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Mar 12, 2014

The good news is that culture has caught on as a concept. but leading culture expert Edgar Schein, says it’s just as a “word” and people need to be aware that 90 percent of their behavior is driven by cultural rules and not personality.

Schein, a best-selling author and Professor Emeritus with MIT Sloan School of Management, shared this and other key insights about culture and leadership in the second part of a recent interview with CultureUniversity.com.

He continues to be troubled by the misuse of the word “culture” and the “failure of people to see that culture is not this surface phenomenon, but it is our very core, that we live in culture, we display a culture, and we are always driven by the culture.”

Leaders create culture

Schein believes that:

Culture and leadership are two sides of the same coin. When organizations start or when groups start there is always a leader who has a preferred way of doing things, and those preferences by definition are going to be imposed on the group members. If you don’t like the way I run this group, I’ll replace you. The leader’s values and preferences are the first ways that a group or organization does things and if that works it becomes eventually the culture of that group. So in a very real sense, founders and leaders create culture.”

In an established organization, “the way in which they’ve always done things limits what a leader can do, even what defines a leader in that organization.” A leader can’t just walk in and do things their way,” he said. “The system will not let you.”

Schein pointed out that,

“Once IBM is IBM, once GE is GE, only certain kinds of leaders will be tolerated. When Carly Fiorina came to Hewlett-Packard, she immediately raised hackles all over the place because she was too flamboyant, she wanted to do expensive stuff, so that limited the amount that she could do as a leader. So you can see that culture constrains leadership in a mature company just as leaders create culture in a young company.”

Leaders should use humble inquiry

Schein believes leaders should not focus on changing culture but on solving business problems and he outlined this and other insights in part one of his interview.

His most recent book, Humble Inquiry – The Gentle Art of Asking and Not Telling, outlines an approach leaders should utilize to build trust and surface real issues and potential solutions to those business problems.

He explained it this way:

Humble inquiry is creating a climate in which you display, through your asking genuine questions, an interest in the other person such that they will want to tell you the truth about what really is going on. Now why is that important? I think the major pathology in all organizations that I’ve seen is that upward communication is very faulty.

Subordinates know lots of things that would make the place work better or safer that they for various reasons withhold. If you survey them and ask ‘why aren’t you telling your boss what is really going on, they’ll say 1) he shoots the messengers, 2) I used to tell him but he never really took any interest in it, or 3) I tell him but they never fix anything so I no longer have any incentive to tell.’

Now, if I’m right and that is the problem, the only way to cure that is for the boss to change his behavior, to go to that subordinate and engage in humble inquiry. Say to that subordinate, ‘I’m really interested in what you see in how we can be safer and better and what not, and I’m listening.’ If the boss doesn’t do that, we are going to continue to have accidents and low quality products because the information isn’t surfacing.”

We all have experience with the Humble Inquiry

All of us know how to be humbly inquiring. We do it with our friends, relatives, children and parents, so it’s not a skill we don’t have. (The issue is) “when we take it to the work place, for some reason we think we should now get stiff and formal.

The switch I have to learn to make, if I’m an old leader and I’m dissatisfied and want to change this, is I have to wake up to the fact that these subordinates are people and I have to get interested in them. If I get interested in them and curious, the behavior will become natural. It is not a new skill, it is applying an old skill in a new setting and recognizing its relevance.”

Leaders should “orchestrate”

Edgar Schein had some interesting insights into why more leaders don’t apply humble inquiry.

The larger culture of management says: once you’re a manager, now you have the right to tell other people what to do which is really how a lot of young managers behave. They think, ‘OK, now I’m the boss, so I get to tell.’ This culture of ‘tell’ is very congruent with Western capitalist culture because our whole foundation is built on the higher you go, the more you know and the more you can tell people what to do.

Work now is a highly distributed process where lots of things have to play together for the product to go out the door and so it’s no longer a case of where the manager can tell what to do. The manager now has to orchestrate, create relationships and make sure everything works together.

I don’t think very many managers have figured that out. They still think they’re the boss rather than the orchestrator.”

Do you agree with the need for leaders to focus on humble inquiry and being an “orchestrator”?

This post originally appeared on CultureUniversity.com with a full interview video and transcript.

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