Your organization probably doesn’t have a culture.
It’s more likely that you have many, many, cultures.
Every time some part of the mission gets delegated, you may be creating a new culture. Delegating a sales responsibility? Delegating a research responsibility? Delegating an IT responsibility? The odds are that you may be creating 3 new versions of your culture.
Think of the game ‘telephone’. The message shifts with every retelling. Same here. Every time you delegate, someone new is implementing the culture as they understand it. And, with every subsequent delegation, the drift will likely get bigger.
If you believe that policies and slogans prevent this drift, good luck. These are simply the source material for each reinterpretation. These policies and slogans are materially impacted by what each person sees from their manager. And their own life-experience. That’s where the drift occurs. Sometimes small. But, sometimes big.
So what’s the answer?
It’s simple. Take culture seriously. And recognize that your performance structure is the scaffolding that helps keep the performance culture consistent.
There’s always one starting point – decide on your values. And then put someone in charge who will own the responsibility of embedding these values into both parts of your Performance Environment. First work on the Performance Culture. Teach the values. Assure that people understand them. Explain how they work. Provide dozens of illustrations about how these values play out during a normal day. And then, second, build them into your Performance Structure. It’s these tangible structures (like job interviewing, employee on-boarding, determining promotions, reporting results, monitoring dashboards, rewarding the right types of outcomes, etc.) that make it difficult for these values to drift very far under any circumstances. The structure serves as that constant reminder of what matters.
So, I choose to reject the idea that culture drift doesn’t happen. And I also choose to reject the idea that this drift is inevitable. Far from it. Great organizations manage this as a priority. You can too.