Every organization has a distinct culture defined by its history, norms, values, and behaviors, and every team in an organization develops its own subculture.  Learning to read a culture and adapt your style to fit (or at least complement it) is essential to success regardless of your level or role.  It’s also something that can be honed as a skill through increased awareness and consistent application of a few basic approaches.

Consider how important it is to accurately read a culture in these situations:

  • If you are a job seeker, your ability to quickly and accurately assess an organization’s culture can spell the difference between a great career move and disaster.  There’s not much worse than showing up at your new job only to know by lunch that you’ve made a horrible mistake.
  • Informal leaders such as Product and Project Managers are responsible for brokering relationships and agreements across organizational and team boundaries. Success in these roles is a function of getting people to cooperate and collaborate towards common objectives.  A keen understanding of what makes each team tick is table-stakes in roles where you have all of the responsibility and little of the authority.
  • Salespeople and Business Development professionals must become masters of reading a culture as part of their mission to cultivate relationships and engage in activities that lead to revenue generation.   There’s not much worse than watching a sales rep miss the mark in a proposal or presentation as they alienate their prospective customer by showcasing their ignorance of the customer’s business or environment.
  • Change-agents (executives, leaders new to a company or team) must understand and respect an organization’s culture even when working to change the culture. Many an ambitious executive has fallen hard when attempting to change the world and openly ignoring how deeply people identify with the historical culture.   Ignoring a firm’s culture in pursuit of change is akin to ignoring your own DNA.  You might not like what/where you’ve come from, but you can’t fundamentally change it.
  • Teams managing post-merger integration fail all of the time on reading and respecting the culture of the acquired organization.  Increased awareness and accommodation of an acquired organization’s DNA might help improve upon the abysmal failure of most mergers to create shareholder value.


A few suggestions to improve your cultural read-rate success:

-Step one as you approach a new situation is to make certain that the notion of understanding the culture is front-and-center in your mind and on your to-do list.  Whether your mission is to fit in or to ultimately facilitate change or action, an accurate read of the culture is required.

-Leverage one of the most important mathematical relationships of nature, the 2:1 ratio.  You have two ears and one mouth and use them in proportion.  Translation: shut up and listen.  You’ll have plenty of time to talk down the road.  Listen to people talk about the firm, what makes it go, where its sense of pride comes from, what the legends are and are they about customer heroics, innovation successes, financial achievement and individual or group accomplishments.

-Hone your questioning capabilities.  This goes hand in hand with the 2:1 ratio (sorry about the mixed metaphor!).   You want to understand the leadership culture of the firm, and what drives the leaders.  Do people and teams talk about and take on (or skirt) the tough issues?  Is experimentation encouraged and how is failure dealt with?  How are priorities established and are they linked to broader organizational goals and strategies?

-Ask questions to gauge strategy awareness, perception of external forces and competitor pressures.  Look for consistency (or lack thereof) about thes big issues.

-Employ some of the most powerful and brief questions and cross compare answers.

What’s working?
What’s not?
What do we have to do to improve?

The common answers and the divergent thoughts speak volumes.

-Talk with long-time employees and ask them about the firm’s roots, evolution and opportunities for the future.  Talk to newer employees and ask them what the surprises have been since they joined the firm.

-Repeat all of the above as needed.

The bottom-line:

Ignore an organization’s culture at your own peril.  The business press is filled with great stories of noble but failed attempts to transform a culture through moral suasion and logic (see also Carly Fiorina and HP).  Regardless of your role or level, understanding the culture of your team or firm is critical to figuring out how to leverage the strengths of the culture to produce results and drive change.  Learning to accurately read the culture of teams and organizations is step one on your road to success.  Watch out for the plot twists!