Contents

 by Marc Wright

Understanding your organisation’s culture is a key step in developing your internal communication strategy. Every company has its own culture and, if not understood and recognised, this culture will undermine your internal communication campaigns.

This section examines the four corporate culture types and how to adjust your internal communication strategy to be more effective within each.

Fons Trompenaars, in his seminal book 'Riding the Waves of Cultural Diversity', identifies four types of cultural diversity among corporate cultures:

• Guided Missile

• Eiffel Tower

• Familial

• Incubator

His work, written in association with Charles Hampden Turner, is based on understanding cultural differences within multi-nationals and across national frontiers but these findings are also useful if you work within a single country.

Guided Missile culture

This describes the company that is guided by objectives. These cultures are strongest in the US, the UK and The Netherlands. It is now the dominant business culture in the UK – particularly in the service, technology, media and communication sectors - and has replaced the older ‘command and control’ cultures, where staff were expected to do as they were told.

Command and Control was prevalent in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, when the majority of senior managers had either fought in World War II or had done military service. They exported their behaviours and systems from the military straight into management practices and government departments. Command and Control cultures tend to use communication to give instructions and lay down rules of behaviour. Such cultures can be extremely efficient (particularly in warfare) but the rise of an enquiring, well-educated workforce with a stronger sense of self has meant that such cultures have melted away in the UK. They are only really found in the armed forces and some financial services industries, where compliance is more important than initiative or customer service.

Guided Missile cultures are where the objectives of a particular project or mission are paramount. Here, staff are rewarded and focused on initiatives to move the business forward. When managers make decisions they will tend to be guided by targets set for their project rather than by the views of those working on different projects, no matter how senior.

What’s good about Guided Missile cultures is that managers feel a high degree of ownership and are able to cut through and across departments to get the task done. Results are faster than in other cultures and there is greater flexibility as people work in smaller, sometimes virtual, teams to get the job completed.

What could be better is the complexity in a business that sometimes results from managers following separate agendas. These cultures, being target driven, can create high levels of stress and over-working in staff who strive to achieve the various objectives and key performance indicators they have been set.

So how do you thrive in a Guided Missile culture if it's foreign to you?

• Align yourself to key projects

• But hold onto the bigger picture

• Set yourself measurable and achievable targets.

Communication programmes in such cultures tend to become quite tactical, being designed to support whatever initiative is top of the agenda. Managers may have little time for communication projects that are company-wide as they will see them diluting the attention of teams that they would prefer to stay focussed. If you want to get their support and a share of their resources, then align yourself to the key projects which need communicating. Concentrate, for example, on a new sales incentive plan, on health and safety issues or on a share-save scheme, which needs to attract the attention of large numbers of staff to be successful. If you spend your time communicating projects that are not seen to be important to the business, then you and your department will lose credibility.

However, one of the challenges of the guided missile culture is that a company can easily lose sight of the bigger picture amidst the complex reporting lines of matrix management. There is a real opportunity for communication managers to work with the CEO to communicate the Big Picture, which shows where all the initiatives are heading. What binds the targets together? Where do all the initiatives fit? Read about creating or revitalising your own Big Picture; your boss will readily support that kind of initiative.

And liase with your HR department to see if you can bring alive your organisation’s balanced scorecard by making all those targets available on-line so people can see how the success of their projects add to the company’s overall mission and performance.

Eiffel Tower cultures

Strict hierarchies are called Eiffel Tower cultures by Trompenaars because they are tall and inflexible and found mainly in France – although German companies can share many of these multi-layered characteristics. Instead of being target- or project-focussed, here it’s the relationship you have with your boss and your position in the hierarchy that drives management behaviours.

These cultures are very effective and strong; they are among the most successful organisations in Europe. However, they can be slower to react to change and this can be a problem when working in areas which require employees to be able to bend the rules to get the job done, or where there is a higher degree of ambiguity.

In rigid hierarchies, information is power. The communication professional, therefore, can be blocked by senior management’s desire not to tell staff too much.

To counteract this tendency:

• Cultivate side-to-side and bottom-up communication channels

• Develop both objective and measurable feedback channels

• Develop a senior champion for communications.

The Eiffel Tower model encourages communication in a top-down cascade model. By developing your feedback channels, you can beat the hierarchy at its own game. When feedback is objective and can be measured, it becomes a very effective tool for changing management behaviours. Imagine if your managers were giving messages directly to customers: the manager who alienated customers through poor or misleading communication would not stay long in the hierarchy as soon as sales began to suffer. What is measured dictates what gets done so, by measuring feedback rather than stifling it, you can use information to permanently improve the quality of internal communication. 

