In my last post I took my first hesitant step at questioning whether there is such a thing as organisational culture. In this post, I will assume there is such a thing as organisational culture, but I argue that if there is such a thing as organisational culture, then organisations do not have ONE culture, but many.

It is rather common to assume that organisations are coherent, and that all organisational members share a similar kind of values. When you consider the likes of an insurance company, with its actuaries busy calculating risk tables, and sales people busy talking up the benefits of various policies, it does not take much to appreciate that in fact there are multiple groups in organisations and they do not share the same values necessarily.

Take for example any of the classic organisational battles between groups such as sales and marketing, R & D and marketing, sales and finance, HR and line managers and it becomes very evident that not everyone in the organisation shares the same values or culture.

Organisations are characterised by rather complex differentiation of work tasks, departments and hierarchical levels and this differentiation fosters strong differences in meanings, values and symbols. The variety of generations, classes, occupational groups and genders tends to produce and sustain variety and fragmentation of cultures rather than unity of ONE culture in the organisation (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008).

Perhaps the concept of corporate culture refers to the beliefs of the senior managers about what the culture should be. The beliefs of top managers can marginalise the beliefs of others in the organisation.

Recent posts have been critical of the standard planned change "n-step" approaches (e.g. here and here).

What are the alternatives to planned change? Recent interest has been growing in thinking of change as a process or processes, emerging from myriad local interactions.

The process view is interested in exploring change as a continuous (rather than episodic) and unpredictable process, without any clear beginning or end. Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that this means that organisational change is seen as a result of a variety of operational and administrative decisions made on a daily basis. These decisions are quite ordinary and are made in the process of adjusting to political struggles, shifts in power differentials, and adapting to changes in the priorities of others.

The process view, while acknowledging that managers are striving to accomplish planned change also considers that plans are always modified and reinterpreted in unpredictable ways.

As the plans of the top managers are set in motion, they interweave with the plans of other individuals in the organisation, who reinterpret the change initiative in the light of their own issues, background and concerns. Power relations inevitably are a part of this, and an understanding of complexity, human beings and social interaction will assist those seeking to change their organisations.

Here is something very important. "We need to move away from reifying change as something done to and placed on individuals, and instead acknowledge the role that change recipients play in creating and shaping change outcomes," as Balogun says in her interesting 2006 article (subscripton only unfortunately).

In the above passage the word "reifying" means seeing something as a thing, a physical object, when it is not. For example Balogun is suggesting that change is not actually a phsical thing, but it is common to treat change as though it were a thing. The moment it is seen as thing, it becomes frozen and immobile, whereas change is anything but, by definition.

So, we need to think about change as being something that the recipients of change are actively involved in. Not just in the sense of "we have to involve them in our change, engage their hearts and minds" which amounts to little more than manipulation – manipulating people emotionally so that they go along with our designs for them.

This is important for you as a leader because if you are thinking of organisational change as an active process involving top managers and "change recipients" then you would design your meetings with them quite differently from what you would do if you thought that your job was to persuade them or provide them with positive messages, which is what most road show approaches do. And then we wonder why 75% of change initiatives are reputed to fail.

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their book "Changing Organizational Culture" say that while this logic might explain the popularity of these approaches, these planned change models reveal little about how change emerges from interactions between those involved in the organisation. These models pay little attention to how people interpret the change efforts, nor how they relate to these based on their interests, backgrounds, jobs and how they will be affected by the change.

In these models, the complexities of real life organisational change are reduced to simple recipes (e.g. remove obstacles to change) in which how people interpret the change is rendered of little consequence in comparison to the "vision" of the top managers.  There are many obstacles that arise in change initiatives that could not have been foreseen, because they arise from how people respond to the change initiative, and that is something that cannot be controlled by the top managers and change designers.

Planned change models do not have a very good explanation for how these complex dynamics result in unexpected turns of events, some of them positive to the desired change and some of them not.

That is where I see the complex responsive processes theory of Ralph Stacey to be so helpful. According to this theory, organisations are complex patterns of interaction, i.e. these patterns exhibit properties of complexity in that novelty can emerge from the interactions, as can familiarity. Culture change is then about trying to foster new or different patterns of interaction, rather than the familiar. For example, in trying to become more customer oriented, then you would try to create conversations out of which new understanding of what it means to be customer oriented would emerge. This would entail discussing what it means to be customer oriented, in the face of conflicting values or principles, such as cost effectiveness. What if delighting the customer meant spending money or incurring cost? In those circumstances what should a staff member do?

