Tag Archives: culture

The Bizarre World of Recruitment

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Help WanterSelect­ing new people or can be a stress­ful exper­i­ence. Many organ­isa­tions main­tain extens­ive pro­ced­ures to try to find the right per­son for the right job or even hire spe­cial­ised con­sult­ants to do the job for them. In inter­views strange ques­tions are asked that no nor­mal per­son would ever dare to ask any­one: “What are your three trade­marks?”, “What are your biggest mis­takes?” or “What is the mean­ing of life” and “What is the air­speed velo­city of a laden swal­low?”. Some even resort to pseudo-scientific per­son­al­ity test­ing to throw some insights into these strangers across the table.

The prob­lem recruit­ers have is that it is a lot easier to not hire someone than to fire them later, which leads to com­plic­ated pro­cesses to reduce this risk. Job inter­views are thus a bizarre envir­on­ment that often bares no resemb­lance to a real pro­fes­sional situ­ation. The fear of tak­ing a risk with a per­son and a lack of self-confidence in their own people skills motiv­ates recruit­ers to resort to pseudo-scientific tools and hid­ing behind bizarre inter­view­ing techniques.

Every com­pany gets the employ­ees they deserve.

Spe­cially in a cus­tomer ser­vice related pos­i­tion a person’s abil­ity to smile and under­stand cus­tom­ers is more import­ant than the res­ults in a per­son­al­ity test or the answer to weird ques­tion­ing. Ask­ing strange ques­tions only motiv­ates the applic­ant to bend the truth. Recruit­ment meth­ods should as much as pos­sible be nor­mal human inter­ac­tion as ulti­mately every com­pany gets the employ­ees they deserve.

What is your strangest job inter­view moment, as a recruiter or applic­ant? Share your thoughts with us in the box below.

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The end of Americanisation?

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Trav­el­ling around the globe the influ­ence of Amer­ican mar­ket­ing seems ubi­quit­ous. It is almost impossible to escape Amer­ican brands and enter­tain­ment. Mar­ket­ing scholar Theodore Levitt wrote that a “power­ful force drives the world towards a con­ver­ging com­mon­al­ity”1. This is no more appar­ent than meet­ings of the United Nations. Every­body wears suit and tie, rather than their own local garb.

Amer­ic­an­isa­tion is, how­ever, only skin-deep. For example, even though people of all cul­tures use iPods, they all listen to very dif­fer­ent sounds. Indi­ans will gen­er­ally prefer Bol­ly­wood over Hol­ly­wood, Muslims will listen to the Qur’an instead of Lady Gaga and  many Ger­mans prefer to listen to thigh-slapping Schlagers.

Influ­ence from dom­in­ant cul­ture is not lim­ited to the con­tem­por­ary times. Two thou­sand years ago, the Roman Empire influ­enced local tribes that eagerly adap­ted their occupyer’s cus­toms and habits, no bet­ter illus­trated than by this scene from Asterix and the Big Fight by René Gos­cinny and illus­trated by Albert Uderzo.

Scene from Asterix and the Big Fight (1971)

Scene from Asterix and the Big Fight (1971). Click to enlarge.

After the final sack­ing of Rome by the Van­dals in the fifth cen­tury, West­ern Europe gradu­ally developed a new cul­ture, cul­min­at­ing in the High Middle Ages of knights, schol­asti­cism, castles and cathed­rals.2.

With the cur­rent fin­an­cial crisis in Europe and the USA and asso­ci­ated shift of eco­nomic power to the Ori­ent we can jus­ti­fi­ably ask what will hap­pen when the Amer­ican hege­mony on the global eco­nomy wanes. Will we see signs of Hinduisa­tion or the cur­rently con­tro­ver­sial Islam­isa­tion of European cul­tures? Or will a new ver­sion of West­ern cul­ture emerge?

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Notes
  1. Levitt, T. (1983) ‘The glob­al­iz­a­tion of mar­kets’. Har­vard Busi­ness Review 61(3): 92–102. See also: Peter Pre­vos, Con­ver­ging Com­mon­al­ity and Busi­ness Strategy (Hypo­thet­icorp). [↩]
  2. Johan Huizinga, The Wan­ing of the Middle Ages: A Study of Forms of Life, Thought, and Art in France and the Neth­er­lands in the Dawn of the Renais­sance, trans. Fritz Hop­man, Lon­don, 1924. Scanned ver­sion from Archive.org. [↩]

The Manager's New Clothes

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The man­ager in his or her suit has become an arche­type in pro­fes­sional life around the globe. Even at inter­na­tional meet­ings, where people of vari­ous cul­tures gather, man­agers all wear the same type of cloth­ing, only dis­play­ing minor vari­ations in style and colour.

