Author: Mr. Biswaroop Mukherjee, HR Head – Commercial Vehicle Business Unit, Tata Motors

“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast,” Peter Drucker, revered management guru, said in 2006.

The implication behind these words still holds – even the best-thought-out business strategy can be rendered ineffective without the right culture holding the organisation together in a more powerful embrace.

In the world of business, culture is the ‘how’ of work getting done in an organisation and shows up in core values, behaviours, beliefs and assumptions that prevail in matters of importance. In other words, it reflects how the workforce as a collective behaves in delivering on the needs of customers.

Balancing the strengths and perils of culture
The association between business and culture has been long established. A 1992 study by John Kotter and James Heskett found that the best performers over time are organisations that have nurtured a strong and adaptable cultural mindset. In contrast, the lack of a performance-enhancing culture can drastically hold back the organisation’s overall growth, be it revenue, employment, income generation, or stock positions.

Thirty years after the Kotter-Heskett study, a strong culture continues to hold the keys to organisational performance. In these times of great uncertainty, the influence of culture on business performance cannot be emphasised enough. A majority of senior executives (~70%) who were part of a PWC Culture survey believed that culture was at the heart of their change initiatives making a real impact as well as giving them a continued edge over competitors, particularly during the global pandemic.

From an employee standpoint, those who expressed optimism about their workplace culture were nearly four times more likely to feel engaged at work than others who believed otherwise, according to research.1 On the flipside, actively disengaged employees can be costly as revealed in Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report2 – the loss in productivity could be upwards of 8 trillion dollars.

Empowering culture
Every organisation has an inherent culture, influenced by its philosophical bent, beliefs, and goals. This culture significantly impacts organisational performance

Methodologies such as Large Scale Interactive Process (LSIP) can be valuable to help kick-start an organisation’s cultural transformation journey. LSIP approaches cultural transformation and activation based on the Model of Change proposed by Dannemiller Tyson Associates.3

The model takes into account, dissatisfaction (D) with the organisation’s present situation which necessitates change in the first place, the vision (V) or a positive picture of future possibilities, the first steps of change (F) that can be taken towards this vision and the natural resistance (R) to change.

As per this model, for any successful change to take place, the product of D, V and F must be greater than R to tackle the barriers to change or in short, D x V x F > R.

At Tata Motors, we have drawn inspiration from LSIP methodology to shape our Culture Connect program. Our cultural transformation journey began in 2020 when our employees co-created the strategic direction we chose. Our culture credo pivots around being bold and empathetic, building an owner mindset and solving together. The LSIP framework helped drive change associated with these pillars and enabled employees and leaders across the organisation.

As part of this, 25 workshops were conducted resulting in 120 projects that have brought about notable cultural transformation including role modelling behaviour.

We were able to bring together all employees who hold a stake in the change journey or will be impacted by it, thus allowing us to move quickly and effectively. Also, every participant involved was aware of the events unfolding at a given point in time.

Achieving an organisation-wide cultural transformation
For large enterprises, overcoming the resistance to cultural transformation itself can be a massive undertaking. How can organisations ensure that every employee across the organisation understands, behaves and lives the cultural credo? How can the key tenets of the credo permeate into the organisational structure so that every member of their vast workforce is guided by the same cultural North Star?

The answer lies in the involvement of leaders. The success of such transformational journeys relies heavily on business managers and leaders picking up the mantle and driving the culture credo deep into the organisational setup. This was corroborated by a PWC survey4 that showed the tone of the leadership as the premier cultural enabler.

In our cultural transformation journey too, our top-down approach and focused reviews paid off thanks to the keen interest and involvement of our leaders in the change management effort.

Leaders and Organisational Culture
In the words of Edgar Schein who introduced a holistic outlook toward organisational change, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do not manage culture, it manages you and you may not even be aware of the extent to which this is happening.”

According to him5, measures, rewards, controls and other tools can help leaders bring change. Their impact is determined by the ability to allocate resources and rewards, oversee performance and make decisions around hiring and retention policies.

In essence, culture is an ongoing journey that must be curated relentlessly. Leadership is, therefore, paramount in navigating and enabling the evolutionary change that will become necessary for the organisation to be future-ready.

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