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48 Articles

“ Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”

WHILE MANAGEMENT THEORIST Peter Drucker never actually uttered that catchphrase attributed to him in PowerPoint decks all over the world, he did warn managers against trying to change corporate culture because it is so “singularly persistent.” But precisely because culture is so pervasive and enduring, leaders who do know how to subtly influence it can create powerful change that permeates their organizations in lasting ways, enabling them to achieve bold strategic goals. And those who ignore managing their company’s culture do so at their peril. They risk leading organizations that are unwelcoming, disengaged, and lagging in learning and innovation that are critical to competing in today’s world. Influencing culture is easier said than done, though, because culture is also elusive. It’s found in unspoken rules and patterns of behavior that by definition…

The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture

STRATEGY AND CULTURE are among the primary levers at top leaders’ disposal in their never-ending quest to maintain organizational viability and effectiveness. Strategy offers a formal logic for the company’s goals and orients people around them. Culture expresses goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms. Strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision-making. It relies on plans and sets of choices to mobilize people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so. Ideally, it also incorporates adaptive elements that can scan and analyze the external environment and sense when changes are required to maintain continuity and growth. Leadership goes hand-in-hand with strategy formation, and most leaders understand the fundamentals. Culture, however, is…

The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture

THE PROBLEM Much of corporate culture is rooted in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns. Confounded by this, many leaders either ignore culture or relegate it to HR, where it becomes a secondary concern for the business. This is a missed opportunity. THE GUIDE The authors present eight culture styles—caring, purpose, learning, enjoyment, results, authority, safety, and order—that fit into an “integrated culture framework” based on how each style reflects a company’s orientation toward people interactions and response to change. Using four tools, leaders can determine their company’s current culture, find step-by-step advice for shaping their culture, determine which cultural characteristics employees converge on, and assess their company’s context, conditions, and culture. ALIGNMENT Determining your organization’s current culture and shaping it to fit your strategy is the first step toward corporate success. Properly managed, culture…

What’s Your Organization’s Cultural Profile?

BEFORE YOU BEGIN an initiative to shape your organization’s culture, it’s important to explore where it is today. This worksheet and the questions that follow can help you formulate a preliminary assessment of your culture and get the conversation started. Consider how your organization currently operates, what is valued, how people behave, and what unifies them. Partner with a colleague and independently rate each statement according to how well it describes your organization. Add the two ratings in each row and then rank the eight styles. The higher the total, the stronger the match. Compare your rankings with your colleague’s and discuss the following questions: What do you like most about the current culture? What behaviors and mindsets might you evolve? How effective are your organization’s leaders at role modeling the culture? What are the characteristics of…

How to Shape Your Culture

FIRST YOU MUST identify culture targets. The best ones have some attributes in common: They align with the company’s strategic direction; they’re important to execute; and they reflect the demands of the external business environment. A good target should be both specific and achievable. For example, “We value our customers” can create ambiguity and lead to inconsistent choices regarding hiring, developing leaders, and running the company. A better version might be “We build genuine and positive relationships with customers; we serve our customers with humility; and we act as ambassadors for our rich brand heritage.” To Set a Culture Target Understand the current culture. Examine your culture—the company’s founding and heritage, its espoused values, subcultures, leadership style, and team dynamics. (Use the worksheet on the preceding page to start the conversation.) Identify your…

How to Shape Your Culture

Convergence Matters

WHEN WE COMPARED employees’ views on their organization’s most salient cultural attributes, two types of organizations emerged: low convergence (employees rarely agreed on the most important cultural attributes) and high convergence (views were more closely aligned). In the two examples below, each dot represents one employee. Note that in the low-convergence organization, seven of the eight cultural attributes were cited as most important, and every quadrant is represented. That means employees viewed their company in varying and often opposite ways. Some saw a caring organization, for example, while others saw one that emphasized authority. Why is high convergence important? Because it correlates with levels of employee engagement and customer orientation. However, if the culture you have is not the one you want, high convergence will make it harder to change. HBR Reprint S18013…