Busi­ness suits have of course no prac­tical pur­pose, but rather con­vey social mean­ing. The suit has become a sym­bol of power, a means to demarc­ate the white from the blue col­lars. Using clothes and other objects to com­mu­nic­ate mean­ing to other people is a nat­ural aspect of being human. An immut­able law of mar­ket­ing is that we don’t buy stuff for what it does, but for what it means.

Early in my career I was work­ing on a dredging site in Bangladesh, wear­ing my comfy heavy metal t-shirt and jeans. I was unex­pec­tedly asked to present to head office exec­ut­ives vis­it­ing from the Neth­er­lands. Bliss­fully unaware of my lack of appro­pri­ate attire and ignor­ing their vis­ible scep­ti­cism towards my expert­ise I was able to con­vince them of my recommendation.

It is of course not a secret that the rela­tion­ship between the clothes we wear and our actual abil­ity to be a good man­ager is not a neces­sary one. Soci­olo­gists Erving Goff­man, who ana­lysed human inter­ac­tion from a the­at­rical per­spect­ive, wrote more than half a cen­tury ago:

“People hold­ing cor­por­ate pos­i­tions are blind­ing them­selves and oth­ers to the fact that they hold their jobs partly because they look like exec­ut­ives, not because they can work like exec­ut­ives”1.

In the field of con­sumer beha­viour, the clothes we buy are often seen as the res­ult of our life­style, demo­graph­ics and other vari­ables. Soci­olo­gists, how­ever, have a reverse logic and see the clothes we wear as the cause of beha­viour. Research has con­firmed that we use objects such as cloth­ing to com­pensate for actual abil­ity to act in a cer­tain role.

It has been found that MBA stu­dents less likely to be suc­cess­ful in pro­fes­sional life (based on grade aver­ages) are more likely to look the part.2.

With this in mind it is inter­est­ing to note that quite often the smartest people are por­trayed in movies as eccent­ric, devi­at­ing from the expect­a­tions, but accep­ted because of their abilities.

Cloth­ing as a means to com­mu­nic­ate actual and aspired social status is part of what makes us human and after my exper­i­ence I quickly learnt to adept to the expect­a­tions of pro­fes­sional life. The best way to end this post is with the words of the bard:

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely play­ers; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts …” (As You Like it).

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Notes
  1. Erving Goff­man (1959) The present­a­tion of self in every­day life, Pen­guin, Lon­don. [↩]
  2. Solomon, Michael R.: The Role of Products as Social Stim­uli: A Sym­bolic Inter­ac­tion­ism Per­spect­ive, The Journal of Con­sumer Research 10(3), volume 10, 319–329, 1983. [↩]

The Pitfalls of Culture Change

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Cul­tural change is a pop­u­lar past-time among con­tem­por­ary man­agers. The prom­ise that many man­age­ment books make is that chan­ging your organisation’s cul­ture will lead to organ­isa­tional success.

Man­agers eager to impress their dir­ect­ors will invari­ably imple­ment a cul­tural change pro­gram with the anti­cip­a­tion that it will increase pro­ductiv­ity, prof­it­ab­il­ity or any other noun end­ing in –ty. This prom­ise is made on the premise that suc­cess­ful organ­isa­tions all have a ‘good’ culture.

The idea that a good or strong cul­ture will improve busi­ness res­ults is also logic­ally non­sensical. The claim that a strong organ­isa­tional cul­ture will improve per­form­ance is tau­to­lo­gical. Any qual­i­fier of the word cul­ture will inev­it­ably be self-referential.

Inter­est­ingly enough, most cul­ture change pro­grams fail!

The reason most cul­tural change pro­grams fail is because cul­ture is an epi­phen­omenon of human inter­ac­tion. This means that cul­ture as such does not exist., it is a men­tal con­struct. Cul­ture is the effect of some­thing and can not be the cause of any­thing. The only place where cul­ture changes are always suc­cess­ful is in micro­bi­o­lo­gical labor­at­or­ies, where nerdy sci­ent­ists in lab coats poke around in pet­rid­ishes  and con­ical flasks to develop medi­cine, bio­lo­gical war­fare or just because they need a job. Back to human cultures.

