Identifying (and addressing) company culture challenges

By Hélène Debaisieux on 28 December 2010 in Friday Session | Comments Off

What can affect your consulting work for clients ?

As an external consultant, working for a company which has its own culture, way of working, thinking and acting, is not always easy. Alex Papanastassiou helped us decoding what is company culture and what are the challenges of working in a company where the culture might be different from yours. The challenges of the company culture difference leads to the following questions:

• how to decode it?
• how to deal with it?

With a psychological and sociological approach, Alex helped us in the classification of the different cultures to understand their backgrounds and values.

What is a company culture?

Culture is one of the elements composing the lenses with which we decode reality. The behaviors are reflecting these lenses. The challenge for a consultant is to have all the components of the company lenses in order to deal with it.

Culture is a complex set of rules and values reflected in behaviors. It is torn into contradicting dynamics:

• System versus individuals : Each culture is a global system but internalized in each individual.
• Transmission versus changes : Culture would not exist without individuals perpetuating it. Meanwhile, culture is not static, it is in perpetual change.
• Skills (internal level) versus behaviors (external level) : Culture modulates the individual competences, it requires to subsist and influence the behaviors. As a consultant, you have to prove your expertise, your skills in the field but you also have to integrate yourself into the company culture, it is a factor of socialization.

Engagement is first

Even if the culture is engaged in opposite dynamics, relationship and trust are the basis for all understanding. We cultivate culture!

“Don’t try to change the company culture as a consultant. You have to work with it“, says Alex. Company culture is complex, even if it does not follow your values, don’t try to change it, you better have to deal with it. Here is the quality of a good consultant!

How to decode it?

Alex decoded the culture into different memes (=patterns of thinking). Going trough all these memes is the success key for understanding the culture and the challenges behind it. It gives you the framework for thinking further.

“You must be the change you want to see in the world”

On one hand, the logical and individual level of the memes takes us to a trans-personal level, leading to compassion. On this level, curiosity must precede judgement.

The speaker illustrated this through an example with a volunteer, Raphaël Thys (see picture). Together they had to find the memes behind a difficult communication example experienced by Raphaël. Going from the visible part of the experience, the environnment and the behaviors, Alex took gradually Raphaël to the transpersonal level and the identity values. This psychoanalytical experience gave Raphaël the possibility to understand the reasons of the mutual misunderstandings in the before-mentioned situation.

With the Spiral Dynamics, companies are colors

On the other hand, the collective level leads us to categorize the company culture into different kinds (colors) based on their nature. For example, an “orange” company will be devoted to competition and merit while a “green” company will be devoted to participation and sharing. On this level, the consultant must at least recognize the existence of those different natures in order to recognize them when he/she will work with one of them.

An experience to live

The interactive way to introduce the topic and the talents of Alex made us feel the real potential of the Spiral Dynamics (read the book)! The consultant using this technique will better deal with the different cultures, better establish her/him-self as an external expert but also as a reliable consultant! This Friday Session gave us the key for being a successful consultant and a larger reflection on what is a company. The challenges were accepted and succeeded thanks to Alex!

If you missed the session, you will find the pictures on Flickr and the presentation on Slideshare.

Tags: Alex Papanastassiou, Christopher Cowan, Company culture, consulting, culture, Don Edward Beck, memes, spiral dynamics