You cannot design the overall patterns of interaction (which is what planned change tries to do) because you are a human being and you cannot step outside of human interaction yourself and design the interactions of others. All you can do is participate in human interaction so you have to be thinking about how you are interacting with others, because that is all you have.

My last two posts were about the group dynamics and systems thinking approaches to change. Why was this? Because they both lead to thinking of change as a sequential process. Kotter in his book Leading Change has the most widely known example with his eight stage process for creating major change:

1. Establishing a sense of urgency.
2. Creating the guiding coalition.
3. Developing a vision and strategy.
4. Communicatin the change vision.
5. Empowering broad-based action.
6. Generating short-term wins.
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change.
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture.

There are many other approaches to change along similar lines. Patrick Dawson in his book Understanding Organizational Change summarises these as having five aspects in common (according to Alvesson and Sveningsson).

1. Identifying a need for change.
2. Selecting an intervention technique.
3. Gaining top management support.
4. Overcoming resistance to change.
5. Evaluating the change process.

It is relatively easy to see these five aspects of many change projects of the last 15 years or so, reflecting how this way of thinking has become so dominant.

Alvesson and Sveningsson call these approaches "n-step" change models, characterised by a number of sequential steps, depending on which author or consultant you are talking to.The sports analogy is that this is like a relay race, where at each step, the baton is passed on to someone else to carry out. For example, top management identify the need for change. They hire (i.e. pass the baton to) a consultant to come up with the method / intervention that will be used. The consultant trains (i.e. passes the baton to) middle and senior managers to run workshops. The senior managers then expect (i.e. pass the baton to) their people to change their behaviour and actions according to the desired new culture.

Of course I am describing a typical cascade approach, and in Alvesson and Sveningsson’s book they describe a case in which it becomes exceedingly obvious that the organisation concerned is acting as though their organisational change really is like a relay race. The managers don’t actually use those words, but when you observe the way they expect each step of the change intervention to be carried out by different people, it becomes evident that they are acting as though it were a relay in which you can pass the baton on to the next person for them to do their bit, and your bit is finished.

I have seen several initiatives like this and I’m sure you have too.

The relay race metaphor relies on what Latour calls a diffusion model, which is based on the idea that ideas originate in the supposedly autonomous mind of the scientist and then spread, more or less by themselves, by virtue of their truth value. In other words, a change plan or desired new vision will spread and move acording to its initial force and its intrinsic truth value. It might meet with friction (e.g. bad communication) or resistance such as opposition which will slow down the initial force. This, as you can see, is a view based on Newtonian physics, that social forces are like physical forces, with resistance in the world of humans being like friction in the world of physics. The top manager makes the decision and the other managers react like billiard balls, pushed in irreversible directions. Subordinates are, by implication, passive receivers of the new initiative, passing it on to others as a mechanical execution of predefined tasks. People are transmitting a force and meaning according to its original definition.

Latour’s alternative to the diffusion model is the translation model. In Latour’s translation model people are active interpreters of the ideas, and in the process of interpretation or translation, they modify, distory and transform the meaning of the ideas they are supposed to carry, as anyone who has played "Chinese whispers" can attest. In the translation model, the movement of the ideas is dependent on how the ideas are transformed as people make sense of them.

People are doing something active with the change plans, rather than passively transmitting them.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that what happens in a planned change programme is that it gets constantly renewed energy by people who do something with it as they make sense of it and interact with others, a bit like the interaction between rugby players with a rugby ball, the initial force of the first in the chain cannot be said to be any more important than that of the subsequent others.

If this is the case then, as a manager of change you need to be paying attention to the daily translations of meaning that are going on in your organisation on a moment by moment basis – your key messages are not being passed on from one person to another, they are being translated and revitalised. So you need to track what meaning they are taking on as this translation process takes place.

Your organisational change is not a relay race where you can pass the baton on to others and watch them bring it on home to the finish line. 

According to Alvesson and Sveningsson’s excellent new book Changing Organizational Culture, key dimensions of change that are common in the literature include:

1. The scale of change
2. The sources of change
3. The content of change
4. The politics of change

The Scale of Change

Change is often characterised in terms of two extremes as revolutionary or evolutionary. Revolutionary change refers to changes that affect several aspects of the organisation simultaneously, such as culture, resources, performance management systems, strategy, technology, market positioning. Evolutionary change refers to operational change that affects part of the organisation within existing strategy and resources.

The following scales are also used to characterise organisational change:

• revolutionary vs evolutionary
• discontinuous vs continuous
• episodic vs continuing flow
• transformational vs transactional
• strategic vs operational
• total system vs local option

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that these labels and distinctions often mean roughly the same.

