In this article we look at the role that internal relationships play in organisational culture and why it is essential to consider them when managing culture.
Relationships are the heart of organisational culture. These are the organisation’s own relationships with each of its members as well all the various relationships across the organisation – between individuals and between teams and departments. These relationships all influence – and are influenced by – organisational culture.
One would think that this should be good news for successful organisations that are usually good at handling relationships. After all, solid relationships with suppliers and customers are the bedrock of many businesses and not-for-profit organisations. However, many organisations find it difficult to manage internal relationships, particularly when it comes to managing or changing organisational culture.
Below we unpack five reasons why this is so and we give some tips on how to navigate around these issues when managing culture. In summary, these internal relationships are hard to handle because:
- They are not a series of separate one-to-one relationships, but rather a network of inter-connected relationships.
- You have to consider not just the relationship between the organisation and each individual member, but also the relationships between the individuals who make up the organisation
- Each relationship is complex, intertwining commercial/organisational considerations with personal elements
- It is impossible to manage each relationship separately – the tools available usually only allow for an “across the board” approach
- It is very difficult to anticipate all the consequences of any change.
- Internal Relationships are Interconnected
Relationships with suppliers and customers are relatively simple. Each is a separate, one-to-one, direct relationship with one other party. The issues involved in managing the relationship are usually fairly straightforward commercial considerations that do not change much over time.
An organisation’s relationships with its members are much more complex than this, in a number of different ways.
- They are interconnected. The organisation’s relationship with Anne can easily impact its relationship with Bob. Promoting Anne above Bob – or treating her unfairly – can sour Bob’s feelings towards the organisation.
- The organisation’s actions can also impact the relationship between Anne and Bob. The organisation’s culture is strongly influenced by the sum total of all such interpersonal relationships across the organisation. If you damage personal relationships between employees the overall organisational culture will suffer.
- The organisation’s relationships with Anne and with Bob are neither purely business nor purely personal but a mix of the two.
We expand on some of these aspects below.
2. Need to consider relationships across the organisation
As noted above, not only does the organisation itself have a separate relationship with each of its individual members, but there are also relationships between individual members to consider. In an organisation of 100 people each person has a personal relationship with 99 others, making a total of almost 5,000 personal relationships across the organisation. There may be further group relationships between different teams.
Organisational actions can have a significant impact on these inter-personal relationships. Indeed, the impact of any given action on these interpersonal relationships may be greater than the impact on the relationships with the organisation itself. For example, if the organisation promotes Anne over Bob, this can have a more profound impact on the relationship between Anne and Bob than it does on Bob’s relationship with the organisation.
What is particularly difficult for the organisation, as a third party, is to try to manage the relationship between Anne and Bob. Management attempts to get two individuals to cooperate more closely, for example, can easily backfire. If done without sufficient care attempts to influence how one individual or team behaves towards another can be intrusive or authoritarian.
3. What employees want is complex
What employees (or non-profit volunteers) want from a job and from an employer is complex. It includes, of course, remuneration, an interesting and challenging role, opportunities for self-development and advancement, a good working environment with good work-life balance and personal and professional respect.
In other words, the employer-employee relationship is not a purely transactional relationship. Emotive and personal aspects sit alongside more transactional elements such as remuneration.
All of these elements are, of course, highly personal and each employee will have his or her own views and preferences. A new requirement to take additional professional qualifications, for example, might see Anne pleased at the opportunity for self-development while Bob is upset by the negative impact on his work-life balance.
4. The need to balancing different needs and reactions
While organisations can be flexible, they cannot have a different policy for each employee or member of the organisation. When new measures are introduced, they are invariably introduced on an “across the board” basis – not least for legal reasons.
But, as we have seen, one size doesn’t fit all. It is almost impossible for any measure to please all of the workforce at once. Even something that one might expect to be overwhelmingly positive, such as the payment of discretionary bonuses, can leave a majority of people dissatisfied that they did not get more.
5. It is hard to anticipate the impact of changes
Perhaps the hardest part of implementing any form of change is anticipating how it will impact the organisation and its culture. I’m sure we all have stories of organisations making changes that they thought would be beneficial only to see a whole cascade of unintended consequences. Such unintended consequences can often be worse than the original problem. As the saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.
Conclusion
Aletheian Advisors recommends a number of strategies to minimise these effects:
- Know the organisation, top to bottom. Do not rely solely on a senior management echo chamber to tell you what people are thinking or how they are likely to react to any given change. If 90% of your organisation are outside the senior management circle, this is where the cultural impact of the change will be determined.
- Knowing the organisation requires you to have forthright, two way conversations up and down the organisation. As well as listening carefully to both the tone and the content of what people are saying, you should also take the opportunity to communicate how senior management sees the culture and how it would like that culture to develop and change.
- Road test potential changes wherever possible by discussing them with a range of people. Management teams sometimes cite confidentiality as a reason for not doing so. It is worth asking which is worse and which will make the management team look worse – to have people know what changes you are planning or to risk facing a barrage of unintended consequences because you did not consult.
- Make changes incrementally stopping at each point to assess the impact. It is important to be open about what you are doing, to fully explain your rationale for doing it and to explain how you are going to stop, assess the impact of each change and decide whether or not to continue.
Failing to do this will almost certainly lead to suspicions about your real intentions. In particular, people will think that you are “salami slicing” – using stealth to introduce a much larger change little bit by little bit in order to disguise the full scale and nature of the intended change.
