A brief chat about culture...

I fancy myself a bit of an expert on the culture of organizations.

I led or participated in over 50 Submarine Culture Workshops as a Navy reservist.  The program was adapted from NavyAviation Culture Workshops, something aviators had been doing since the early 1990's, and also is used by the Navy's Surface community.  These events are an intense two days with six two hour sessions conducted with a 15-20 person subset of each level of the crew, going from lowest levels to the highest (deparment head) with in briefs and outbriefs with the Commanding Officer (CO) and his leadership team.

The goal is to provide the CO with actionable insights into the culture of his ship.  My experience is we had great success and submarine COs found our output often validating, sometimes eye opening, but always useful.

In Corporate America, do we truly spend time understanding the culture of our organizations? Is this something we try to cultivate? Is the modern corporation just too big to develop a meaningful culture? A submarine has a crew of maybe 150 people, but can we develop a single culture in an organization of 5,000, 10,000, 300,000 people?

Having worked in companies of these sizes, I have observed that yes, they all had particular corporate cultures.  Those developed over many years, and became part of the DNA of the company.  Of course, as company size increases, sub-cultures spring up and take root.  They tend to contain elements of the core culture, but develop their own tentacles and peculiarities.  Mergers and acquisitions create changes and conflict and sometimes they mesh, and sometimes they don't.  Culture clashes can be the biggest impediment to a successful merger.  Corporate re-organizations often don't seem to take enough stock of the clash of cultures from the changes.  And people wonder why they fail.

Is your management aware of the culture of your organization? What do they do to cultivate a particular culture? Is this something that is even on their radar?

Since my audience is Asset Managers, and IT beyond that - does your management understand the culture of your organization or department? Is it something they think about when hiring people, when analyzing problems? When reviewing projects?

Your culture can be a make or break proposition. 

I have observed that the highest performing submarines generally had cultures that we would describe as positive and people-centered. Leadership teams who take an active interest in their people and who truly listen and communicate back to their crews, simply succeed.  It is possible for hard driving leaders to achieve results, but often it comes at the expense of a culture that borders on toxic, and that may be held together simply by the will of a layer of management lower who shields others from that toxicity.  These examples don't stand the test of time.  Burnout occurs or accidents happen.  People move on to other careers (in these cases, they leave the service). It's a dangerous strategy to pursue.

What's this have to do with IT Asset Management?

I've railed that tools are not the be-all, end-all for asset management.  I consider leadership commitment to be another essential element for ITAM success.  At the highest level of your organization.  You require a culture that respects and understands the benefits that professional ITAM brings.  You require leadership's trust in you, and you need to trust them.

The good news is that culture can change.  But culture changes require an understanding of where you are now, and the leadership commitment to change and move to a better place. 

Do you understand and can you describe the culture of your organization? 
Can your management? 
Is your culture the kind where ITAM thrives, or is it one where ITAM is either barely acknowledged, or pigeonholed or forgotten entirely?
Does your company have a Chief Culture Officer? Is this person effective?

Best to be honest about addressing this.  If you're in a situation where your culture is holding your team back, you need to have a discussion with your management and get it fixed (or, God forbid, move on).  Odds are it is not just the ITAM team being impacted.  One of the things I most heard when conducting workshops was "It was nice learning that other shipmates felt the same way I did." 

When we're all working in our own little corners of the organization, we don't talk enough to each other to understand that we may have serious issues of communications, trust, etc that impact us all.  Culture workshops bring people together to expose these issues, and I recommend it.  But, you can achieve the same by talking to people.

If you're fortunate enough to be in an organization with a culture that breeds success, good for you.  Remember what that looks like, and how it happens, because if you find yourself elsewhere, your experience may be required to change the next place.