The Sources of Change

The sources of change can vary – hence a distinction between planned change and emergent change. In planned change, the intentions of top managers are central, and in emergent change, the source is those outside top management. Emergent change emphasises the messy nature of change. Planned change includes the grand change projects often involving HR staff and consultants, including re-engineering, TQM, new technology, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on.

The Politics of Change

Strategy is the result of political processes where bargaining, negotiating, lobbying and power relations are used to further the interests of top managers. The political dimension of change is often downplayed, perhaps by being framed in rational and analytically accepted terms which are useful especially when change is challenged.

The Content of Change

The content refers to the specifics of the change, whether it’s restructuring, re-engineering, strategy, customer orientation, new production systems or whatever. Often many aspects of the content are related to each other, for example a culture change is often seen as affecting aspects such as management control systems, strategy and structure.

Conclusion

Alvesson and Sveningsson go on to point out that these categories are not so neat and tidy as they might first appear. Depending on your position in the organisation, the scale of change might look quite different. What appears as minor and incremental to a senior person might be seen as radical and revolutionary by someone else. Personal interests, background, education, hierarchical position and other factors all influence how you see and categorise the change.

There are plenty of examples where change that is seen as major by the top managers is disregarded by the troops. The converse is also common, where the troops see a change as far more significant than the managers; many cases of industrial unrest and strikes reflect this different perception.

These views of change are also affected by whether you see organisational change as discontinuous and episodic or as continuous. Major planned change initiatives are often implemented on the assumption that change occurs from time to time and the organisation reverts back to stability or equilibrium in between. Seen at a distance organisations can appear quite stable (episodic change), but looked at closely they can appear to be constantly changing as people leave, customers and suppliers change and new products are developed (continuous change).

Alvesson and Sveningsson in their article about the disappearance of leadership summarise two main means by which ideas about leadership break down. One is that common definitions of leadership do not correspond to the accounts of leadership produced by people in leadership positions in organisations.

The second is that their initial claim about what is important in leadership is contradicted by their efforts to show what this means when they are applying it in their daily work.

To me, this is very interesting. But there is more.

Reviewing the literature about leadership, the main common aspect amongst various leadership definitions seems to be that leadership is an influence process. Unfortunately this is not enough distinction because you could also say that selling is an influence process. You can probably think of other influence processes such as political lobbying.

What is the difference between leadership and, say, selling or lobbying? Well, one difference is in the context of an asymmetrical organisational relationship. What this is referring to is that the leader/manager has more power and is attempting to influence what those reporting to him or her do. A salesperson or lobbyist is operating in a different context, where there is not the same asymmetrical power relationship.

Alvesson and Sveningsson come to three conclusions in their highly interesting article.

First, highly intelligent managers have rather vague and contradictory notions of leadership, which are only discovered by taking an open ended research approach (questionnaires would not discover this).

Secondly, there are strong ideological overtones to the views people have about leadership, and so the leadership industry should be careful about the extent to which its ideological perspective enables the easy production of leadership as something distinct and robust without adequate questioning. From this study, the phenomenon of leadership seems to be much more fragile than is commonly assumed.

Thirdly, while the researchers do not want to kill leadership off, they do want to make sure that there is clear understanding of the research methods used to draw conclusions about leadership. Do the methods used to research leadership generate the views about leadership that they report on, rather than reporting on observations about leadership?

Ultimately, I think that Alvesson and Sveningsson’s research points to the need to ask of any leadership research what the method was, so that you can decide whether or not the study has avoided the tendency to impose its own leadership ideology, thus creating the leadership phenomenon it intends to report on.

Alvesson and Sveningsson conduct leadership research in which they attempt to avoid the problem of constructing leadership through the process of developing a questionnaire and then getting respondents to answer it.

What they do instead is interview managers/leaders using open questions and ask the managers to describe their leadership in their own terms.

In their article The Great Disappearing Act: Difficulties in Doing "Leadership," Alvesson and Sveningsson’s analysis of the responses is illuminating. The main thing that the responses have in common is the confusing and incoherent picture they paint of what it is they consider leadership to be.

Each manager starts with a statement of what they consider important in leadership, and, perhaps not surprisingly, these statements reflect current fashions in leadership – maintaining the vision, promoting the team, working with key team members, harnessing the energy and so on. One manager who appears to be relatively sophisticated even says leadership is about managing meaning. Although he then says that he is rarely able to find the time to spend with his people because operational issues tend to take priority.

Managers I speak often reflect the same concerns, saying they don’t have time to do the leadership aspects of their roles.

