Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours

Proper ding dong this week. I have a fabulously enjoyable back-and-forth with the brilliant Professor Rob Briner.

At one stage Rob says: ‘If you tell someone - whose favourite thing is organisational culture - and you tell them it’s not a very useful idea - they don’t like it.’ Well, I felt seen. To be fair I’d already acknowledged that I agreed on what he was saying that behaviours are more important than culture. Also I’m more than a culture fan, I promise.

But it’s a sign that it’s an outstanding discussion. Rob’s key point was that the idea of culture is vague and subjective. Rob says that culture is ‘a description. So if you want to change something, you don’t change the description of it, you change the cause of it.’ He says we should be specific about what we're trying to change, not just wave our arms and mouth 'culture'.

• We discuss if an obsession with scale is the curse of modern business.
• How to build effective organisations.
• Why you should focus on being specific about culture.

It's worth checking out some of Rob's posts. For example: Does changing culture change behaviour?

Rob asked me to share the following bio:

Rob Briner is Professor of Organisational Psychology (Queen Mary University of London) and a Research Director at Corporate Research Forum (rob@crforum.co.uk). He has been promoting Evidence-Based Practice in Management, HRM and Work Psychology for almost three decades.

His recent research with Corporate Research Forum includes reports on Evidence-Based HR and how HR can more effectively drive organisational performance.

He also leads CRF’s Work Psychology Network which has produced reports summarizing the best available and most practical work psychology theory and evidence around a range of topics including motivation and performance, assessing potential and behaviour change in organisations.

He has also produced a series of short posts on LinkedIn where he explores various popular ideas about behaviour at work (e.g., learning styles, psychological safety, growth mindset, happy-productive worker) and asks about each: Is that really a thing? That question is answered through a combination of critical thinking and using reviews of scientific evidence.

There's a full transcript at the website.

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