The dinosaur café – the impact of a toxic culture on digital transformation
Presiding over a toxic organisational culture is a significant failure of leadership.
A toxic culture can have a long (dinosaur) tail of hidden costs for any transformation
One of the strangest things about this type of failure is that a lot of leaders are blissfully unaware that they are leading an organisation where the culture is reducing productivity, impacting morale, causing sickness, increasing staff attrition, and putting deliveries at risk.
So, how can this be? How can senior leaders not know that sections of their organisation have a toxic culture?
Culture is driven from the top down, isn’t it?
The master manipulators that are middle management
Most sizeable organisations will have several very competent managers that have, over time, been promoted into leadership positions.
They have reached these stations due in no small part to the fact that they are political experts and extremely skilful in “managing the message”. That is, they carefully control and manipulate the communications that flow upwards and outwards from their fiefdom.
The messages emanating from these groups go through so many layers of filtration that by the time the communication hits the senior leadership team, any trace of contamination is removed and a shiny and spotless message has been crafted ready for consumption.
The fact that the toxicity of the culture is so well hidden is one of the reasons why it is extremely difficult for senior leaders to understand that they are heading an organisation where some teams/departments foster a culture that the leadership function themselves would not want to work in.
The elephant in the room is actually a dinosaur
Individuals in these positions of power remain too focused on the operational and delivery detail to provide effective leadership.
Over the years, they create an authoritarian regime where there is no desire to foster broad collaboration. They evolve a siloed structure which leads to fractionalisation, division, and a situation where political game playing, at which they excel, is rife.
In their book Team flow: the psychology of optimal collaboration, Jef van den Hout and Orin Davis express their views on this type of management: “You can get the right talent in the room, give them a clear, meaningful goal, and then stick a dinosaur brain at the head of the table. You know the type: it roars loudly, ignores what people say, does what it wants, stomps around looking to see what it can snag, and generally makes a nuisance of itself. …Whatever the case: bad leader, bad team.”
It is sometimes difficult for others to see that the particular focus of these managers is resulting in a leadership vacuum.
Delivery? Absolutely! But at what cost?
The very fact that these managers are so focused on the detail of delivery means that, more often than not, they do actually deliver.
What they deliver might not be exactly what was asked for or might be a bit late, but they do deliver. The shortfall of what was delivered and the time to delivery is usually explained away and blamed on external factors. Remember, these individuals got to this position by using their superb manipulation skills.
However, the hidden costs left in the wake of these deliveries should not be underestimated.
The dinosaur brains often adopt a “do as I say” attitude resulting in a lack of trust and employees not feeling enough psychological safety to speak up.
Culture of fear
This type of environment leads to every element of even the most minor output being checked, double checked, and triple checked to avoid the inevitable consequences should something be found to be wrong.
A significant increase in the CC lists of emails also results. Emails are sent multiple times a day with CC lists of hundreds and the “reply all” option being used regularly. This defensive use of CYA (cover your ass) emails and the regular use of the phrase “…well you were on the email chain…” demonstrates how toxic the culture is.
There is a close to zero tolerance for risk, and teams/individuals feel their creativity is being stifled. There is no appetite for failing fast (or failure at any level), resulting in inevitable delivery impacts and missed opportunities.
Reduced productivity
The culture of fear, and its cascading impacts, has a direct impact on productivity. The output of the entire transformation function is likely to be below what would be regarded as the norm.
The situation is not conducive to instilling a sense of hope and optimism for the future.
Morale
Situations can arise where highly skilled individuals are spending significant amounts of time and effort on unimportant tasks (e.g., tidying up a PowerPoint deck) rather than on tasks that are directly related to delivery.
These skilled resources are still expected to meet delivery commitments and timelines with the relatively unimportant tasks proving an unwanted and time-consuming distraction. This leads to staff members working unsustainable hours to get deliveries across the line.
Which in turn leads to…
Sickness
The pressure on staff over a sustained period will have the inevitable consequence of an increase in staff illness. A vicious cycle can now ensue where the same amount of work must be delivered in the same timeframe with fewer staff, resulting in yet more pressure.
Which can lead to…
Staff attrition
Unsurprisingly, the point can be reached where several members of staff leave the organisation to pursue their careers elsewhere.
The cost of the human and intellectual capital that is walking out of the organisation based solely on a toxic culture is likely to be significant.
Closing thoughts
A toxic culture will have a direct financial effect which can be difficult to quantify, especially if it is obscured. There are human costs, delivery inefficiencies, and waste which all have a negative impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the transformation function.
This is not a new problem, and most organisations have put in place checks and balances to mitigate this risk (e.g., leadership training and development, anonymous employee surveys, exit interviews, and so on), but it still occurs all too frequently.
In the words of Tony Williams, business transformation advisor: “Results and rewards for results are often about the what not the how. Managers who drive results often don’t concern themselves about how they get them and of course for all the HR work (training, surveys, exit interviews, and so on), in too many organisations, it lacks teeth and performance remains one dimensional.”
A human-centric approach to transformational change combined with incentives that cover “how” delivery is achieved as well as “what” is delivered are required to allow organisations to effectively identify and challenge the toxic culture.
Tackling the dinosaurs will result in positive improvements in delivery and the overall organisational health of the company.
About the author
Brian Harkin is the CTO of Kynec and a visiting lecturer at Bayes Business School (City, University of London).
He is passionate about the intersection of people, technology, and innovation and has developed the Galapagos Framework to help leaders and organisations transform the way they direct digital change.
All opinions are his own and he welcomes debate and comment!
Follow Brian on Twitter @DigitalXformBH and LinkedIn.
