Navigating Ego To Enable Culture Change

Changing culture is never easy because we are dealing with collective egos and blind spots in the form of cultural norms. But it is possible to create shifts in culture.

How leaders engage, buy into and lead that change is at the heart of it being successful. Leaders taking responsibility for themselves, and their impact can be the difference that creates a positive culture.

Culture is formed by the people

An organisation’s culture is the collective ego of all the people working there. This is because it is a collection of people, and each individual person has their own ego.

For example, I was recently coaching a leader who had gained employment with a new organisation and was excitedly talking about moving from one organisation to another.

She was conscious of the different cultures of each organisation, and when she described each one, it was as if she were describing a person.

The words she used were character traits, saying both organisations were caring, people focused, committed to service excellence and making a positive difference, while one occurred to her as being more open and transparent than the other.

Leadership behaviour

The role of leaders and leadership behaviour shapes the organisation’s culture through the leadership shadow it creates.

How a leader’s mood, attitude and action influence the climate and culture around them creates what are called cultural norms, often represented by the popular phrase

‘It’s how we do things around here’.

Such norms can give an organisation its character, picked up in the language that is acceptable, the rituals and routines, environment, overt or covert politics and power, and the way people are treated. These become embedded and are often invisible to those working there.

Some examples of norms I’ve observed from different organisations are:

• Ritual – monthly special breakfasts to welcome new starters

• Language – when describing how to get on in a particular organisation, people repeated the phrase ‘You need big elbows to push yourself in’

• Environment – immaculate and orderly, every chair in the boardroom left in exactly the right place

• Power politics – room space in a department is currency for power and influence

• People – you need a constant senior sponsor to get ahead, and moving overseas risks the loss of visibility and sponsorship

• Processes – anxiety around ensuring safety results in 50,000 documented step-by-step processes

For a moment consider different organisations you have contact with.

It could be any organisation, for example the tax office or a hotel.

What is:

• The demeanour of the staff you have contact with.

• The process you are asked to participate in.

• The overall effect your contact with this organisation has on you.

Ask yourself, if this organisation were a person, what sort of person would they be?

• What impression do you gain of the culture this organisation has?

• What beliefs and values do you think are important to it?

• What would you imagine the leaders of this organisation to be like?

Now do this process again, but this time imagine you are a Martian, visiting earth for the first time. You are looking at the organisation you work for through completely neutral eyes.

What insights are emerging for you?

Trickiness of shifting culture

Enabling a positive cultural change is often enigmatic and challenging because, much like our ego reactions, culture lies largely in the area of the unconscious. This blindness makes it hard to put our fingers on precisely what it is, and if we aren’t aware of it, then it’s nigh on impossible to do anything about it.

Culture is created through habitual behaviours and ways of being that are out of reach of our levels of awareness. Trying to shift culture is hard because we cannot grasp it; we get sucked back into it without our knowledge.

It is like a fish swimming in water with no concept of what water is. Take the fish out of water, it gasps for breath and gets what water is; put it back in, water becomes the norm again.

This is why people leave stand-alone training initiatives and team events inspired with capabilities and commitments to new ways of working, yet sometimes within days have resorted to previous behaviours, despite good intentions to the contrary.

For a day or two, leaders are removed from the work stream and can see the culture and way of being for what it is. Then when they return to the stream, the culture is like a current that pulls them back into old ways of being and maintaining the cultural status quo, often without them being aware of it. I like to describe this as the ‘cultural drift’, because it’s a bit like when we swim in the river or sea.

We often cannot see the current, but we unknowingly get caught up in it, and before we know it, we are drifting with it. It then takes energy to swim against it.

It’s not only the blindness to cultural drift, but also the collection of many people that makes it tricky to change. Just as each individual leader has a blind spot to their behaviour and how it impacts others, so does the organisation to its culture, and it’s even harder to shift it due to the complex nature of it being a collective ego.

Making culture change happen

When we’re creating a culture of increased high performance and engagement, the terrain is complex. Complexity requires a variety of approaches, each interdependent on and supportive of the other. Using a variety of approaches increases the ability to deal with the cultural drift, just as a team of rowers in a large boat will have more chance of tackling a strong current than a single canoeist.

Culture change starts at the top of the organisation.

What is required of leaders is to possess a level of consciousness around how they, their beliefs, values, emotions, experiences (self-awareness), and attitude and behaviour (social awareness) affect others. Being responsible for that means setting aside your ego to do what is required for the greater good of the organisation and the people you lead.

This is hard to do without understanding yourself and the impact you can have and is certainly helped by creating clarity around your own purpose and vision and what you stand for as a contributor to your organisation and the world as a whole.

It also means being a leader who is willing and open to learning, feedback, self-understanding and insights, be vulnerable in the face of not knowing, and be willing to flex your attitude and behaviour.

Being responsible for yourself means holding yourself to account, checking in on your own integrity regularly. Knowing your integrity is intact gives you a sense of personal power and makes it much easier to hold those around you to account too.

I would love to know your thoughts and experiences on culture change. Do share in the comments.

For more help and support on culture change I explore this in my book ‘Ego: Get Over yourself and Lead’.