What kind of organizational culture are you working in?
A guide to the different kinds of company cultures out there.
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In a startup, a founding team of two or three people sets the culture in motion—but as people are added they bring slightly new behaviors to the group, which it collectively adopts or rejects, until you have an entire organization that speaks, works and often acts with a shared set of behaviors. The first step to being able to helpfully contribute to an organizational culture, and change it, is to be able to identify it.
Think of this as a working list of the primary organizational culture archetypes, we’ll use these again and again to look at how you can be a better contributor to yours, and eventually to explore how individuals like you can start to influence group cultures like this—even if you aren’t the CEO. Yours might be one, or a mix of these.
Command and Control
The culture that tends to move without hesitation, is one that exhibits a ‘command and control’ type of culture. Often these organizations have very present, visible leadership and information and direction is clearly, visibly set by one or more leaders of this group. This can be a fast moving organization, but one where, with few exceptions, people must get on board to get by. This culture can feel most like it is led by a ‘cult leader’ and yes, you’ve guessed it the organizations run by leaders such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk often behave like this and a dangerous side effect can often be that these cultures become unusually political beneath the top layer of the organization, as people vie for attention and resources
Openness and Responsibility
Highly open cultures often tend to be quite multifaceted and while they move slower, they also create for more freedom, diverse ideas, action and experimentation. Many of these cultures are often places where more entrepreneurial mindsets thrive. The tricky side of this can be an organization that doesn’t always ‘row’ in the same direction, so people who aren’t clear on what they should work on can get frustrated with a lack of direction. Organizations that have implemented this successfully are the likes of Google, where new ideas are encouraged but failures are often sunset without hesitation.
Autonomy and Performance
This is similar to the open and responsibility culture, but essentially these cultures create immense individual autonomy, with dire consequences for failure. Netflix famously gives people the autonomy they need, but it also fires its lowest performers consistently and transparently. The benefits of this culture are that new ideas are encouraged and autonomy also is cultivated, but the performance of any individual can affect the happiness of the group a great deal and there is often an underlying fear, which can burn people out.
Highly Executional and Operationalized
Some organizations thrive on getting s**t done. Often they move at speed to deploy capital and are just well oiled machines. This can work fantastically well in combination with Command and Control (see above) or a really well articulated strategy, but if the organization encounters a roadblock, like ants, people often won’t think creatively about “why”, often everyone will continue ‘find a way’ until—often, the strategic challenge is missed entirely and it is too late and, which can be catastrophic for the business . Look at military style organizations or ones deploying a playbook that has been the same for many years (example telecommunications) for examples of this.
Super Collegiate / flat, equally applicable rules
Flat organizations try to operate with less hierarchy, and put objectivity, data or some other social currency above seniority. At their best they are highly collegiate groups of individuals who generally put an objective truth ahead of the individual. Historically, Amazon has done a great job of creating an evidence based organization which allows more junior people to challenge more senior ones, if they have the right data and insight. This culture can be dangerous if the flat organization doesn’t create any decision making clarity and, for example, becomes entirely Freedom oriented, cultures like that don’t tend to get anything done unless roles are crystal clear.
This list is not exhaustive, and often these archetypes combine to create unique, special cultures that work together to achieve things that weren’t possible before.
What other archetypes of organizational cultures have you recognized, and what examples do you have of them in play?
(Thanks for reading. If you don’t mind, I’d love your feedback on this post via an extremely brief survey—it’ll help make future posts better.)
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