Convergence Matters

Context, Conditions, and Culture

CONTEXT MATTERS WHEN assessing a culture’s strategic effectiveness. Leaders must simultaneously consider culture styles and key organizational and market conditions if they want their culture to help drive performance. Region and industry are among the most germane external factors to keep in mind; critical internal considerations include alignment with strategy, leadership, and organizational design. Region. The values of the national and regional cultures in which a company is embedded can influence patterns of behavior within the organization. (This linkage has been explored in depth by Geert Hofstede and the authors of the GLOBE study.) We find, for example, that companies operating in countries characterized by a high degree of institutional collectivism (defined as valuing equity within groups and encouraging the collective distribution of resources), such as France and Brazil, have cultures that…

Context, Conditions, and Culture

How Generative AI Changes Organizational Culture

AMY BERNSTEIN: Read just about any business history or any case study, and you realize just how much success depends on company culture. The unwritten rules of behavior can make the difference between capitalizing on a big shift or missing it all together. You can’t have successful innovation without the right culture; you can’t compete successfully without the right culture; you can’t thrive over the long term without the right culture. And it follows that if you want to bring your organization into a future that includes generative AI, you need to build the right culture for it. To learn more about this, I’m talking to Nitin Mittal. He runs the global AI business at Deloitte, and he helped develop the firm’s own implementation of generative AI. He’s also a coauthor of…

How Generative AI Changes Organizational Culture

THE CHALLENGE Generative AI is here to stay. And to capitalize on the technological shift to generative AI use, companies must build the right culture to support it. EMBRACING AI Deloitte Consulting’s Nitin Mittal and Harvard Business School’s Tsedal Neeley, both experts on artificial intelligence and organizational culture, discuss the risks and challenges of adopting gen AI ethically and effectively. The key is to adapt your organizational culture to gen AI with an environment of learning and accountability along with a framework of guidelines and protocols. LEADERSHIP’S ROLE To lead the way on generative AI, leaders must exercise fundamental skills relating to communication, integrity, and fairness, as well as demonstrate technical understanding and competence with gen AI as a tool—and the values they bring to its use.…

Build a Corporate Culture That Works

AT THE BEGINNING of my career, I worked for the health-care-software specialist HBOC. One day, a woman from human resources came into the cafeteria with a roll of tape and began sticking posters on the walls. They proclaimed in royal blue the company’s values: “Transparency, Respect, Integrity, Honesty.” The next day we received wallet-sized plastic cards with the same words and were asked to memorize them so that we could incorporate them into our actions. The following year, when management was indicted on 17 counts of conspiracy and fraud, we learned what the company’s values really were. Ever since Peter Drucker famously declared that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” there has been a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture…

Build a Corporate Culture That Works

THE PROBLEM There’s a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended. WHAT USUALLY HAPPENS All too often a culture is described as a set of anodyne norms, principles, or values, which do not offer decision makers guidance on how to make difficult choices when faced with conflicting but equally defensible courses of action. HOW TO FIX IT Follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value.…

Manage Your Emotional Culture

BEFORE LEAVING WORK each day, employees at Ubiquity Retirement + Savings press a button in the lobby. They’re not punching out—not in the traditional sense, anyway. They’re actually registering their emotions. They have five buttons to choose from: a smiley face if they felt happy at work that day, a frowny face if they felt sad, and so on. This may sound like an HR gimmick (“See? Management cares how you feel!”) or an instrument of forced satisfaction (“The team with the most smiley faces wins!”). But it’s neither. Ubiquity is using the data it collects to understand what motivates employees—to learn what makes them feel a sense of belonging and excitement at work. Other organizations are starting to do the same. Some use apps that record how much fun people…

Manage Your Emotional Culture

THE PROBLEM Most companies pay little attention to their emotional culture—which feelings people have (and should have) at work, and which ones they keep to themselves. That presents problems for both individuals and organizations. THE REASON Research shows that, for better or worse, emotions influence employees’ commitment, creativity, decision making, work quality, and likelihood of sticking around—and you can see the effects on the bottom line. So it’s important to monitor and manage people’s feelings as deliberately as you do their mindset. THE SOLUTION Once you have a handle on your existing emotional culture, you can shape it in several ways. Explicitly say which emotions will help the organization thrive, channel the feelings that people have and express naturally, and cultivate the ones you want through emotional contagion and the power of “deep acting.”…