After each manager/leader had said what they considered important (vision/values/team etc) a curious thing happened when the researchers then asked them to describe the most important leadership activities in more detail.  This is where the responses started to get confusing and incoherent.

The researchers described this as being the disappearance of leadership. They identified the following tactics that leaders used in explaining leadership, the result being that leadership undergoes a disappearing act.

• Pointing at what they saw as the crucial issue in leadership, and then being vague and contradictory about how to tackle it.
• Stating the obvious as a uniting vision (e.g. where the vision is simply the function of the business unit such as "providing infrastructure")  and then living the vision through improving social relations.
• Limiting one’s role to presenting ideas and then letting the others decide. The researchers call this minimilastic influencing.
• Stating one leadership principle is crucial and then contradicting it in practice.
• Doing primarily things other than those stated as being crucial, and largely being absent from influencing.

 These things are very different from what most authors on leadership would advocate – typically, an active person trying ambitiously to exercise influence within an asymmetric relation.

Conclusion

As part of my consulting practice I am often concerned with leadership in organisations. This study certainly reinforces my own experience of discussing leadership with those in formal and informal leadership positions.

Leaders always find it difficult to pinpoint what it is that they do that can be classified as "leadership." I find myself in the same boat, wrestling with the question of how to describe what my own practice is, a practice that includes leadership. 

Is it the inadequacy of words to describe the concept of leadership, or is it that there really is no such thing as leadership after all? Or is there some other explanation?

The assumptions, methodological preferences and ideological commitments permeating many leadership studies are often not acknowledged by the researchers. This means that their findings are likely to lead us into false conclusions unless we consider what these underlying assumptions might be.

One such assumption is that such a thing as leadership exists. Many studies ask respondents to choose between multi-choice items on a questionnaire, all of which are based on the assumption that leadership is a thing and that the researcher has been able to work out all the possible choices that the respondent might make. The very act of collating these responses then creates the phenomenon of leadership that is reported on in these studies. This suggests that any leadership studies should be taken with a grain of salt, or at least that you should check their research method before accepting the results. Alvesson and Sveningsson (Article is subscription only, unfortunately) point out that it is possible there is a real phenomenon behind the discussion about leadership, but it is also possible that there is not. Much of the leadership research would report on findings about leadership because of the assumptions of the researchers, even if the phenomenon known as leadership does not actually exist.

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that there is a lot of leadership literature around, but that there is also a lot of discontent with that literature. For example, back in 1979, Sashkin and Garland say that the study of leadership has failed to produce generally accepted, practically useful and widely applied scientific knowledge. Ten years later, Yukl concludes that leadership theories are beset with conceptual weaknesses and lack strong support when studied in practice. The results of many studies are contradictory and inconclusive.

The scientific approach to studying leadership, which promises the accumulation of knowledge through the development and verification of hypotheses has not delivered universally accepted theory that can guide leadership action, unlike, say, the law of gravity which is universally applied and has been such an important underpinning of many developments in Newtonian physics. In fact, practitioners mostly view academic research on leadership as abstract, non-practical and of little relevance. Imagine if gravity were so diffuse that people said "I wish you would come up with a more practical theory of gravity." And yet much leadership theory has been developed with the intention of trying to find immutable laws of leadership that apply just as much as the laws of gravity.

Not very successful, it seems. More to come in future posts.

In an earlier post, I summarised Alvesson and Sveningsson’s conclusions about the mundaneness of much leadership action.

When the researchers asked managers to specify the practice of leadership, they initially talked of formulating and communicating visions, strategies and overall guidelines but were not able actually to illuminate what they did in relation to these visions and strategies.

What they did instead was they talked about tasks such as listening, chatting and being cheerful as some of the things that were important in leadership. Some suggested they had special skills in this area, or that they favoured a style of being available for informal chats that allowed employees to talk with them (i.e. leaders as listeners). It is difficult to see how these things relate to the rhetoric of leadership as being about grand concepts such as strategies, visions and ‘the big picture’.

Listening and chatting do not really fit in as either leadership (transformation, strategy) nor management (administration, organising), according to the common management / leadership dichotomy. In fact, listening and chatting are not much different from what  "non-leaders" also do in going about their work.

One of the managers in the study referred to listening from the point of view of being the manager, and also being the subordinate. Listening enabled the manager to be receptive to and understand information and ideas from those below, although the manager might not be able to take action on the ideas – but at least the staff would feel listened to – listening would convey caring and respect. So far so orthodox.

