The Shocking Truth About Organizational Culture

Lately, I’ve been having lots of conversations with nonprofit professionals who want to change something in their career or organization, but find themselves getting stuck.

One of the most common challenges I hear is: “I can’t get professional development because my employer won’t pay for me to go to trainings or conferences. My boss won’t let me be great.” OK. That’s why me and Trista wrote our book, How to Become a Nonprofit Rockstar: 50 Ways to Accelerate Your Career. Take matters into your own hands. Develop yourself. Make your own map.

But another, more nuanced challenge I’m hearing is that when someone does feel like they’re ready to lead and contribute, they hesitate to share their ideas. They feel like their boss or staff or board won’t listen because of a stagnant organizational culture.

For that one, we need to really break down what we mean when we say “organizational culture.” Usually, when people reference their organization’s culture, they’re talking about the way the organization has always done things. They’re talking about how people are hired, trained, rewarded and punished. They’re talking about the cadence of change in the organization and how the “higher-ups” react to new ideas.

But let’s look at a more succinct definition for a moment.

MIT organizational development scholar Edgar Schein developed a model of organizational culture in the 1980s which included this definition:

A pattern of basic assumptions – invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with the problems of external adaptation and internal integration – that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

What Schein’s definition makes clear is that organizational culture is invented by people. It’s not determined by the organizational culture gods, never to be questioned again. And, since culture is essentially a pattern of assumptions, when those assumptions change, a new pattern CAN emerge.

Now, I’m not at saying that all nonprofit organizational cultures are bad or outdated. That’s not the case. Organizational culture is important to socialize staff, board, donors and members into what the nonprofit stands for and how it will operate. It gives people a shared lens from which to view the organization.

But what often happens is that somewhere along the way, assumptions change and therefore the culture needs to change. Yet, even when it’s apparent that a shift needs to happen, the change process can be next to impossible because the people within the organization have internalized the current culture to such an extent that they conclude that this is just “how it is and how it always will be.” That this is just the nature of our “organization’s culture” and they can’t do anything to change it now, no matter what the internal and external landscape looks like.

They forget that THEY are organizational culture.

(Seth Godin puts it a slightly different way: corporations don’t have consciences, people do.)

So, organizations are made up of individual people who are responsible for their individual actions on behalf of the collective. Which means that this is all up to us. It is what we make it. If you want something to change within your organization, it needs to start with YOU.

You can be the one to take the first step. Call that first meeting. Make that first phone call. Express that amazing new idea that’s been bottled up inside of you. And if you’re waiting for your CEO to retire or for someone else to make it happen, well, that’s not leadership, is it?

We are the people. And we have the power. The question is: what will we do with it?