Quantifying Your Company’s Emotional Culture

MANAGERS TEND TO view emotions as something “soft” that can’t really be measured. But you can—and should—track emotions quantitatively, the same way you’d track employees’ other attitudes and behaviors: through surveys. There’s a key difference in approach, however. In a survey we’ve used in many organizational settings, people don’t tell us how they feel. Rather, employees or outside raters observe the emotional culture around them—that is, the norms, values, artifacts, and assumptions governing which feelings people can have and should express at work. This helps us get a birds-eye view of what’s happening with the group as a whole. We ask: “To what degree do other people in this organization (or division or unit) display the following emotions?” The options include enthusiasm, caring, compassion, frustration, anxiety, and energy, to name a…

Culture Is Not the Culprit

WHEN ORGANIZATIONS GET into big trouble, fixing the culture is usually the prescription. That’s what most everyone said General Motors needed to do after its recall crisis in 2014—and ever since, CEO Mary Barra has been focusing on creating “the right environment” to promote accountability and head off future disasters. Pundits far and wide called for the same remedy when it came to light that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, deemed a corrosive bureaucracy by federal investigators, kept veterans waiting months for critical healthcare. Cultural reform has likewise been proposed as the solution to excessive use of force by police departments, unethical behavior in banks, and just about any other major organizational problem you can think of. All eyes are on culture as the cause and the cure. But the…

Culture Is Not the Culprit

THE PROBLEM Cultural reform has been a favorite go-to to rescue organizations in trouble, whether the culprit is a corrosive bureaucracy, a product-recall crisis, or unethical behavior. But several corporate leaders disagree: In many cases it’s the business itself that needs repair. AN EXAMPLE Ecolab CEO Doug Baker was on a mission to triple revenue, but the expanded bureaucracy necessary to do so was cutting into the company’s customercentric culture. Instead of changing that culture, Baker altered business processes. Pushing decisions down to the front lines engendered trust and responsibility and restored connections to customers. A culture of autonomy was the result. THE RESULTS Culture isn’t something you “fix”—rather, cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new structures or processes in place to tackle tough business challenges.…

Revitalizing Culture in the World of Hybrid Work

TWO-PLUS YEARS INTO the pandemic, many leaders worry that remote and hybrid work are undermining their organizations’ culture. Their concerns aren’t entirely misplaced: A 2022 global study by the research and advisory firm Gartner found that just 25% of remote or hybrid knowledge workers feel connected to their company’s culture. But forcing employees back to the office is risky, as CEOs including Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon have discovered firsthand. Companies should take another tack. “I find it ironic when leaders say they need to bring workers back to the office because of culture,” says Alexia Cambon, a research director in Gartner’s HR practice and a principal author of the study. “They’re going to get the opposite of what they hope for. Instead of viewing hybrid work as a disruption to…

Revitalizing Culture in the World of Hybrid Work

BRENDAN REIDY: “Hybrid Work Balances the Requirements of the Job with Personal Flexibility”

Over the course of the pandemic, almost all the 6,500 global associates of Acushnet—the parent company of golf brands Titleist and FootJoy—were told not to come in to work, and manufacturing shut down. The decision to focus on health and safety was easy, says chief people officer Brendan Reidy. Determining how and when people should return was much harder. Reidy spoke with HBR about how Acushnet’s strong culture embraces hybrid work arrangements. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow. How did you decide when to reopen? Shortly after the shutdown, we experienced a huge uplift in business as people flocked to outdoor recreation. The question became: How do we keep our associates safe while meeting our customers’ growing needs? Our manufacturing operations reopened in accordance with local and state guidelines and when we…

BRENDAN REIDY: “Hybrid Work Balances the Requirements of the Job with Personal Flexibility”

1. Company Culture Is Everyone’s Responsibility

HERE’S HOW ORGANIZAIONAL culture might have been handled in the past: The CEO commissions the human resources department to produce an effective company culture. HR designs a campaign to tout a mission statement and core values that the CEO and senior management developed. HR also implements some employee perks like free snacks in the break room or monthly birthday celebrations. Maybe they also field an annual employee engagement survey and report results back to the CEO. And then with their culture-building to-do lists completed, the CEO and HR move on to other priorities. This approach no longer works for several reasons. For one, Covid-19 has upended how leaders interact with employees and how coworkers connect with one another. The need to adapt quickly and remain flexible during the pandemic has also…

1. Company Culture Is Everyone’s Responsibility

2. Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?

