Why can Culture Changes be so big and scary?

I’ve talked before about Intercultural Coaching and the need to be well prepared for Geographical Culture changes. But it is also very important to think of a culture from three perspectives: organizational, professional, and geographic.

Geographic culture

Changing jobs to a different country can represent one of the changes with the greatest diversity differences. Also the way people do businesses in different regions of a country can also vary significantly. I have talked about this throughout my posts, but the two next factors are something we should also consider strongly when changing to a new job.

Organizational culture

Cultures within organizations or groups are develop over the years. Imagine the organizational culture of JP Morgan or Dupont, companies that have been around for more than 200 years. Their values are the core of what the company is today, how they operate or mainly how thier people work. Company values can change throughout the years, to align with who they are and where they’re going, but some values never change. Besides their values, organizational culture includes how people treat one another, formally, non-formally, honestly, competitively, how meetings are held, etc.

The type of industry also influences organizational cultures. As an example, traditional retail companies are more comfortable with elaborate processes and systems. While startups and technology companies, which are more creative and fast pacing, find it difficult to stick to processes and procedures. Every organization is different; it’s important to preserve what makes your company unique, successful, and appealing to those who maintain it. Even more important is for newcomers to seize and adopt the essence of that culture quickly.

Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng in their HBR article ⁽¹⁾ make a fundamental understanding about how the dimensions of People Interactions and Response to Change. They identify and relate these dimensions with eight styles that apply to both organizational cultures and individual leaders. This can help us drive a most positive organizational culture. These 8 styles are caring, purpose, learning, enjoyment, results, authority, safety, and order.

Professional culture

On the other hand, If your new position takes you to different functional areas such as from operations to marketing, or finance to operations, you will face professional cultural changes.

As a group, professional or functional, leaders also share cultural characteristics that distinguish them from other professional groups such as the engineers, financial, HR professionals and doctors. I can go on forever. But this doesn’t mean all managers within one function are alike.

Put together with other cultural factors, such as, industry, school background, or geographical culture, huge cultural differences can be found. For example, financial managers might use different terminology than marketing or research leaders. Their use of statistics might be on an everyday basis while marketing people may want to understand trends on a monthly or yearly basis. Engineers may seem to approach everything with processes and systems. While HR create roadmaps to align the organization’s diverse activities and initiatives towards the achieving the company’s vision and values. Because of all this, professional cultures can also be considered as sub-cultures in a certain organization.

Moving into a new culture

These different kinds of cultural change can overlap and reinforce one another: you can be faced by a new geographical region, organizational change and even functional or professional change at the same time.

As I mentioned in my previous post one must assure significant energy in conquering a new position by understanding and adapting. You’ll need to understand the impact of existing cultural characteristics on your new job or position and how your role as leader will complement the organization to the achievement of the organization’s key goals.

Very like the Intercultural Hofstead Intercultural dimensions, one can measure Organizational and Professional Cultural with dimensions such as, Process oriented Vs. Results oriented, Employee oriented Vs. Job oriented, Parochial Vs. Professional, Open system Vs. Closed system, Loose control Vs. Tight control, and Normative Vs. Pragmatic. ⁽²⁾

As an intercultural Executive Coach, I will accompany you, the Global Leader, to better understand how to obtain and apply cultural knowledge and to learn appropriate cultural responses and behaviors in cross-cultural interactions. 

Sources / Further reading

1. Groysberg, B. & J.Y.J. Cheng (2020). How Corporate Cultures Differ Around the World. Based on  https://hbr.org/2020/01/how-corporate-cultures-differ-around-the-world
2. Hofstede,  G.,  Neuijen, B.,  Ohayv, D.,  &  Sanders,  G. (1990). Measuring  Organizational  Cultures:  A  Qualitative  and Quantitative Study across Twenty Cases. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35 (2), p. 286-316.