure and reward. What you walk past. Who's in the room.

Those get set by the leadership team, and nobody else in the building can set them. 

HR can design the system and recommend it and build it. What HR can't do is decide that authority sits here instead of there, and HR isn't who the organization watches to learn what's actually tolerated. That's not a limit on HR. It's a limit on where authority lives, and handing culture to a function that doesn't have the levers is why it comes back six months later looking exactly like it did.

Reinforcement is the part that catches people. The systems get set once, and then they get reinforced or abandoned every day by whoever is in the room when something happens. A manager who walks past the hallway conversation has just told everyone what's allowed. That happens whether or not anyone meant it to.

The leaders who come out of a transition with a stronger organization than they started with didn't run a better culture program. They changed the systems producing the behavior, instead of talking about the behavior they wanted.

Until next time,

Kayla

P.S. If you're in the middle of a transition and people aren't behaving the way you expected, the systems are where I'd start looking. Reach out and I'll tell you what I look for:  [email protected]. 

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