EARLY IN MY career, strategy was seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business—the North Star and inspiration meant to orient all company activities. But there is often a large gap between a company’s purpose and what its employees experience, and a simple communication campaign about the great new company purpose won’t do much good on its own. So, what’s missing from this picture? We’ve all known for a long time that besides purpose and strategy, something else is critical: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy. As a business leader and as a student of other…

2. Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?

3. How Leaders Can Create a Purpose-Driven Culture

MANY COMPANIES TOUT their corporate purpose, emphasizing guiding principles that reach beyond mere profitability. While some earnestly prioritize ethical behavior and broad responsibility, others falter in matching their actions with their rhetoric. What sets them apart? As professors deeply immersed in both practical industry involvement and academic research, we study the elements that allow firms to excel, particularly when integrating environmental and social concerns into their business strategy. Our research points to a pivotal element: organizational culture. This is because culture provides the underlying assumptions, shared values, and norms that shape employee mindsets and behaviors. Companies may profess a commitment to purpose, but without a supportive culture aligned to that purpose, employees won’t be supported to enact these shared values in their work. We’ve found that successfully integrating purpose relies on…

3. How Leaders Can Create a Purpose-Driven Culture

4. Three Ways to Build a Culture That Lets High Performers Thrive

ÉLODIE IS A senior leader in a technology company. She has a young child and a husband who also works. She is particularly strong at two skill sets: leadership and collaborative problem solving. Because of this, she’s considered critical for major company initiatives. What’s her reward for being such a high performer? • Stressful goals: Because she’s done so well in the past, she often receives the most complex and risky goals after others have failed. • Meeting mania: Because she is seen as an essential part of the team and can often solve even the thorniest of issues, her days are filled with back-to-back meetings, which requires her to get work done at night and on weekends. • Very little mentorship: Because her organization focuses on fixing and improving “squeaky wheels,” Élodie feels…

4. Three Ways to Build a Culture That Lets High Performers Thrive

5. Retaining the Best of Your Culture Amid Organizational Change

THERE HAS BEEN a lot published on how leaders can do the hard work of building organizational culture for the better. And this is hardly a surprise: After all, culture shapes our experience of work and our organizations. A firm’s culture is strongly related not only to its performance and value but, importantly, to the way it handles change (such as M&A integrations), fosters workplace well-being, and espouses ethical practices. Changing its culture can help a company achieve goals that have long seemed out of reach. But for leaders in this time of great change, an equally difficult challenge that doesn’t get talked about as much is keeping a culture steady. As companies go through transformations—M&As, organic growth, digital strategies, hybrid work, leadership transitions, generational changes—they need to retain the best…

5. Retaining the Best of Your Culture Amid Organizational Change

6. Three Steps to Prepare Your Culture for AI

AS BUSINESS LEADERS, today we find ourselves in a place that’s all too familiar: the unfamiliar. Just as we steered our teams through the shift to remote and flexible work, we’re now on the verge of another seismic shift: AI. And like the shift to flexible work, priming an organization to embrace AI will hinge first and foremost on culture. The pace and volume of work has increased exponentially, and we’re all struggling under the weight of it. Leaders and employees are eager for AI to lift the burden. That’s the key takeaway from our 2023 Work Trend Index, which surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries and analyzed trillions of aggregated productivity signals in Microsoft 365, along with labor market trends on LinkedIn. Nearly two-thirds of employees surveyed told us they don’t…

6. Three Steps to Prepare Your Culture for AI

Do Your Employees Feel Respected?

WHEN YOU ASK workers what matters most to them, feeling respected by superiors often tops the list. In a recent survey by Georgetown University’s Christine Porath of nearly 20,000 employees worldwide, respondents ranked respect as the most important leadership behavior. Yet employees report more disrespectful and uncivil behavior each year. What accounts for the disconnect? Although employees who aren’t shown respect are acutely aware of its absence, people who feel respected on a regular basis—typically, those in managerial or other high-status roles—don’t think about it very much. So leaders may simply be unaware of the problem. But research I’ve conducted shows that this is only part of the explanation. A bigger issue is that leaders have an incomplete understanding of what constitutes workplace respect—so even well meaning efforts to provide a…

Do Your Employees Feel Respected?

