After writing recently about cultural misalignment and how that impacts employee stress levels, I was thinking about levels of alignment around culture.
My proposal is that there are 4 levels of alignment around culture in an organization:
- Level 1 – At this Leadership level, leaders must not just be fully aligned with each other and the company. They must also be aware of things that the remainder of the organization is not, such as basic assumptions described in my other post.
- Level 2 – At this Integrated level, employees must be fully integrated into the culture such that they align with the values and have had enough experience with the situations that those values should apply to that they feel (even if they do not overtly recognize) the underlying basic assumptions.
- Level 3 – At this Learning level, employees are getting their repetitions in. They are beginning to experience what others have experienced before and will move eventually to either Level 2 or Level 4.
- Level 4 – At this Misaligned level, employees either are simply not aligned around espoused beliefs and values or they are, but due to misalignment around basic assumptions, their behavior, performance, and/or satisfaction do not show that they have integrated into the culture.
Level 1 – Leadership
As discussed in my other post, employees can afford to not be explicitly aware of the culture’s underlying basic assumptions because they are only required to act in accordance with the culture. Leadership on the other hand has to guide the organization and help to shape its culture.
When organizations encounter new and novel circumstances for which there is no prior experience or knowledge, leadership needs to advocate for a specific type of response (an artifact) and potentially even a value. For example, “I believe we should do this…” Espoused values and beliefs are always open to debate, but those that are supported by underlying basic assumptions are much less likely to be argued with because those beliefs and values are simply statements about the way the world works.
New beliefs and values though will typically be seen as something coming from another party. When we encounter a new situation and the CEO says that we should handle it a certain way, I as an employee might not see that as the natural solution, but rather as the CEO’s value or belief. I will not internalize it until my experience confirms that his solution is just the way that those situations should be handled. In this way, leadership guides the ongoing evolution of the organization’s culture.
Once new beliefs, values, or basic assumptions are set and felt by the employees though, they begin to limit the ability of leadership to deal with circumstances in any other way because a departure from an existing belief, value, or basic assumption would demonstrate misalignment to the employees and contribute to the stress or underperformance mentioned in my other post.
Level 2 – Integrated
In the most common scenario, you have employees at this level that have been around the bend with you so many times that they have experienced certain solutions that just work or are simply the preferred way of doing things in your situation. These are the people that understand whom to call, how to respond, how to manage projects, etc when specific situations arise. They have been there done that so to speak and learned that the way the organization has responded works.
One of my clients has what they call The Woodard Way. They instill The Woodard Way in their staff through a 3-month training program that everyone goes through and then repeated reminders for how everything they do comes back to a specific approach and why it works.
Culture is a process of social learning. It is not something you do alone. And, culture is also learning from the mistakes of others without having to pay the dues, which is what you want from all of your employees. Ideally, they do not have to make all of the mistakes in order to learn the same lessons, but rather can learn from others what the organization has experienced works or does not.
Level 3 – Learning
Generally, people do not spend a significant amount of time at this level, and the better job you do hiring for cultural fit and onboarding your people, the less time they will spend here. My company for example is small so we do not have a robust onboarding process. We do however work in organizational culture and alignment, so we are much more sensitive to instilling in new coworkers our values and preferred behaviors than other organizations our size might be.
Fundamentally, when you ask yourself how long it will be before a new hire can fly on their own, the answer is for the most part the amount of time they remain at the learning level. After that point, if not before, you should be able to clearly see progress toward level 2 or that they are slipping down to level 4.
Level 4 – Misaligned
This is largely the level I described in my other post. I know I have been there more than once, so I’m guessing you have been there at least once. I hope that you at least liked your colleagues and felt like you’re one of them. Often, misaligned people do feel lonely and isolated though unfortunately.
At this level, performance is likely an issue. The person delivers work that is not what was expected and/or handles situations in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s norms. They and those around them have likely expressed at least some level of dissatisfaction, and as much as you might wish to work on it, you are likely better off parting ways.
As unfortunate as it is, when there is misalignment, it is not often due to an issue with espoused beliefs or values. Most values are idealistic and things that the majority of people would support–truth, love, and the American Way sort of things. The problem comes in the manifestation of those values, and that is generally determined by the underlying basic assumptions.
For example, the company and I both say we value truth. Due to my experience though, truth is best communicated one on one because I have an underlying basic assumption that growth is hampered by embarrassment, and pointing out a problem with truth in front of a group would embarrass the person having the problem. The organization however has come to learn that truth is best arrived at through open debate. What we might see in this scenario is that I appear to shy away from stating the truth and do not seem to be living the value. I know though that I’m just waiting to have the hard conversation one on one. And what I appear to see is that I just work with a bunch of jerks that are more interested in arguing and being mean to each other than they are in actually living the truth value.
Level Management
One of the most interesting things about culture is something that I’ve already stated. Leadership helps to establish culture, but once it is established, culture limits the leadership’s options. As a result, it is incredibly important to be deliberate about hiring and onboarding, to be as consistent and aligned as possible when dealing with new circumstances, and to be as proactive and sensitive as possible about identifying and acting on misalignment.
