Hi, welcome to week six the screen side chats on organization and culture. There's a whole series of questions I'm going to cover and I'll try to move them relatively quickly. The first one I want to cover is when I asked and the reason I asked is because I want to make sure that each week you guys have concrete strategies on how to view a organization through the theoretical lens that I'm providing. And so the first question I asked was what are some concrete strategies for engineering your organization's culture? And I got lots of feedback from you and it was really neat. In the end, you get this long list of really concrete things that you can do to develop a culture. Within an organization and I mean I think a lot can be drawn from the reading, as well so as I said it's actually a useful list and I'm just going to go through some of them here. Many of them are pretty obvious but you often forget about them when you actually go and manage or try analyse and organization. Well the easiest ones is just deal with branding. It's the kind change the mission statement to make sure the goals highlight values that you think are essential to the kind of culture that you want to have in your organization. And then, you just want to make sure that's visible that has seen everywhere like on a Web presence today is kind of key for most organization. Especially ones that are dependent on the environment for resources and legitimacy. But you can also imagine all kinds of other things associated with the brand name and organization like its symbol, its name, all kind of products, T-shirts, pens. Things that would take the name out into the environment. And show that you're a member of it. That you're wearing it, in particular, is quite an identity act for the individual. Other kinds of things that occur within organizations that set the culture is something like an orientation session. In schools it's things like pep rallies, perhaps, and there you can set the tone, the focus of what the organization's about expectations. You can also kind of relate a founder's story, a history of the organization. And you can highlight exemplary people. That are considered valuable or sacred in terms of espousing the values. That you want the organization and the culture to have. This can also be awards ceremonies, and here you're kind of rewarding positive kind of behavior. And by doing that, you kind of put on display notions of sacredness. And keep in mind that it's important all of these efforts are an effort to render the things we value in object and that's what the idea behind a ritual is. That we go through these actions in interaction each other and in the process we convey sacredness on something. So in religious ceremonies you'll see that imbued on a text or a symbol, but in organizations, and even schools and classrooms we do it all the time, with textbooks as well, as well as kind of. Identities or narratives of accomplishment, things we value we make sacred through these rituals. Other things you can do are announcements in newsletters that highlight those exemplars. Or highlight kinds of ritual behaviors that went successfully and what the value of them is in terms of the organization and its culture. You also read about in Kunda, about analyzing the organization and developing accounts of the organization as an expert or a specialist would. And that too can kind of create a sense of objectivity and authority behind the culture. And that's typically done by like an analyst, like you maybe or I am. And of course they select what to present too in a lot of firms so it's not as if the analyst is always everything they say is showcased everyone. Unless of course the organizational culture is one that values openness and sharing of even the faults and flaws. And that it's kind of rendered as something that we can all learn from. You will see that all the time, but in some organizations you certainly will. Other features that you can manipulate are the use of certain words and there are certain jargon repeated keywords that you can use to highlight. The kinds of values or the kinds of features you want to draw attention to. The use of pronouns can also be revealing so if I use a lot of we statements and them, I create this intergroup kind of conflict or distinction that builds a sense of Collective culture. If high alert it is a little bit different, right? But it may reveal how I identify with something or how I relate to it. So this products could be kind of revealing to in terms of work culture and how people relate to it. Symbols the use of space to like furniture and design of offices and. And settings that was gone over the lecture but that's clearly something that establishes kinds of flows of interaction, and the potential for revealing presentations of self or not. And then last are kind of practices and the kind of practices that I have in mind When I think of organizing a culture, are things, interactions that render the values of the mission statement. A point of focus and sacredness. So if you're going to say you want to have a community as part of our organizational culture, that you value it. You want to create kinds of interactions where those types of reciprocal and group relationships are highly valued and visible and awarded within that culture and that context. There are other things that can also be done and people mentioned the stripping of identities like Jenny did. In terms of engineering a culture or changing it. And here we can think of things that are more dramatic and drastic like firing people or hiring people in terms of whether they fit the culture or a spouse that kind of values that you want the organization to have. And we don't always have that. But, it's clear that organizations do rewarded punished individuals who conform or don't to the organizational culture. In fact, very greedy kinds of institutions like prisons, boarding schools, military's, they do strip people of identities. You have to remove you clothes, you gotta shave your head, you get uniform, and then you go through this kind of training where you are not given much leeway to enact your old identities. You have to develop a new one through various rewards, a whole other structure of identities and rewards and punishments, and over that period you become socialized into a distinctive self. And through that there's quite a bit of mortification process. It's not always positive and that kind of context that we would think are ideal. But that's happening through a lot of the dramas that Kunda talks about as well in terms of presentations where people make mistakes. Or people say the wrong thing and they're corrected. Those are minor mortification processes that humiliated us and make us kind of feel bad. But they reorient our behavior so they occur in a lot of minor ways, but also positively so as well. So, the idea here is that you can announce these more managerially, these kind of constructs through all kinds of fronts of the organization, like the mission statement, announcements, newsletters. And then, you can reinforce it through more of this inter-personal rituals that tend to render those values or those kinds of cultural elements, sacred or meaningful, and important and visible. That they're not like everything else. That they're amplified and central to what your organization's about. So I think often we look for cultural practices that also align across units of the organization, as well as across the kinds of roles from management on down. Albeit it's not always complete, and it's not always clear that that's desirable either. And it depends on the kind of goals your organization has I could imagine a culture where, an organization where you don't, individual productivity and creativity are key. And therefore an integrated culture may not always be beneficial to that. That freedom is lost with a very integrated culture. Many of you out there may be from a small village or a small town and remember how oppressive a small community can be for developing a unique sense of self and creativity. They can also be an enabling in the sense of your support and you have colleagues and friendships and family. So there's a trade off to a lot of these different cultural systems that we have in mind, and some maybe more conducive to the kinds of productivity. And behaviors that you'd like to see in your firm in comparison to others.