THE DEFICIT A respectful workplace brings enormous benefits to organizations, but efforts to provide one often fall short. That’s partly because leaders have an incomplete understanding of respect. THE FIX Research shows that employees value two distinct types of respect. Owed respect is accorded equally to all members of a work group or an organization. Earned respect recognizes individuals who display valued qualities or behaviors and acknowledges that each employee has specific strengths and talents. THE IDEA IN PRACTICE At Televerde, a technology focused B2B marketing firm staffed by female prison inmates, regular displays of owed and earned respect have created an extraordinarily engaged workforce responsible for impressive profitability and growth. And recidivism among Televerde’s inmate employees is 80% lower than the national rate.…

How to Build a Culture of Originality

IF THERE’S ONE place on earth where originality goes to die, I’d managed to find it. I was charged with unleashing innovation and change in the ultimate bastion of bureaucracy. It was a place where people accepted defaults without question, followed rules without explanation, and clung to traditions and technologies long after they’d become obsolete: the U.S. Navy. But in a matter of months, the navy was exploding with originality—and not because of anything I’d done. It launched a major innovation task force and helped to form a Department of Defense outpost in Silicon Valley to get up to speed on cutting-edge technology. Surprisingly, these changes didn’t come from the top of the navy’s command-and-control structure. They were initiated at the bottom, by a group of junior officers in their twenties…

How to Build a Culture of Originality

WHAT’S POSSIBLE We tend to believe that true innovators are a rare breed. But most people are quite capable of original thinking, and leaders can set them up for success by building a culture of nonconformity. WHAT GETS IN THE WAY Unfortunately, leaders often fail to do this because they have trouble moving past their flawed assumptions—for instance, believing that doing fewer things leads to better work, and that strong cultures squash originality. WHAT TO DO Give employees ways and reasons to generate lots of new ideas (being prolific actually increases quality). Have fellow innovators evaluate the ideas (they do the best job of predicting success). And strike the right balance between cohesion and dissent in your organization (you need both).…

A Syllabus for Innovators

When aviator Ben Kohlmann set out to build a culture of nonconformity in the U.S. Navy, he found inspiration in many sources. Here’s a sampling of the items he recommends to people who want to think more creatively, along with his comments on how they’ve influenced his own development. SPEECHES “Lead Like the Great Conductors” TED TALK BY ITAY TALGAM Much can be learned from professions we have no understanding of. People are people—and recognizing the commonalities is useful. “How Great Leaders Inspire Action” TED TALK BY SIMON SINEK Sinek cracks the code of influence: Deep-seated desire is what inspires followers and builds movements. FICTION Ender’s Game BY ORSON SCOTT CARD This novel illustrates how tactical and strategic teams can be adaptable—and how genius can emerge at a young age. It’s especially apropos reading in the military, where we promote on…

A Syllabus for Innovators

The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures

A CULTURE CONDUCIVE to innovation is not only good for a company’s bottom line. It also is something that both leaders and employees value in their organizations. In seminars at companies across the globe, I have informally surveyed hundreds of managers about whether they want to work in an organization where innovative behaviors are the norm. I cannot think of single instance when someone has said “No, I don’t.” Who can blame them: Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. When I asked the same managers to describe such cultures, they readily provided a list of characteristics identical to those extolled by management books: tolerance for failure, willingness to experiment, psychological safety, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. And research supports the idea that these behaviors translate into better innovative performance. But despite…

The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures

THE FRUSTRATION The conventional wisdom is that successful innovation depends on providing an environment where there’s a tolerance for failure and a willingness to experiment, it’s safe to speak up, and it’s highly collaborative and nonhierarchical. The reality is that these elements do not suffice. WHAT’S MISSING Each of these easy-to-like behaviors must be counterbalanced by tougher behavior that’s less fun: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership. THE LEADER’S ROLE Such a culture generates tensions that must be carefully managed. Uncertainty and confusion must be addressed with decisiveness and transparency. People who can’t adapt must be ushered out. The temptation to take shortcuts must be resisted.…

