Do You Need A Chief Culture Officer for Your Organization

I walked in to the first meeting with the leadership team after joining the new organization. Everyone in the meeting room was pecking away at their laptop or staring into their smart phone. I had met most of them during my "new hire orientation". Yet none of them made any eye contact or stopped to acknowledge a new member joining the team.Did they not remember meeting me, I wondered.

The CEO walked in and announced the agenda. No one looked at him either (so it wasn't about me) and kept on typing even after the meeting started. They were all alternating between answering emails, surfing the net and using the internal chat software to ask each other questions. No one spoke during the meeting unless they had to answer questions raised by the CEO. The meeting ended, and everyone picked up their laptop and walked back to their cabins without a word. It had been scheduled for 30 minutes and ended in time. All the three items on the agenda had been covered. All this was different from what I had experienced in other companies where I had worked.

After the meeting, the CEO called me to give me my first assignment. He said, "As part of the human resources team, you are the chief culture officer." What was I supposed to do, I asked him."Tell me what behaviors strike you as odd and those that require change to make this company a place that attracts talent."I told him that there seemed to be no human connection among the team members. They were physically in the same room, but had no involvement with either the agenda or their peers. The atmosphere of the meeting room was as cold as a surgical table.He replied, "People are expected to multi-task. They all have to take notes during the meeting. It is just that they are using their laptop to type away. You will get used to it.

"The culture of a company is just the invisible set of norms that guide the behavior of everyone in the team. It is not visible to those who have been there for a while and have accepted the way things get done in the organization. Actions get performed for their symbolic value and become well established rituals like rewarding someone for their years of service to the company. The symbolic value of the ritual can sometimes overtake the logical boundaries.

In one company I worked for, the "New Year party" was celebrated in the first week of December. The New Year was still a month away, I mumbled. My colleague overheard my mumble and said curtly, "That is the way we do things in this place. Get used to it."Every new employee gets this magical gift of being able to see the culture of the organization for a few days or weeks after he or she has joined. It is like a magic spell that wears off after a while. After that the new employee starts accepting as "normal" what once seemed "strange".

Before that happens, ask them to describe what they found different in their new colleagues' behavior when they first walked in. This is a precious gift that you can use to decide if there are some parts of the culture that need to be tweaked. That is never an easy task and getting an early start may be an advantage.I had found the behavior of my new colleagues "strange" because in my mind I was comparing it to the way meetings used to be in my previous organizations. Even the most sombre discussions used to give way to banter and humor among colleagues. Everyone had an opinion and was eager to voice it, resulting in meetings that would always run longer than scheduled. I am sure, someone would have found that culture strange too. I was used to it and accepted that as the norm against which I evaluated my new colleagues.

Google added 'chief culture officer' to head of HR Stacy Sullivan's job title in 2006. Staples appointed John Burke in the chief culture officer role to champion its approach to ethics, environmental sustainability, community relations and diversity, and inclusion. Should you have one in your company?Culture is how each employee behaves every day. The chief culture officer cannot influence daily choices that employees are going to make as they go about their work.Unless every employee sees himself as the chief culture officer, no behavior will be practiced by the majority of employees. But it is only the new employees who can point out dysfunctional elements of culture. Tenured employees need to leverage these magical moments before they decide to make the new hire a member of the culture club.

First Published in The Economic Times 23 April 2013