Management 101: How to entrench good organisation culture in your firm

Two Saturdays ago, Itierio Boys High School in Kisii County was closed indefinitely after students torched seven dormitories. Trouble started after the learners were allegedly denied a chance to watch a football match between Portugal and Croatia in the ongoing Euro 2016 tournament.

The students reportedly shouted ‘haki yetu (our right)’ after they were denied permission after the end of the student entertainment period.

This was not just an isolated case. Over the past year, school unrest across the country has led to the destruction of property worth millions of shillings.

But I would like to draw correlations with another incident that took place around the same time.

Six legislators from both sides of the political divide kept us laughing about their experiences in the cells. They regaled us with tales of how clever they were, sharing one shoe while visiting the loos.

They told us how, like common criminals, they smuggled money and a phone into the police cell and together planned a common defence when they would be taken to court.

Teenage phase

Where am I going with this? Culture is caught not taught. You cannot jeer our teenagers as you cheer our legislators. The culture that is loudest will prevail. And your guess is as good as mine as to which culture is prevailing.

One of the biggest challenges for an organisation is to maintain a strong consistent culture -especially when high growth is occurring. This is because, just like human beings, organisations also go through their teenage phase.

During adolescence, children become more independent. They begin to look at the future in terms of career, relationships and families. The individual wants to belong to a society and fit in.

It is a major stage in development where the child has to learn the roles he or she will occupy as an adult. It is during this stage that the adolescent will re-examine his identity and try to find out exactly who he or she is.

According to Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist, what should happen at the end of this stage is “a re-integrated sense of self, of what one wants to do or be, and of one’s appropriate sex role”. During this stage the body image of the adolescent also changes.

They explore possibilities and begin to form their own identity based upon the outcome of their explorations. Failure to establish a sense of identity within society can lead to role confusion. Role confusion involves the individual not being sure about themselves or their place in society.

In other words, your employees-just like your children- will catch what you do, not what you tell them.

Have you considered whether your employees perceive your organisational climate as “good or bad?” Establishing a good organisational climate begins with defining and modelling ethical values and behaviours that employees can identify with and adopt as their own.

At the end of the day, all organisations consist of one essential resource: People. People support, uphold and advocate the purpose of the organisation. Your teams make your organisation work.

Therefore, leaders must make it a requirement to get to know their teams and consistently treat them with trust and respect.

Your organisational culture is unique and foundational to the success of your organisation; it cannot be reproduced by others.

To architect the right conditions to win, take time to recognise that your employees have expectations, then establish a positive organisational climate that values people as the most important resource in your organisation.

One of the best ways to impact culture is to tell stories. There’s something solid that resonates when people hear nice tales of how things were handled in a difficult situation, or how the organisation has successfully progressed to where it is.

There’s a substantive wisdom that comes from these stories, an experiential element of teaching that goes beyond the intellectual theories.

I pray that, unlike the two incidents that I explained above, your stories will resonate in ways that pure theory cannot.

Mr Waswa is a management and HR specialist and managing director of Outdoors Africa. E-mail: [email protected]