{"id":666,"date":"2018-04-30T11:08:52","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T11:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/?p=666"},"modified":"2018-05-31T19:26:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T19:26:14","slug":"stan-slap-organizational-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/stan-slap-organizational-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Stan Slap, CEO, SLAP Company"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stan<\/a>Stan Slap<\/strong> is a renowned thought leader<\/strong> in how to achieve maximum commitment from manager, employee and customer cultures. He wrote the New York Times <\/i>and Wall St. Journal <\/i>bestselling books about business culture. His consulting company, called SLAP by a remarkable coincidence, was the first to accurately identify a business culture as an organism that exists to protect itself, the first to identify managers as a distinct culture, and the first to identify a company\u2019s brand status as a tribute that must be paid by its employee and customer cultures. SLAP\u2019s unique and proprietary solutions have achieved legendary performance impact for many of the world\u2019s most successful, demanding companies. The kind that don\u2019t include Patience on their list of corporate values.<\/p>\n

Site: slapcompany.com\u00a0\u00a0 Direct: stan@slapcompany.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

What does organizational culture mean to you?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Every business has three cultures: its manager culture, its employee culture, and its customer culture. We\u2019re not talking about a bunch of managers, employees, and customers. When these groups formed relationships with your company, they became cultures and became far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence.<\/p>\n

A culture happens whenever people share the same living conditions and so band together to share beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity. In a company this means, \u201cWhat does it take for me to survive, working in this industry, in this company, on this team, for you? Knowing that I\u2019m going to be okay, then how do I get rewarded emotionally and avoid punishment?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBeliefs about the way things are around here,\u201d is often erroneously described as a culture. Those beliefs are the currency of a culture. A culture is a self-protective organism that gathers the beliefs. A culture is a constantly recalibrating belief system about the known rules of survival and emotional prosperity.<\/p>\n

What are the major determinants of organizational culture?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

An employee culture is an independent organism, living right inside the enterprise, with its own purpose and all of the power to make or break any management plan \u2013 and any manager. Its purpose is to protect itself, not the company. Logically protecting the company should come first \u2013 from a management perspective. But that would mean your culture perceives a reliable through line between what happens to the company and what happens to the culture, and chances are good that it doesn\u2019t. Achieving cultural commitment is a matter of aligning your culture\u2019s beliefs about protecting itself with what your company believes is needed to protect the enterprise.<\/p>\n

A culture\u2019s antennae are working constantly, seeking information it can use to update the known rules of survival and emotional prosperity. Its credibility detector is nearly infallible. Its perceptions are alarming accurate. Its memory is elephantine. You can\u2019t bluff, bribe, or bully a culture into sustainably believing or doing anything. You can\u2019t tell it what to believe or stop it from existing. But you can take great comfort that a culture is the most rational organism in the world \u2013 objective, agnostic and constantly open to new input. Your culture will give you whatever you want; you just have to give it what it wants first.<\/p>\n

What is the role of employees in organizational culture?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Employees are the organizational culture. It is what the culture says it is that defines a company\u2019s culture; not what the company says it is, which only defines wishful thinking. The self-penned job description of your culture is to protect itself, but if it chooses to the role of the culture is to determine the success of any strategy, performance goal, organizational standard, or published company intention. If your culture wants something to happen, it\u2019s going to happen. If it doesn\u2019t, it won\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n

What are the common problems associated with managing organizational culture?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Here are the top 6:<\/p>\n

1) \u201cCulture\u201d is the most overused, least understood concept in business, so the biggest problem is an accurate working definition of how a culture works, including that it is not subordinate to business performance but is the driver to business performance, and that is HR\u2019s responsibility, when a great CEO is a Chief Cultural Officer.<\/p>\n

2) Because a culture exists to protect itself, it is a closed organism that won\u2019t easily reveal its true motivations and perceptions to management \u2013 standard \u201cengagement\u201d surveys give wildly inaccurate impressions of a culture\u2019s commitment.<\/p>\n

3) A culture\u2019s belief system was formed long ago and without understanding how it came to its current perceptions and recalibrating those beliefs, it may resist new demands.<\/p>\n

4) The greatest missing competency amongst even the smartest management teams is how to reliably gain maximum commitment from their own employee cultures. Without this, any plans coming from the C-Suite don\u2019t stand a chance of being reliably executed.<\/p>\n

5) Blaming the culture for how it\u2019s treated is unfair and useless; the culture is simply reacting to what it perceives as reality. It is not naturally resistant to change, it is not motivated mostly by money, and it does not need to be taught to be more accountable or innovative \u2013 it needs to be convinced to do these things.<\/p>\n

But the number one problem is that companies believe that it is the responsibility of their culture to understand the business logic. In fact, it is the responsibility of the business to understand their culture\u2019s logic. Get this and your own company will be unbeatable in any market you choose to own.<\/p>\n

What are the ways to innovate company culture? Any best practices to share.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It is essential to counter the problems identified in my answer to the prior question. Before doing a lot of great things for your culture, however, it is critical that you emphatically declare why you are doing them \u2013 the company\u2019s firm intention about how its culture should be treated. Otherwise, whatever you do will be exchanged by your culture for a short-term performance gain and if you want something else, you\u2019ll have to give it something else \u2013 you will have created a transactional culture. However, if your culture identifies what you do for it as confirmation of your stated intention, then you have created a safer place by defining linkage between what the company says and does. At that point, you will have achieved a protective culture because protecting its source of safety is what a culture does first and best.<\/p>\n

As to best practices? Sure, there are some companies that do it very well and many of them are our clients. But it\u2019s not about what other companies do; it\u2019s about what you do.\u00a0 At the risk of sounding like an arrogant snot, this is what my company does. We\u2019ve been achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee and customer cultures for over twenty years.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Do<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stan Slap is a renowned thought leader in how to achieve maximum commitment from manager, employee and customer cultures. He wrote the New York Times and Wall St. Journal bestselling books about business culture. His consulting company, called SLAP by a remarkable coincidence, was the first to accurately identify a business culture as an organism […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[12,8,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/grosum.com\/topTalk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}