1. What Inclusive Companies Have in Common

THE KILLING OF George Floyd catalyzed a reckoning around racial injustice that led many corporate leaders to seek to evolve their organizations to meet today’s tremendous societal challenges. Many U.S. organizations have publicly pledged to increase diversity by filling more executive positions with individuals from underrepresented groups. Some boards of directors, from companies such as Nike, Starbucks, and Uber, have gone further, tying executive compensation to diversity goals. While it is still too soon to know the effects of these policies, we do know from prior research and our own experience that financial incentives can be effective in changing behavior in the short term. But will these policies create sustainable and long-lasting organizational change? Alongside these formalized change mechanisms, we think it is just as important for leaders to turn their attention…

1. What Inclusive Companies Have in Common

2. What Is Psychological Safety?

NO ONE LIKES to deliver bad news to their boss. But that’s exactly what I had to do when a project I’d been working on wasn’t delivering the results we expected. I’d been a big advocate for our team taking on the initiative, and personally I’d invested a lot of time into it—and convinced others to do the same. When I met with my manager to present the data, which showed that we hadn’t recouped our investment and the initiative had performed worse than planned, I was nervous. I would’ve understood if she had been frustrated or even angry, and I expected her to at least ask “What went wrong?” or “How could we have prevented this?” (both questions I’d prepared answers for). Instead, she asked a simple question: What did you…

2. What Is Psychological Safety?

3. Leaders, Make Curiosity the Core of Your Organizational Culture

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE is a remarkable competitive advantage. McKinsey & Company, for example, has found that top-quartile cultures outperform median cultures by 60%—and bottom-quartile cultures by 200%—and that those company’s cultures are difficult for competitors to replicate and allow the organization to better adapt to changing circumstances. These findings are echoed in the research of Alex Edmans of London Business School, who found similar outperformance among companies with exceptional cultures. Great corporate cultures are good not just for performance but for the flourishing and engagement of the people who work in them. In my own work, I focus frequently on the need for strong culture, its components, and how to craft an organization’s culture to deliver greater meaning and purpose. But often overlooked is the central role that curiosity plays in shaping…

3. Leaders, Make Curiosity the Core of Your Organizational Culture

4. You’ve Built a Racially Diverse Team. But Have You Built an Inclusive Culture?

WHETHER BUSINESS LEADERS have social justice aims in mind, wish to win the war on talent, or want to embrace the value-creating potential of a diverse workforce, race is at the forefront of everyone’s minds. But evidence-based strategies and resources on racial diversity and teamwork are few and far between. In fact, a quick search of ProQuest, a popular database for articles, revealed 339 scholarly and media articles with “team” and “diversity” in the title with only three emphasizing racial diversity. That’s 1%. For more than 20 years, I have researched how relationships, networks, and collaborating with others, either in teams or one-on-one, enhance creative problem-solving. I have also taught courses on managing teams for nearly 10 years. I draw from this experience to suggest where we must start. With societal hunger…

4. You’ve Built a Racially Diverse Team. But Have You Built an Inclusive Culture?

5. Millennial Managers Can Change Company Culture for the Better

WHETHER OR NOT you believe the Great Resignation is upon us, it’s safe to assume that how we think about attracting, retaining, and nurturing employees needs to change in light of the upheaval caused by the pandemic. Much of that change will start with “company culture”—a term that has taken on new meaning this past year. Culture is an aspect of work particularly important to Gen Z, many of whom are just now entering the workforce after having spent the past two years grappling with the impacts of Covid, as well as social and political injustices around the world. Combined, these events have driven their desire to instill meaning and purpose into all areas of their lives—including their work. Fortunately, Gen Z has strong advocates at the top who feel the…

5. Millennial Managers Can Change Company Culture for the Better

6. Four Ways Every Employee Can Contribute to Company Culture

MOST OF US would love to work in a vibrant, diverse, and caring environment in which we are valued as whole people—meaning our priorities in life are as supported as our work priorities. We often leave it to the “powers that be” to turn this dream into a reality, believing that company culture is something set by leadership and implemented by managers and human resource teams. We assume that their values, along with the policies and decisions they make, determine the behaviors and priorities we employees must follow. The first and most foundational thing you can do is to get to know your colleagues as people—not just coworkers—and support them. While there is some truth to these assumptions, it is equally true that a great company culture is built and reinforced by…

