Page 101 - Successful Onboarding

90 • Successful Onboarding

When managers refer to culture, they often talk more narrowly about
consciously articulated corporate culture. Many firms take pride in their
heritage and spend a fair amount of energy communicating their history
to new hires. Yet heritage and an articulated sense of corporate culture
aren’t always as relevant operationally as leaders might think. No matter
how aware one becomes of their organization’s corporate heritage, they
are still operating in the complexity and the dynamism of the here and
now. If you compare your corporate heritage with how your organization
actually functions, you will find you have two different animals. Corpo-
rate cultural elements that have allowed for success in the past, or that
correspond to an idealistic sense of what sets your organization apart, are
likely not to help your employees succeed right now or help your organ-
ization perform at its best.
In speaking of culture, then, we refer to the broader organizational
culture that arises out of how people actually come together to get work
done (and in the case of dysfunctional cultures, avoid getting work
done). We especially like MIT Professor Edgar Schein’s notion of orga-
nizational culture:

A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved
its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has
worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to
new members as the correct way you perceive, think, and feel in relation
to those problems.

By this definition, a unifying culture emerges naturally over time in the
course of the organization’s actual functioning. It is a “set of assumptions”
about the world that are tried and true and are passed on to new members
as established norms. Because organizational culture also includes within
it the formally articulated corporate culture, we also need to consider the
stated values that people working together maintain. Finally, we need to
consider observable artifacts—the language, symbols, style, and behav-
iors—that shape workplace experience.
When we think more closely about Schein’s definition of organizational
culture, we begin to see how treacherous culture can be and why new
hires often get caught up in cultural snafus. Members of an organization
might consider the common assumptions of a culture to be “valid,” and