A corporate culture conversation with Charles Dayton
I am blessed to have a very large family (11 siblings and over 90 first cousins). My family members are, if I may say so, all very talented. Really impressive people, each in their own right. Most in my generation have gone to college, many with graduate degrees, successful careers, many running their own businesses, all with amazing talents and families of their own. I learn so much from talking with each of them. I really can’t think of anyone else that I’d rather spend time prior to my wife and kids, my siblings, and my cousins.
I had the chance to speak with one of my cousins recently and wanted to share some of his insights. Charles Dayton is a business consultant, a famous artist (wyoartist on IG), a rancher, and all around nice guy. He works extensively with Native American organizations across North America. More times than not, Charles is open to talk (and more importantly, listen) to what’s going on in others’ lives. He always asks about others and he cares about people’s stories; it feels like he’s looking into your soul with his intelligent piercing blue eyes. Last time we were in Wyoming he took time away from his work, art, and family to help us get some horses saddled up to take some Chinese friends on a ride.
Recently he and I were talking about corporate culture, a shared consulting interest of ours, and we geeked out a bit on some theory and how different people see the same situation differently. I’ll save you that re-cap, but as we got further into the conversation I realized that I was meta-analyzing our discussion. Charles was coming at culture from an MBA perspective while I was coming from Anthropology. We both agreed that culture drives behaviors and performance, and he was mentioning strategy and incentives while I was discussing security and authenticity—our default level of analysis was different.
We both noted that culture is the a driver of strategy. In fact, since working at SRI I’ve personally come to believe that culture trumps strategy. You can have the best people and the best plans (important in that order) but if they are not culturally appropriate you’re not going to see the results that you desire. Culture drives behavior and performance as it informs decisions and incentives and it surrounds individuals in unconscious layers that empower and constrain.
What does your culture do for your strategy? Support or inhibit people and projects? Do employees feel safe to challenge ideas and participate fully? Or does your culture intimate that real change and actual best practices are not really what’s valued? How can you know? (Hint: hire a corporate anthropologist)
One of the areas that we found some similarities was the high levels of public respect and deference shown in Chinese, Thai, and NA cultures. Charles noted that NA cultures are “based on respect first.” This is often so deeply entrenched as part of larger NA culture that older people don’t realize the extent of the deference given to elders that limits daily communications. Without consciously constructed cultures that allow for trust and safety, younger employees simply defer to more senior colleagues by “default.” This creates top-down leadership with minimal input from the bottom even when that style of leadership is actively discouraged.
One of the principles that works to maintain respect but also encourage assertiveness is trust—if you want people to speak up there MUST be a high level of trust. Trust is built over time, over multiple crucial but safe interactions. Trust is a tone that’s consciously set by leaders. To create a trusting environment leaders themselves must feel secure with difficult conversations and even (appropriate) challenges to their authority and ideas.
But, in my consulting experience, trust is still different from security. Employees looking for security don’t necessarily need an environment of trust and vise versa. One can be in a volatile industry, or a company with high turnover and still have open, candid communications that indicate a high degree of internal trust. Similarly, there are jobs in stable companies with toxic corporate cultures.
Differing from social scientists who look to survey data to understand if there is a culture of trust, anthropologist look at the daily verbal and physical behaviors of groups of employees over a period of time—participant observation, in anthro-speak. On a daily basis in actual office situations, to what degree are people allowed to be honest, showing candor without offending or being reprimanded in some way? While there likely isn’t any leader who would say, “no, thanks we don’t want the truth, just sugar it coat if for us,” many cultures do just that by not recognizing actual (vs on-paper) workspace cultures. This is one of the values of anthropology in understanding data and behavior (more on this here).
Side note: Historically, anthropology has been great at “thick description”—detailing culture to the nth degree. But unless one is trained as an applied anthropologist, the anthropologists usually stop at description. Academic anthropologists are loath to offer suggestions for culture change, that would be ethnocentric and unethical (exactly the colonial legacy that we’ve been collectively running from since anthropology was invented). But applied anthropologists work on cultural audits and culture change projects (we aren’t so Marxist that we don’t mind selling our labor to The Man). And in doing culture audits/change it becomes obvious that some cultures promote some values better than others. Depending on the variable being measured, not all cultures are equally empowering—some do a better job at creating xyz value (i.e.trust) than do others.
Let me be clear, I’m not saying that there is one culture that is best for all situations. Nor am I saying that all cultures need to value the same principles. I’m not even saying that there is one best way to measure the creation/valuation of variables. But I am saying that if, for example, openness, diversity, and candor are valued, the corporate culture (not just the corporate value statements) needs to actually support an environment of trust before those values will be realized in office behaviors.
Not all cultures are equal to this task. Not all cultures value candor and trust over other values.
After two decades of doing research and working with scores of different companies in Asia I’ve found that many organizations value peace and stability over honesty and openness. If results are “good enough” and there isn’t friction in the office, they’re ok paying lip service to corporate value statements that aim at different principles. When introducing new values or adjustments to culture to fit existing value statements, the ensuing conflict is met with knowing head-nods. “See, we told you that these new values/behaviors aren’t “ours,”” even if they are printed in the corporate manuals.
Granted, sometimes they’re right. Many MNCs have corporate values set in the home country with little local adaptation. When a new manager comes in and tries to align the two, they can be seen as insensitive to local cultures. (Even worse, sometimes value statement adaptations are created in the home country HQ and sent into the field offices creating whole new levels of resistance, confusion, and frustrations.) Other times, the push back is just people being shifted out of their comfort zones (power positions). It’s hard to know the difference without a real understanding of how the existing corporate culture(s) actually work. (Queue smiling anthropologist 😉)
If you’re a leader in these situations, the “speed of trust” then becomes of paramount importance. How quickly can you gain the trust of those whom you need to support culture change/alignment? More exactly, how quickly can you determine who the influencers are that can support (and derail) your goals? Does your endeavor make sense to them? What will it take to get these people on board? What do they trust about you/your plan that you can build on? And how can you communicate those incentives in culturally sensitive ways that they understand?
Another area that Charles and I found was culturally similar in our work in different parts of the world was the differing status of women in the organizations with which we work; both of us noting that women generally tend to have lower public status in both NA and Chinese and Thai organizations (than in Western orgs). Women generally didn’t hold the senior titles but they were not without influence. While to some degree this is true globally, it plays out differently in different areas.
In Thailand, for example, the culture is matrilocal but patriarchal. For businesses, this means that men have public title but women tend to manage both home and office spaces, as well as finances. This requires a foreign manager to understand that getting a female administrative assistant on-board might be even more important than convincing her male boss (though his “face” still needs to be managed).
China on the other hand is patriarchal but with an almost even number of well educated younger women and men in entry-level positions. The numbers of women then drop dramatically as the hierarchy rises, though there are a significant number of professional older women in admin roles, many related to senior corporate executives (and almost no men in HR). Women are pushed out of promotion-track positions across China and while they shouldn’t be disrespected, this corporate habit means that women are often seen as less important to long-term decision making. Expat executives looking to promote younger women are often put into uncomfortable positions when they are more comfortable with equality than hierarchy.
Knowing how these dynamics play out in actual office behavior is essential to how leaders adapt strategic goals to specific corporate culture characteristics—how to go from good people and good strategy to optimal results.
Hearing Charles talk about this is much better than my writing, so look for more from Charles and I as I’m scheduling him for an episode of the SRI Corporate Cultures Podcast soon!
