How important do you think shared values are in an organization?
How important is a common, unified culture?
When you are a manager of other managers, those questions are more than just academic. Each team within your span of control will have the tendency to form their own microculture that may be different from those of nearby teams. Is that OK?
On one hand, there’s value in enforcing unity with deeply held core beliefs. At an organizational level these may include values such as respect, integrity, or humility.
But teams may differ on other values, leading to different subcultures across different departments. For example, a sales team may thrive on competition while customer service gives greater honor to cooperation. Even within a technical organization, different teams may place different levels of value on predictability, speed, aesthetics, or tolerance of risk.
I used to be in an organization where one team was responsible for creating user interfaces for managing internal work requests while another team was responsible for the algorithms that automatically identified and merged duplicate patient demographics to combine their clinical records. As you can imagine, one team valued rapid iteration and deployment, while the other placed higher value on certainty, predictability, and reduction of risk.
As a leader over distinctive teams like those, you’ll need to be conscious of which parts of your culture demand unity and which parts invite diversity.
If you’d like a thinking partner to look at your specific situation, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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