6. Four Ways Every Employee Can Contribute to Company Culture

7. Build a Strong Learning Culture on Your Team

WHEN KENDRA GRANT’S team was charged with designing and delivering learning experiences for 90,000 Walmart Canada associates, she knew as a senior learning-and-design director that the landscape of corporate learning needs was constantly changing. “Over time,” says Grant, now the principal of her own L&D practice, “we acknowledged that many of the problems we saw, such as lack of engagement and lack of retention, were a result of the design process and not the fault of the learners.” Be the team leader who unapologetically shows others that prioritizing your own health and wellness is OK, and often necessary. If you are in a leadership role in your organization, you more than likely share this problem. Technology and society are driving changes faster than your people can adapt. According to the Organisation for…

7. Build a Strong Learning Culture on Your Team

Can a Strong Culture Be Too Strong?

HBR’s fictionalized case studies present dilemmas faced by leaders in real companies and offer solutions from experts. This one is based on the HBS Case Study “Zensar: The Future of Vision Communities” (case no. 311025), by David A. Garvin and Rachna Tahilyani. It is available at HBR.org. “HOW LONG IS this list of escapees?” asked Kumar Chandra, the head of operations at Parivar, a midsize Chennai based IT services company, as he pointed at the slide projected onto the conference room screen. Everyone chuckled, except for Indira Pandit, the vice president of HR. Nearly 100 employees had given notice in recent weeks. “We’re losing them faster than your people can bring them in,” she said, turning to Vikram Srinivasan, the head of recruiting. “Our turnover rate is up to 35%.” Vikram shook his head.…

Can a Strong Culture Be Too Strong?

Should Indira endorse the new People Support function? The experts respond.

Ganesh Natarajan, chairman of GTT Data, Lighthouse and Honeywell Automation, India; former vice chairman and CEO of Zensar Technologies People Support will pay for itself in the form of reduced employee turnover and lower recruiting expenses. The dismal retention numbers at Parivar clearly show that the company is not doing a good-enough job of meeting its employees’ needs, so Indira absolutely should endorse the People Support function. Taking this step might even allow her and her team to identify and resolve the issues that are bothering people before they decide to leave the firm. This case is based very loosely on our experiences at Zensar. We have found that a fun, friendly workplace gives us a big competitive advantage in recruiting and retaining employees. In interviews, prospective candidates ask us whether the stories…

Should Indira endorse the new People Support function? The experts respond.

Beware a Culture of Busyness

IN MY 2019 book, The Power of Human, I recount an anecdote about a man who immigrated to the United States and soon came to believe that the word “busy” meant “good” because when he asked people, “How are you doing?” they often responded, “Busy.” Nora Rosendahl, the chief operating officer of the performance coaching firm Hintsa, discovered the same thing when she conducted a small social experiment by documenting answers to the question “How are you?” over the course of a week. By her count, nearly eight out of 10 people said, “Busy.” Academic research suggests that our days are becoming increasingly jam-packed. One analysis of holiday letters indicates that references to “crazy schedules” have risen dramatically since the 1960s, for example. And an analysis of Gallup data by Harvard…

Beware a Culture of Busyness

THE PROBLEM In the corporate world everyone feels busy. “Time poverty” and stress are reducing firm productivity and leading to burnout. Corporations are mistaking activity for achievement. THE CAUSES Corporate cultures lionize busyness. Even as the long-term damage of this becomes clear, individuals continue to mindlessly overwork because of an aversion to idleness (it feels good in the moment to be busy) and the need to justify their efforts. THE SOLUTION Leaders should conduct an audit to see whether employees have time for “deep work.” They should mandate paid time off, offer incentives for output, model the right behavior by disengaging from the busyness culture, and build slack into organizations to make them more resilient.…

