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The Meaning and Importance of Culture for Project Success
- Lawrence Suda
By Simon Sarkis
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Dr. Lawrence Suda, President/CEO of Management Worlds, Inc., presented “The Meaning and Importance of Culture for Project Success”. Mr. Suda explains the beliefs, expectations, moral ethics, and cultural background constituting an organization’s “core culture”. Mr. Suda pointed out four types of core culture that frame and characterize every operational organization. The four core cultures are collaboration, control, cultivation, and competence.
Every organizational culture incorporates a set of beliefs, values, expectations, and assumptions defined and applied by its working members and leaders. Nevertheless, a structured and defined organization might consist of subcultures nourishing its main core culture. These subcultures grow proportionally to the relative size of the main organization, employee diversity, and the geographical location of the organization. Mr. Suda’s concept, or “organization categorization” for project/program managers and functional (service pool) managers, is based on Dr. William E. Schneider’s research work on organizational psychology published in 1994, titled “Why Good Ideas Fail: The Neglected Power of Organizational Culture”.
Looking at the four main organizational cultures, a “collaborative” culture favors an atmosphere of harmony, inter-communication among project members, diversity, and synergy. The management style in this culture is democratic and seriously depends on experience records and the trust built among the members. The disadvantage of this type of culture might be its proneness to short-term thinking. Mr. Suda notes examples of collaborative cultures such as Southeast Hospital, Goldman-Sachs, and CRS Sirrine, known also for embracing and managing diversity.
A “control” culture organization favors standardization, discipline, stability, and order, but lacks in communication and personal involvement. Project members become task-oriented and turn into bureaucratic officials. However, its advantages include proficient planning, realistic decision-making, and eventually gaining a dominant position in the market.
A “competence” culture defines an organization with a high level of capability and an objective of pursuing excellence. This culture focuses on setting high expectations, recruiting the best team, setting incentives for the purpose of motivating efforts, and offering a vision to others. Weaknesses for this type of culture can be an unsatisfiable leadership and an organization where winning becomes emotionally driven. To illustrate, Mr. Suda listed Citicorp, the Four Seasons Hotel, and Intel, known for setting high performance standards, encouraging creativity, and promoting individual accomplishments.
Last, a “cultivation” culture seeks potential growth, fulfillment, and enrichment for its team members. Management operates in a stress-free environment. Hence, decision-making encourages commitment, participation, and inspiration, and only requires the ability to adapt to the group. Its weaknesses could be an organization where projects may not always finish on time and a proneness for playing “favorites”. 3M and Herman Miller are examples.
Finally, in order for a project manager to succeed, he or she needs to establish one strong and unified culture in his/her workplace, where it is possible for subcultures to grow and enrich the predominant culture. A successful project manager must ensure a unified goal for the team and clearly communicate the views and visions of the culture organization to the stakeholders and perspective employees. Unquestionably, “success” remains the only common desired outcome for all four of these cultures.
Observe the figure below and guess which one(s) is NASA’s 2006 core culture?
Then, which culture in this figure describes best your workplace environment?
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Curator:
NASA Official:
Last Updated: May 9, 2006 |
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