It is an undisputed fact that to retain and hire the top talent, the 'in thing' for today's corporate rankings is the company culture. Before, During and After every interview, a good amount of time is spent on discussing the culture by potential and current employees.
For a company or a function in an intermediate and late stage, the culture is already defined, and the focus is on maintaining it and carrying it forward. The system itself throws out the non fitting ones. Its the early stage companies / functions, where the culture is being defined - its being nurtured for future. So an active thought needs to go into it.
Company culture is generally built around a protagonist with the shades of surrounding team. Think of a tea plant. The basic flavor is defined by the raw seed, but the varieties will depend on the soil it grew in, the sunlight it was exposed to, the temperatures it bore, and the rains it weathered. The final outcome would be a mixture of all these factors, but the biggest impact would be of the raw seed. Similarly a big contributor to any culture is one centric personality - and a culture is a vibration of the rhythm of that person's character.
Any extremity in the world always generate its opposite polarization. This rule applies to an individual's character too, and the response of the world to that individual. For e.g. a supportive and empathetic individual would earn respect of others but would not be able to drive a feeling of fear; a highly action oriented individual might find it difficult to sit in a box and strategize & vice versa. I charmingly call this as your biggest strengths are your biggest weaknesses too.
Now since culture is centered around an individual - it can get polarized too, if left unchecked. Each extremity in character would drive an ability and a handicap. So if the centric personality drives work through fear, it might be difficult to see self motivated outcomes from the team - all outcomes would be to mitigate the fear. Similarly if the centric personality is very collaborative - moving fast would difficult as it would require every one's buy in before moving. Luckily each of us are unique + have different types & balances of polarization.
What might this mean for companies (lot is still vague, but hopefully presents a framework):
a) If something is not working for the culture, change faster than later
Delays just make matters worse. The pros and cons of the character start settling in the organization culture. When you are trying to negate a con - that will also negate the pro related to that polarization. For e.g. if you are trying to take away fear from a culture, it will show in slowed down results. Now its always difficult to leave a benefit that you have got used to. We get addicted. The team gets used to produce results only in response to certain stimulus. So if you replace that stimulus, short term results will go for a toss. For e.g. You know cutting cigarettes would make you healthier, but its difficult to let go of that short term kick that you get. An organization is a lot bigger beast, and letting go of anything which is showing result becomes difficult and difficult - as a result of which the con side of it keeps getting ingrained further deeper into the culture. So overall the delay in any such decision will increase the probability of NOT TAKING IT.
b) Choose the right polarization (and the right balance) for your company / - In environments where the future directions are generally not clear - adaptive vs rigid polarisation might be the most critical polarization compared to a polarization based on aggression, fast decision making etc. An adaptive person would figure out the right mix of other characteristics for e.g. when to be supportive and when to be aggressive, when to be alarmed and when to keep calm etc. Any other polarization would actually limit the ability of organization somewhere in future. Similarly a factory with well defined (not be broken rules) would probably benefit more by a rigid perspective of same polarization.
After narrowing down on the key polarization, hints of other polarizations OR examples of demonstrating both perspectives of a particular polarization could be searched.
c) Change structure to split the centroid of culture in 2 balancing characters with one having a slight upper hand. This is very much similar to "Finding the right co-founder" blogs that you will find around. This particular way helps us overcome the flaw and boon of the extremity that humans generally possess - and smartly using this can help build a high performing and adaptable culture. Just that these 2 characters should actually be balancing - they should be able to confront when the other is going to an extreme.
On exploratory basis, this dilution of power could be extended to more folks. Not sure if it would work. Maybe some kind of hierarchially layered culture might also work
The word 'organization' itself says that it is all about organizing things in different patterns to make them work.
