Adversaries within and beyond the boundaries of an organization's cultural framework
Every organization is more than its bottom line and reputation; it's the culture that truly defines it. Culture shapes individual and team performance, change management, and how an organization navigates complexities and uncertainties. When companies face ethical scandals or breaches, the root cause is often traced back to cultural issues.
Culture isn't limited to employee engagement; it's the intricate web that underpins an organization's functional core. But, culture is tricky to pin down, making it notoriously elusive to define and measure. Relying on traditional methods such as employee surveys, pulse checks, or 360-degree reviews might be insightful, but they rarely paint the whole picture. To gain a deeper understanding, it's essential to identify and comprehend the role an organization's shadow values—the implicit attitudes and beliefs that significantly influence behavior, often covertly—play in shaping their culture.
Peeling Back the Layers: The Role of Shadow Values
By acknowledging and understanding shadow values, organizations can work towards meaningful improvements, aligning both individual and collective behaviors with the company's purpose.
Official values, like collaboration, integrity, or innovation, are publicly declared and promoted. However, even companies with admirable stated values can experience significant ethical flaws due to the presence of implicit, shadow values that contradict their formal values.
At their worst, shadow values and principles stand in opposition to official values. At their best, shadow values offer a nuanced expression of what an organization truly values. Either way, they represent an essential component in identifying and measuring the real cultural landscape of an organization.
Consider a financial services company we collaborated with, where "putting members first" was identified as a shadow principle. This principle, so deeply ingrained, guided employee behavior even when decisions and actions weren't directly dictated by explicit policies or procedures.
On the flip side, shadow values can have a negative impact on an organization's culture. A company we worked with had a common shadow principle of 'shareholders matter most.' Despite providing essential services and being publicly listed, this shadow principle became a reflex whenever trade-offs were necessary between various stakeholder interests. This engendered a high level of cynicism and disaffection among staff who often felt that rhetoric about customer service and the value of employees didn't align with the organization's actions.
Navigating with a Buddhist Lens
To better understand and identify the impact of shadow values on an organization's culture, we can borrow the concepts of near and far enemies from Buddhism.
In Buddhism, the Four Brahmavihārā (compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity) represent the highest virtues humans should cultivate. Each of these virtues has a "far enemy," which is an obvious opposite, and a "near enemy," which closely resembles the virtue but is actually a distortion.
For example, the far enemy of compassion is cruelty—easily identifiable and universally understood as negative. The far enemy is easy to tackle as its manifestations and impact are recognizable, and it can be directly addressed.
The near enemy, however, is pity. Pity poses as compassion, sharing some superficial traits but lacking the connection and motivation to act that true compassion entails. By understanding the near and far enemies of our values, we can better align our culture with our strategic objectives, fostering an environment that supports both individual and organizational success. The challenge lies in identifying these shadow values and addressing them before they become barriers to progress.
Case Studies in Contrast
The near and far enemies concept is invaluable when diagnosing the shadow values that can be root causes of organizational culture failures.
Take collaboration as an example. While the far enemy of collaboration is evident—competition—the root challenge for many organizations isn't competition but harmony, the near enemy of collaboration. Harmony seems positive but can manifest as a reluctance to engage in constructive conflict or make difficult decisions, which can hinder an organization's ability to be agile, innovative, and adaptable.
Another example comes from a large financial services firm that codified "excellence" as a core value. While the far enemy of excellence is easily identified as mediocrity, it didn't explain some of the fundamental ethical challenges the company was facing. Instead, it was 'success,' the near enemy of excellence, that was a significant driver of cultural misalignment. While excellence is about consistent high standards of performance and achievement, success had a singular focus on results for their own sake, regardless of the means by which those results were achieved.
Success generated a range of systemic organizational challenges including a highly competitive internal environment, an increasing reliance on individual sales targets, unaligned Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), withholding information for internal competitive advantage, and more.
Defeating the Near Enemies
An organization's culture is multifaceted, shaped by both visible and invisible elements. While explicit values like collaboration or excellence are crucial, it's the shadow values lurking beneath the surface that often have the greatest impact on behavior. By understanding the near and far enemies of their values, organizations can better align their culture with their strategic goals, fostering an environment that supports both individual and organizational success. The challenge lies in identifying these shadow values and addressing them before they become obstacles to progress.
Our new program, Teamview, can help organizations and teams of any size or ambition explore how their culture operates in practice, identify their strengths, and chart a roadmap to closer alignment with their purpose and values. For more information, contact consulting@our website.
- Organizations can align individual and collective behaviors with their purpose by acknowledging and understanding their shadow values, which are the implicit attitudes and beliefs that significantly influence behavior.
- While official values like collaboration, integrity, or innovation are publicly declared and promoted, companies with admirable stated values can still experience ethical flaws due to the presence of shadow values that contradict their formal values.
- The near enemy of a value, such as harmony for collaboration or 'success' for excellence, can pose as a positive, but it may lack the motivation to act that the actual value entails, and it can become a barrier to progress if not addressed.
- By understanding the near and far enemies of their values, organizations can better align their culture with their strategic objectives, fostering an environment that supports both individual and organizational success, and they can address the shadow values before they become obstacles to progress.
