Culture is often misunderstood in business

It is misunderstood because it is hard to understand. It’s complex, nebulous, indeterminate.

Due to the complexity of understanding this massive topic, what often happens is an attempt to break it down to something more manageable. However, in seeking to simplify, the concept of ‘culture’ is often reduced to niceties like pizzas in the office, implementation of tools to send electronic thank-yous to each other, and employee discount schemes. It is also often thought to be a set of pithy values that an external marketing team put together.

These are tangible things that feel actionable, controllable, which is why we gravitate towards them. Sadly though, these things tend to be superficial, and don’t truly influence or address the culture of a business.

My favoured viewpoint from which to understand what culture really is, is to remind myself that:

Culture is the collective behaviour of a group (not an individual).

Culture is always the customs, habits, attitudes, and beliefs shared by a group; one person doing stuff is just one person doing stuff. The idea of ‘personal culture’ is an oxymoron.

Collective behaviour is driven by the values and beliefs that a group holds.

Beliefs are the things about the world that we hold as ‘true’ or ‘facts’, while values are what we prize, what we prioritise; both of these influence what we choose to pay attention to from all the available possibilities out there.

Behaviours are the routine actions and reactions of an individual or a group in a given environment. ‘Routine’ is the important word here – everyday, habitual, ordinary, regular.

Just like values are hidden under a layer of visible behaviours, behaviours are screened by a veneer of unremarkable usualness. This makes both of these things difficult to spot and to name.

Cultural behaviours are embedded through repetition; this repetition creates a framework to trust and understand other people. When someone partakes in the same behaviour, it reinforces their inclusion in a culture.

Repeating a behaviour embeds it further, making it regular and automatic. This repetition additionally serves to creates trust with the group.

Cognitively, trust is clearly related to confidence and certainty that we can predict what another is going to do. We like what we trust and we trust what we can predict. Behaviour is essentially data we use (and store!) to make our predictions and form judgments about trustworthiness in others. Regular experience builds up our bank of data which essentially helps us predict better.

Similarly, repetition of behaviour sustains group harmony. When we feel a level of ‘certainty’ about how others will act, choose, or prioritise, we believe we can understand them, trust them and harmonise with them, like dancing along to a song with a known beat.

Both trust and harmony links with our preference for certainty and stability.

Culture eventually becomes the expectations we have for each other, and how we expect people to behave is what becomes acceptable.