1. Keep Your Company’s Toxic Culture from Infecting Your Team

SOMETIMES EVEN well-intended managers act in ways that they’re ashamed of. Take Jan, for example. Jan is known for his slightly off-key and mildly insulting humor—it’s even been noted as one of his strengths. He gets the laughs. But he’s told me that he cringes every time he makes a joke at someone else’s expense. He despises the fact that his behavior directly contradicts his personal values. And yet he continues. Then there’s Marty, who is lauded for her ability to pick the “right” person for a job. Deep in her heart, though, Marty is ashamed of herself. She knows that she’s more often than not chosen the “acceptable” person over the right person. And in her organization that means that, at a certain level, it’s a man and he’s…

1. Keep Your Company’s Toxic Culture from Infecting Your Team

2. Blame Culture Is Toxic: Here’s How to Stop It

PICTURE THIS: YOUR team is racing against time and working weekends to submit a new client proposal. You finally manage to put all the documents together, and just in the nick of time, you press “send.” You take a deep breath and thank the team for their hard work. The proposal looks great, and you’re confident that you’ll probably win it. A week later, you get an email from the client: “We really liked your bid. We would’ve loved to go ahead with your company, but we found a mismatch in your numbers and the supporting documents. We’re pressed for time, so we’ve decided to move forward with someone else. I’m sure we’ll be able to work together in the future.” You’re upset, frustrated, and angry. You call your team in, give…

2. Blame Culture Is Toxic: Here’s How to Stop It

3. Why Hiring for Cultural Fit Can Thwart Your Diversity Efforts

RECENTLY I HAD a revealing conversation with the head of sales of a global marketing company. She was talking about her company’s vision of diversity. As someone who has studied diversity for a long time, what she said was music to my ears. She described how the market has changed and globalized over the last 10 years, and how today it is unthinkable not to have diversity in our organizations. Job done. I experienced a momentary feeling of self-congratulation. Something I believed in and had researched now seemed to be accepted as part of the mainstream. Such moments, I should have known, tend to be fleeting. A student joined the conversation and told us how in her former company, she was hired because of her diverse background, being a woman from India.…

3. Why Hiring for Cultural Fit Can Thwart Your Diversity Efforts

4. Hiring for Culture Fit Doesn’t Have to Undermine Diversity

ALTHOUGH MOST managers would agree that it is important to hire people who fit in, the idea of hiring for culture fit has become controversial. Our work suggests it need not be. Most of the controversy boils down to a single key issue: the wrong definition of culture fit. The confusion over what culture fit is has given rise to a number of common misconceptions. Clearing these up can help managers improve their talent strategies. MISCONCEPTION 1 Culture fit is a “nice to have” but not a necessity. The core assumption here is that employees’ skills and competences matter more for organizational effectiveness than how well they fit in. While we’re not disputing the importance of having a highly skilled workforce, a large body of scientific evidence has shown that culture fit—which…

4. Hiring for Culture Fit Doesn’t Have to Undermine Diversity

5. Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish?

EACH COMPANY HAS its own “culture”—the values and norms that define what is and isn’t appropriate behavior for the organization. Culture guides how you work, and a healthy one enables companies to attract and retain highly motivated employees and unite them around a common goal, purpose, or cause in pursuit of sustainable performance. But what starts out as a voluntary alignment sometimes ends up looking like something more sinister. Healthy corporate cultures can easily turn into corporate cults, whether leaders intend for it to happen or not. Many of the companies we celebrate are treading that fine line; Apple, Tesla, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Nordstrom, and Harley Davidson are a few examples. They have all built a cultlike following among their customers and, increasingly, are encouraging cultish behaviors in their workforces as…

5. Is Your Corporate Culture Cultish?

Executive Summaries

Leading with culture may be among the few sources of sustainable competitive advantage left to companies today. THE LEADER’S GUIDE TO CORPORATE CULTURE PAGE 10 Build Your Corporate Culture The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng | page 10 Often confounded by culture’s unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns, many leaders either let it go unmanaged or relegate it to HR, where it becomes a secondary concern for the business. This is a mistake, because properly managed, culture can help them achieve change and build organizations that will thrive in even the most trying times. The authors have reviewed the literature on culture and distilled eight distinct styles: caring, focused on relationships and mutual trust; purpose, exemplified by idealism and altruism; learning, characterized by exploration and creativity; enjoyment,…

Executive Summaries

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