Because hierarchical cultures are driven from the top, it is essential to get a senior champion for communication. Look for outside appointments who come from a different culture. These senior executives are more likely to already have been converted to the power of internal communication.  Cultivate these champions and ask them for advice and mentoring. Then use examples from their part of the business to influence executives who are poor or unwilling communicators. The best champion is always the CEO so you need to develop their support.

It is no coincidence that more and more leaders of business consider strong communication skills to be an essential part of their personal toolkit. If your CEO is not a communication advocate, then perhaps they feel their own performances are not as good as they would like. Develop a programme of speaker training for your top executive and hire the best scriptwriter you can find to support them.

The Familial Culture

The Family or Familial culture is very widespread in Southern Europe, South America and much of the Far East. Here, the corporate culture takes its cues from the family, with its complex interweaving of influence and patronage.

Managers will make decisions in these cultures with reference not just to their line boss but also to the person who has sponsored their career or for whom they have worked in another part of the organisation. The culture relies heavily on mutual dependencies and trust.

Because the lines of loyalty are multi-layered, these types of company can be very flexible: if a key manager leaves, there is a network of ‘relatives’ who can take the strain. These cultures put a great deal of emphasis on honour, on keeping one’s word and on reputation.

Family cultures have deep roots so although they can appear flexible, they are loathe to cut away from the past. As a professional communicator you can match this style by:

• Communicating through example rather than by instruction

• Cultivating stories and legends to suit your cause

• Using celebrations and events.

Staff and colleagues are influenced not so much by what senior management say – as in an Eiffel Tower culture – but by what they do. When senior management promote and reward, it can often be in the face of statistical evidence. Where a ‘Management by Objectives’ culture will reward for attaining clear, concise goals, in a Family culture you can get promoted because you are liked; because the organisation feels that you fit and could do well in the future.

Loyalty from the bottom-up is often rewarded more than performance. Disloyalty to anyone is frowned upon. This gives rise to the archetypal ‘saving of face’ that is so remarkable in Far Eastern corporate cultures.

Internal communication in such cultures can become, therefore, anodyne and self-serving. Few managers are openly criticised, and information can degrade into mere propaganda. So rather than coming out with blunt and unwelcome messages, communicators turn to stories that can illustrate the message you want to get across without having to state the bald facts.

Stories have a strong potency in Family cultures. Exploit the Family culture’s love of celebrations and special events to create significant moments that can accelerate change in your organisation.

Incubator Cultures

Incubator cultures are named after the incubator companies in Silicon Valley that developed with the rise of IT and the dot.com boom. It describes a culture where the idea is king and where people come to work to fulfil themselves. Just look at the pizza-and-sleeping-bag cultures of Yahoo and Google, where staff are motivated by creating an ever-better search engine.

Management consultancies such as Accenture, IT providers such as Microsoft and Apple, and broadcasters such as the BBC, are full of individuals who get out of bed in the morning to follow an idea rather than a pay cheque. While these can be very exciting environments in which to work, for the communication manager, the job of internal communication is like herding cats. This is because everyone feels themselves to be an expert in communication; in fact, they are only good at communicating what is of interest to them.

So how do you communicate successfully in an Incubator culture?

• Develop a believable, authentic voice

• Encourage fanatics

• Use experiential techniques.

In Incubator cultures, hyperlinks undermine hierarchies - which means that anyone can find out the information they need without having to go up through the information chain to get it. This means that top-down communication ceases to work. Your own people leak like a sieve and external commentator and message boards have as much – or more – authority than your internal channels.

It is therefore essential to avoid spinning or obfuscation in any of your media channels. Tell it like it is or, if your can’t, then say nothing. Incubator cultures are full of noise because they trade on ideas. Your task is not to add to the information but to attract attention to the information you want people to focus on.  Blogging is a powerful tool - allowing satff and colleagues access to your genuine unfiltered thoughts in your web diary.

Use Open Space Technology.  This is a technique (sometimes known as an 'unconference', which allows delegates to drive the agenda at your next management meeting. If your people spend most of their lives on the internet or intranet, then get them to come to a live event, where they have to leave their terminals behind. Use strong visual imagery, tastes, smells and sounds to reinforce your key messages. Don’t depend on e-mail. Use story-telling, interactivity, viral videos – anything that engages the senses that are not being used for most of your people’s working hours.

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