My blogs this week are looking at the question of corporate culture, and today I'm looking particularly at the role of the senior team in the change process.

Suppose the most senior team in an organisation make a conscious decision to be united and have 'cabinet government'.  On the basis of what I wrote yesterday, about the organisation mirroring the behaviour of the leadership, they might hope and expect that the organisation itself might, over time, become united.  Hence, they will have changed the corporate culture by changing themselves.  owever, it's not that simple, and indeed not likely to happen, because they are focusing on conscious behaviours, which is often a relatively minor part of their behavioural portfolio.

Freud compared the mind to an iceberg, saying that the unconscious is the far greater part.  Yet, it is the unconscious of the senior team that has the greatest influence on corporate culture.  For example, even though they may be striving to be united, insufficient communication between them outside the boardroom could be undermining their efforts, because they are inadvertently doing different things.  If, in the Johari Window, this undermining behaviour is in the 'unknown' pane, then it would transmit unconsciously to the rest of the workforce (through a phenomenon called 'participation mystique').  Eventually, the rest of the organisation would want to be united, but find they are inadvertently undermining each other.  If, in the Johari Window, this is part of the Blind Spot then the management team will lose even more credibility, because they don't recognise what's happening but the workforce do.  In either case, the result would be an organisational neurosis.  That is, dysfunctional ways of behaving will become embedded in the organisational culture, and a massive gulf may develop between how the organisation likes to be seen and the way it actually behaves.

Carl Jung once wrote "The true leaders of mankind are always those who are capable of self reflection"¹.   In fact,  Jung went further than Freud's iceberg analogy and said that a lot of people are unconscious.  He didn't mean that people are asleep, but rather that they are unware of what drives their own behaviour.  As a result, they tend to see problems 'out there' in other people, in the organisation, and not in themselves.  But leadership requires a high degree of self-awareness, to achieve a congruence between conscious and unconscious behaviours.  This can only be achieved through self reflection - recognising and integrating unconscious behaviours. 

This is the most powerful technique for changing the corporate culture, more effective than any change programme:  self-reflection, followed by a transformation of attitude, by the management team.  Transforming the leadership transforms the organisation, but if they don't self-reflect then they can become the biggest obstacle to change without realising it. 

The solution therefore lies in the leadership team turning inwards for a time, using models such as Myers Briggs or Human Elements as gateways into the unconscious behaviours of the team.  By transforming themselves they will begin to transform the organisation.

Tomorrow I'll start looking at my second challenge to conventional thinking: whether we want a corporate culture at all.

References
1 Civilisation in Transition, C G Jung (p154)