From Dread to Passion: How to Ignite Hearts and Settle Stomachs
Culture is how employees' hearts and stomachs feel about Monday morning on Sunday night - Bill Marklein
Introduction
Organizational culture has emerged as a crucial determinant of business success and competitive advantage in recent decades as leaders recognize its power to shape everything from employee satisfaction to ethical behavior to customer service and innovation. As Bill Marklein astutely observed, culture essentially comes down to how people feel deep inside – their hearts and stomachs. The positivity or negativity employees experience as they contemplate the upcoming workweek reveals the presence of an energizing or toxic culture. This affective dimension underscores that culture operates at the unconscious level of assumptions, mindsets, and emotions to drive behaviors and performance.
This essay will utilize Marklein’s quote as a springboard to unpack what comprises culture, how it impacts critical outcomes, and how leaders can purposefully shape it. Foundational conceptual models on cultural layers and attributes will be integrated to establish an understanding of culture’s complexity and why it merits intense focus. Concrete examples of companies with notorious cultures like Netflix, Patagonia, and Johnson & Johnson will illustrate defining characteristics. Furthermore, vital research on linkages between culture and employee engagement, ethical behavior, and financial performance will be presented. To aid application, a structured approach for assessing and evolving culture will outline specific techniques leaders can adopt. The aim is to provide an authoritative yet engaging overview of why leaders must be attentive “cultural architects” in order to ignite hearts and settle stomachs across their organizations.
Defining and Diagnosing Organizational Culture
Before exploring techniques to shape culture, it is important to grapple with what exactly organizational culture entails. Seminal researcher Edgar Schein developed an influential model delineating three levels present in a company’s culture: artifacts, espoused values, and tacit assumptions. He explained:
“At the surface is the level of artifacts, which includes all the phenomena that you would see, hear, and feel when you encounter an unfamiliar culture....Beneath the surface are espoused values, which are conscious strategies, goals, and philosophies. The core of culture however lies in the basic underlying assumptions and beliefs, which are typically unconscious but which actually guide behavior.” (Schein, 1996)
This tri-level model highlights how culture ranges from the visible artifacts like office layouts down to the shared tacit assumptions that operate unconsciously yet exert immense influence over human perceptions, decisions, and actions within organizations. Misalignment between these levels breeds dysfunction, making cultural diagnosis complex.
As a companion to Schein’s model, researchers have identified various key attributes that characterize strong, strategic organizational cultures:
Clarity – How well defined and communicated are the expected values and behaviors? (Deal & Kennedy, 1982)
Alignment – How consistent are the signals sent through artifacts, processes, and leadership rhetoric? (Denison, 1990)
Shared Identity – How widely embraced is a sense of purpose and community? (O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996)
Values-Driven – How strongly do espoused values guide decisions and policies? (Lencioni, 2002)
Agility – How quickly does the culture adapt to sustain competitiveness? (Shafer, 2010)
Assessing culture requires analyzing the degree to which these qualities are present and interwoven through the organization’s systems and processes. This provides a diagnostic foundation to identify areas of misalignment needing realignment.
Illustrating these qualities, companies renowned for standout cultures like Southwest Airlines, Salesforce, and Netflix exhibit tight alignment between their espoused values and actual behaviors. As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings highlighted regarding their culture, “Most companies spend endless time debating values they wish they had. We took a different approach and identified the actual values our employees were already operating with and made those the formal values for the company.” (McCord, 2014)
Types of Organizational Culture
While organizational culture exists on a spectrum from weak to strong, several common types emerge:
Clan culture – Team-oriented, collaborative, loyal, tradition-driven. Risk of insularity if not open to external partners and customers. (Example: Patagonia)
Adhocracy culture Entrepreneurial, creative, informal, risk-taking. Can suffer from ack of structure and discipline. (Example: Genentech)
Market culture – Results-driven, competitive, hard-driving. Focuses on metrics and beating targets, raising ethical risks. (Example: Uber)
Hierarchical culture Procedural, governed by policies, structured, predictable. Can become rigid and resistant to agility needed for innovation. (Example: old Microsoft)
Purpose-driven culture – Inspiring sense of mission and meaning beyond profits. Empowers people to contribute to social good. (Example: Warby Parker)
According to seminal research by Kotter & Heskett (1992), strong adaptive cultures support sustained high performance, while unhealthy cultures drag down results. They concluded, “Corporate culture matters—a lot. It is a key root cause why some firms do better than others.” Diagnosing and evolving culture is thus imperative.
