12.3 Understanding Culture: The Big Picture

Go back to the opening epigraph. Peter Drucker, one of the most influential management thinkers ever, called out culture’s power, saying, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” What is Drucker’s point? If you want to achieve sustained competitive success, culture is more powerful than strategy, more important than technical skills. You must invest in it! But what is it?

Because culture is on the “soft, touchy-feely” side of business, you will find it hard to find a precise, generally accepted definition. In fact, if you ask a variety of human resource managers, you will likely get a lot of inexact, squishy definitions. Consider these three, which we borrow from SHRM, an organization whose tagline reads: Better Workplaces, Better World.

1. True culture is about behavior—what you see, hear, or feel in the workplace.

2. It’s like electricity: You can’t see it, but you know it’s there, and it has an effect on everything.

3. It’s the glue that holds everyone together, the formal and informal way people work together to get things done.

Take another look. Did you spot the standard catchphrases? Let’s repeat them: What you see, hear, or feel in the workplace; the informal way to get things done; and it affects everything.

Here’s what you need to take away from this conversation. Culture truly is critical. It is shared beliefs and values—and it influences behavior and performance. Culture defines your organizational DNA, molding employees’ perceptions, understanding, and behaviors. You know that managers take culture seriously when you see the following:

1. Employees grasp expectations; i.e., how top management expects them to respond to specific situations.

2. Everyone buys in to the expected response. They believe it is the right thing to do.

3. People know they will be rewarded for living the organization’s values.

In this way, culture shapes the way things get done (see Figure 12.1). At great companies—i.e., companies with distinctive, powerful cultures—you hear people say, “We do it the ALDI Way, the Disney Way, the Southwest Way, or the Toyota Way.” At these companies, the way things get done works; culture drives sustained success.

As you have read the different company stories throughout this book, you have seen culture on display. Why do we say this? Answer: To make lean six sigma work well, you must ensure that key values and behaviors become part of the organizational DNA—the way things get done! This has been true since the beginning.

At Toyota, where lean six sigma was born, the Toyota Way has always emphasized respect for people, teamwork, continuous improvement through learning, and quality. At Toyota, key goals are, and always have been, achieved through people! The result: Toyota has been the most successful—and profitable—major automaker for over 40 years.

Now, the big question: “Beyond helping you become indispensable, why should you care about culture?” Answer: If you are interested in implementing a powerful lean six sigma program, you need to remember this equation.

Where

E = Effectiveness of lean six sigma implementation

Q = Technical Quality of your lean six sigma solution

A = Acceptance of the implementation by your people

You see, lean six sigma originated as an industrial engineering approach to problem solving. The emphasis was on tools and techniques. Yet, after 50 years of experience and thousands of implementations—successes and failures—we have learned that how you engage people throughout implementation is the key to success. Simply put, without your team’s informed acceptance (i.e., buy-in), your lean six sigma implementation will likely be disappointing. You should probably spend your time and resources somewhere else. Culture matters!

Now, let’s take a closer look at two critical investments you need to make in order to build a winning culture: your people and your measurement systems.