It seems that no matter where you look these days, culture is making its mark. Whether it be re-branding the human resources department of your organization to people & culture, or diversity, equity & inclusion divisions popping up across organizations globally, or companies redefining their values around a culture of health & wellness, ESGs, SDGs, and so on and so forth.
While companies and organizations tackle this newfound obsession with culture, and we all have to learn more fancy acronyms, it might be worth asking the seemingly simple question: “what is culture anyways?” Understanding culture for what it fundamentally is can help your company, team, or community make better choices on how to describe and shape that culture, so it is more widely understood, more easily accepted, and perhaps most importantly; be easily explained across cultures.
Describing culture
As mentioned in the introduction, culture is a word that gets thrown around A LOT these days. But how often is the word itself actually defined?
Go ahead. Give it a shot. Describe culture. Take a minute. (Don’t google it!)
How did you do? If you said something along the lines of “a set of values, beliefs, traditions, norms, practices, laws, habits and customs of a specific group of people” you wouldn’t be wrong. But is that really all there is to it? And isn’t that already being too broad and generic anyways? Shouldn’t there be an easier way to describe it? Something more tangible and not so ambiguous and general?
Fons Trompenaars, a key thought leader in cross-cultural management consulting, says in his work “Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business”, that we should think about culture as a “way in which a group of people solve problems and reconcile dilemmas.” These problems and dilemmas, as described by Trompenaars, can be generally grouped into 3 basic categories: relationships, time, and environment. How a particular group deals with relationships amongst each other, how they deal with the concept and importance of time, and how they deal with the challenges faced by their external environments.
Think about your own culture, whether it be your national culture, or corporate culture. How are people expected to act to one another? For example, in most Asian cultures the act of living with your parents as a full grown adult and caring for them in their elderly years is seen as a completely normal and honorable thing to do. Whereas in most Western households the idea of living with your parents past the age of 18 and caring for them is seen as a joke. Your parents don’t want you to take care of them, they want to be rid of you! Get out of their basement!
How about how your culture treats the passage of time? Does your culture place more value on ancient traditions, passed down for hundreds of years? Or is all your culture can seem to talk about is colonizing Mars in the not so distant future?Cultures can be very "past" oriented or future oriented and of course somewhere in between.
And how about with respect to the environment? Does your culture have a natural remedy to cope with extremely cold weather? How about its design of skyscrapers to deal with massive earthquakes?
Through these 3 primary problems are the solutions then provided by all those who share them in common. The outcome is a culture. But it doesn’t stop there.
The 3 layers of culture
Culture, in essence, is not the fabric of life, but rather how we deal with life. Typically we only see culture for what it is on the surface: food, the utensils we use to eat that food, dances, dresses, the design of the clothes we wear and the homes we live in.
Imagine for a moment that culture was a giant iceberg, and these very tangible things such as food, dance, dress and so on were the upper part of the iceberg floating above the surface of the water. This is just scratching the surface of what culture actually is. It is simply the embodiment of how a specific group of people have dealt with and reconciled problems and dilemmas. Like the tip of the iceberg, it is visible and apparent. This is the conscious layer of culture.
The next layer down, just below the surface of the water are things like non-verbal communication, customs, and habits. Do you take off your shoes when you enter your home? Unless you are American (and in some cases even if you are American), the answer to that question is typically a hard yes. How about when you greet someone? Do you shake their hand firmly while looking them square in the eyes, or bow at a 90 degree angle? Well, that depends where you are from and who you are meeting, doesn’t it? This layer is typically easily explainable with some simple thought about how such norms and habits came about. Going back to the iceberg; if you were to put on a wetsuit and jump in the icy cold waters, you would be able to at least make out the size and shape of the iceberg with some effort. This is the subconscious layer of culture.
Perhaps the most challenging and also ominous layer is the deepest layer of culture. The largest and hardest part of the iceberg, deep in the dark, icy depths of the water. These are the unexamined beliefs, values and traditions. These are the things that “just are.” Most of us cannot explain or describe why these things are the way they are. They just are! These are the problems that are so regularly solved by your group that there is no longer a need, or even a memory, of why they needed to be solved in the first place! How can you discover this layer of culture? Typically when the answer to “why do you do ______ that way?” is “I don't know. Because that is the way we have always done it.” This is culture that permeates into the unconscious and thus lacks any sort of conscious reasoning. Like breathing, it has become fully automatic and something you know you are inherently doing without even thinking of it. Think superstitions, proverbs, urban legends, or folklore. Why is “the proof always in the pudding?” As a Native English speaker, all I can tell you is “I don’t honestly know! Because it just is.”
Conclusion
Hopefully this article has shown you the level of complexity that comes with describing and encompassing culture. It is no wonder that when we are in another country foriegn to our own we can go through so many stages from wonder to utter shock and disbelief. Afterall, we are not used to dealing with problems in the same way people native to that country are. Sometimes it can be intriguing, other times confusing, and sometimes absolutely infuriating.
Whether you are a global head of D&I for a multinational organization, or a manager of a four person team of individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds; when defining your culture don’t take lightly the depth and breadth of the word itself. Think first about how you want your culture to be defined based on how your group deals with relationships, time, and environment. Then test those solutions against the three layers of culture.
The concept of culture is so much more than just a couple of slogans thrown up on a wall. It is the very essence of how your company faces and deals with the unique challenges it is trying to solve. Culture is not something to be taken lightly. More so now than ever before. People are leaving jobs that they feel give them no fulfillment, sense of purpose or belonging. For many, work is now becoming much more than just a paycheck. It is becoming something that in an ever-connected world, needs to be an integration to a greater purpose beyond one’s self. That is why it is more important than ever to get it right in a world obsessed with culture.
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