Outcomes of Organizational Culture
Beyond just fostering employees’ affective commitment to their organizations, as Marklein observed, a company’s culture has proven linkages to performance in vital areas:
Innovation – Supportive cultures facilitate knowledge sharing, risk taking, and product development. 3M’s culture of “structured serendipity” yields over 25% of revenues from products introduced in past 5 years. (Gibb Dyer et al, 2011)
Ethics Shared values and peer accountability in cultures like Johnson & Johnson promote integrity and ethical behavior. J&J’s credo assists sound-decision making. (Dunfee & Hess, 2000)
Customer service – Zappos’ commitment to “WOW” service stems from its culture of empowerment to go above and beyond for customers without need for manager approval. (Hsieh, 2010)
Safety – NIOSH research found organizations emphasizing psychological safety through care-based cultures average 62% fewer safety incidents, preventing harm. (Zhou et al, 2015)
Financial performance – A meta-analysis found companies intentionally cultivating engaged, adaptive cultures average 30% higher profitability. Culture fuels competitive advantage. (Katzenbach Center, n.d.)
Sustainability – Patagonia’s culture of environmental conservation and activism manifests through robust CSR efforts like pledging 1% of profits to ecological causes. (Chouinard & Stanley, 2012)
In totality, these outcomes underscore how culture flows down to impact all facets of business performance. Leaders seeking to improve their organizations must regularly diagnose and nourish their cultural soil.
Shaping and Improving Culture
Since culture operates at the unconscious level of mindsets and shared assumptions, consciously transforming it poses challenges. However, leaders can drive positive cultural evolution by following a structured change process focused on realigning behaviors, experiences, and mindsets with strategic values and priorities. As Kotter (2012) outlined:
Define the desired culture – Co-create a vision for the ideal values-driven culture needed to support the strategy and brand.
Assess the current culture – Utilize interviews, observation, surveys, and data analytics to diagnose areas of misalignment with desired culture. Look for inconsistencies signaling dysfunction.
Identify priorities Focus on the biggest gaps undermining performance. Do not try to change everything at once.
Modify key touchpoints – Target HR systems, leadership modeling, rituals, artifacts, and communications to shift towards the ideal culture.
Reinforce and reward – Recognize positive culture change through both informal and formal reward systems to incentivize new norms.
Attract and retain aligned talent – Update recruiting, onboarding, training, and mentoring programs to develop and keep people demonstrating cultural values and mindsets.
Model evolution – Leadership practicing desired mindsets and behaviors in their daily actions and decisions is vital for credibility and inspiring change.
Make values prominent – Keep values visible through office design, training, storytelling, and constant informal reminders.
Persist with patience – Recognize changing collective mindsets happens gradually. Sustain processes promoting cultural realignment.
Additionally, culture change should focus on enhancing key pillars highlighted by researchers such as Denison Consulting:
Mission – Connecting the work to a deeper purpose beyond profits to foster engagement.
Adaptability – Nurturing agility, learning, and willingness to take smart risks to stay competitive.
Consistency – Aligning behaviors at all levels and across units with core values to promote cohesion.
Involvement – Encouraging bottom-up input, belonging, and psychological safety to spur innovation.
While culture transformation requires sustained commitment, the payoff can be immense. Lucas Group (2012) found culture change initiatives fully embraced by leadership led to average profit margin increases of 14%.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
In closing, Marklein’s quote astutely recognizes organizational culture is grounded in how people feel – their affective commitment and mindsets. Leaders must be attentive to the emotional climate permeating their company and intentionally shape the cultural forces guiding employee attitudes and discretionary effort. They wield influence through role modeling, systems, policies, communications, rewards, and symbols that either inspire or deflate the hearts and stomachs within their organizations. Culture merits frequent diagnosis utilizing surveys, interviews, observations, and ethics data to reveal gaps needing realignment to drive competitive advantage. As Marklein emphasized, healthy cultures elicit eagerness and passion while toxic cultures breed resentment and anxiety as employees contemplate their upcoming workweek. Serving as “cultural architects,” leaders have a profound opportunity to build organizations where every employee feels genuinely excited to start Monday morning and bring their full selves to work.