Cul­ture is the res­ult of a whole range of phe­nomen­ons, such as people’s val­ues and beliefs. Man­agers more often than not focus on these aspects of cul­ture. They try to change the val­ues and beliefs of their staff by pout­ing ‘inspir­ing’ rhet­oric and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment pro­grams. See our post on con­sult­ants for a view on this.

Cul­ture is an epiphenomenon

Cor­por­a­tions are gen­er­ally not demo­cratic organ­isa­tions and rely on a hier­arch­ical struc­tures. Cul­ture is thus driven from the top to the bot­tom and can there­fore only change to the limit of the val­ues and beliefs of the man­agers in charge. It is because of this that most text books on cul­tural change fail. In order to change cul­ture, man­agers need to first change themselves!

Because cul­ture is the effect of phe­nomen­ons it can not be the cause of any­thing — includ­ing cor­por­ate suc­cess. What can, how­ever, be the cause of cor­por­ate suc­cess are the aspects that under­pin a cor­por­ate culture.

How­ever, not all is lost. There are aspects of cul­ture that can be changed quite eas­ily. Other phe­nom­ena that cause cul­ture are rituals and cere­mon­ies, stor­ies and legends and mater­ial objects. This might sound like things that you only find in tri­bal soci­et­ies, but all cor­por­a­tions have them. Rituals and cere­mon­ies are expressed in the way meet­ings are con­duc­ted, birth­days are cel­eb­rated and everything in between. Stor­ies and legends relate to the his­tory of the cor­por­a­tion and mater­ial objects are the tools we use and the office we work in.

If a man­ager wants to change a ‘cul­ture’, then these phe­nom­ena are the start­ing point. Change these and the cul­ture will fol­low. Best example to illus­trate this are the often dis­cussed Google offices. By pla­cing people in the right envir­on­ment they will dis­play the right beha­viour. Super­mar­ket design­ers use these prin­ciples very suc­cess­fully. Telling the right stor­ies will cre­ate a sense of col­lect­ive and con­duct­ing the cor­por­ate rituals in the right way will act as an example of the desired behaviour.

The simple mes­sage is: don’t try to change a cul­ture, try to change the phe­nomen­ons that cause the culture.

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Esoteric Change Management

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Just as a new house owner likes to change the paint col­our, new man­agers like to intro­duce change. The lit­er­at­ure shows that most change pro­cesses do not achieve the object­ives they seek and a whole lib­rary of books has been writ­ten about the best ways to cre­ate and sus­tain change.

Man­aging change is more often than not about chan­ging the beha­viour of people. Man­age­ment speak uses words such as align­ment, cre­at­ing buy-in and other bend­able learn­ings. How­ever, as soon as the word ‘change’ is men­tioned in a work­place, people will raise their defens­ive shut­ters and try hard to keep doing what they have always been doing.

One aspect of man­age­ment where attempts to change beha­viour is very suc­cess­ful is mar­ket­ing. Good com­pan­ies are able to manip­u­late the atti­tudes and beha­viour of con­sumers so that they buy their product. Why does it work in mar­ket­ing but not so much in management?

Change man­age­ment strategy is more often than not exo­teric. This means that all details of the approach are revealed to the sub­jects of the change. Change man­agers, and more often than not con­sult­ants, openly explain how they will change behaviour.

Mar­ket­ing man­agers are a bit more devi­ous about their motives and use eso­teric tech­niques to change the beha­viour of con­sumers. Some adds openly admit to the tech­niques they use to change the beha­viour of con­sumers — best example is a Molson beer ad from some years ago:

Maybe change man­agers should take a leaf from the book of mar­ket­ing and use the soph­ist­ic­ated soci­olo­gical and psy­cho­lo­gical tech­niques employed to con­vince people to change their buy­ing behaviour.

This might raise the ques­tion whether it is eth­ical to change people’s beha­viour eso­ter­ic­ally. But all I have to say to that is that we change our beha­viour based on our inter­ac­tion with other people all the time. The anti-marketing crowd often under­es­tim­ate the intel­li­gence of con­sumers, which they por­tray as will-less vic­tims. Cre­at­ing change, whether in mar­ket­ing or man­age­ment is about cre­at­ing an envir­on­ment in which people feel com­fort­able to change, can identify with the pro­posed changes and feel that the change will provide them with benefits.

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