Contrast the same manager discussing the experience of being listened to by his own manager. In this situation, much more emphasis was placed on the substantive concerns being expressed by the subordinate, and a strong requirements for action to be taken by the manager – the listener (manager) needed to be influenced by the subordinate. As a subordinate, without the response of action being taken, the experience of having his feelings taken into account was not enough.

The managers saw their listening, chatting and being cheerful not as means to an end, such as gaining more information, but as valuable in and of themselves, because it was the managers doing it. For example, contrast a secretary claiming that a vital part of their work was listening, chatting and being cheerful – it would be seen as a normal, but minor part of their work – not something that would give them a pay rise.

I think the authors make some very interesting observations in this study. Once managers get past the initial rhetoric that they are formulating and communicating vision or strategy, they can’t say how they do this apart from listening and chatting, which really, are things that almost anyone can do. While there is a tendency for the managers to imply they have special skills in this area, the researchers are not so sure. I am also struck by the view of the manager that just listening was enough, but as a subordinate he needed action from his boss to show he’d been listened to. As a subordinate, just being listened to but ignored was not enough. After all, it’s only when you get the response that you know you’ve been listened to – that you understand what your gesture meant.

I, of course, also have a view on this listening and chatting business.

I think the reason that listening and chatting are highlighted as important are because they amount to human interaction. We are all humans, and hence we are all bound up in human interaction. We cannot escape from human interaction. It is from this interaction that there is the potential for novelty, something new to occur in our organisations.

I am inclined to think, like Doug Griffin in his book The Emergence of Leadership that leadership consists of interactions from which leadership emerges, and is recognised by the participants as leadership – it is hence an emergent phenomenon.

As in the situation of John Robinson, the captain of my tennis team in my earlier post, who told me that he was humbled by what I wrote in that post. At the time he was not seeing himself as showing the leadership qualities I referred to, just wanting to start the day off on the right foot. Nevertheless, I recognised these leadership qualities, and the members of the other team at least stopped what they were doing to listen and took him seriously. They did not, for example, ignore him and continue talking amongst themselves. This, I think, was the recognition of his leadership. And once I pointed it out to him, I think that John can also see that what he did amounted to leadership. It’ll be interesting to see how our doubles match together goes next Saturday!

I write this having just finished an interclub tennis fixture between our club and another. John Robinson, our captain for the day, did something at the start of the day that I thought was at the same time quite special and yet also quite ordinary. He and I went to talk to the other captain and team prior to the contest – introducing ourselves, connecting through past matches and opponents, catching up on each team’s progress throughout the competition, discussing who was injured, the weather forecast, all the while eagerly anticipating the competition we were about to engage in. This struck me at the time as being something I have to call an act of leadership, both establishing a good environment for the contest and also establishing himself as the spokesperson for the team. It was skilfully done.

But at the same time, what happened was really very ordinary. It was several people talking and listening to each other. Was it because it was the captains speaking that this seemed an act of leadership?

I am moved to consider the paradox of the ordinariness of this interaction, which I recognised at the same time as understanding it as an act of leadership that I was a witness to.

In a guest post on this very blog, Russell Ness raised the question of whether is such a thing as leadership. Intuitively we take leadership for granted, it seems self-evident that leadership is important – why even question this?

I wonder if you have come across the work of Mats Alvesson, pictured? He is a professor at Lund University in Sweden with lots of research credentials, who has written numerous books and articles, about leadership, culture and research methodology amongst other subjects. His work on qualitative and management research methodology was important in my own doctoral thesis.

In a very interesting 2003 article in the journal Human Relations entitled "Managers Doing Leadership: The Extra-Ordinarization of the Mundane" (subscription required) Mats Alvesson and Stefan Sveningsson interviewed senior and middle managers in a biotechnology company (think highly qualified (PhD level) managers) about what leadership was and what they were doing when they did ‘leadership.’ Using non-directive interviews without a particular leadership model or models in mind, they gathered accounts of leadership that were only partly in line with what the leadership literature would suggest.

Going straight for the finish line, here are their three conclusions. I’ll explore each of them in more detail in my next post.

• A lot of leadership is fairly mundane (e.g. listening) and doesn’t differ much from what other people do, at least as far as behaviours are concerned.
   
• When managers or "leaders" do these mundane things, they become vested with an aura and appear to be significant and mystical when framed as leadership.
   
• The formal position of manager (or captain in the case of my tennis example) is important in terms of this framing, and this raises a problem for the distinction between leader and manager.

It was supposed to rain but turned out to be fine and we had some good close matches in the tennis, followed by post match debriefs and socialising with the other team. Hmmm.

Is there such a thing as leadership? Does your formal position determine whether or not you are doing leadership? Watch this space…