A Two-Sided Business Culture

Posted on July 29, 2018 by Floyd Williams, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.

Ok, here’s the scenario. Let’s imagine a new deal has presented itself for your company, with a client in a foreign country. Understanding the organizational cultural of this country, it presents a dilemma when attempting to choose the individual who will lead the negotiation team to draft the deal. When we consider leadership in the context of corporate culture, (especially on an international level), the choice is not always so obvious. Which corporate culture is right for the company and its employees? You Decide? Do you pick corporate culture one or corporate culture two?

Corporate culture side one:

Let’s imagine that your company is driven by the bottom line. Their primary goal is to drive big profits. It’s understood that it’s all about getting the job done. It’s also understood that big profits mean big raises and big bonuses for everyone within the organization. Your company is known for rewarding their employees with huge salaries and bonuses when the company does well! This is what drives your company’s culture. Your company is built with Hoftsted’s cultural dimension of uncertainty avoidance in mind. That is, mistakes are not tolerated, and neither is taking risk.

Sophisticated Stereotypes are generalizations based on reliable and valid research, rather than personal experience. In this scenario, reliable research has uncovered that when working with companies from this particular country, their corporate culture does not promote women to the highest levels of leadership and would be very uncomfortable with your top female leading the negotiations. This country has adopted a social constructionism, promoting “gender inequality”. It is their unspoken language that assumes women have no place in high level business negotiations. Your company leaders understand how difficult it would be to change this cultural paradigm. Therefore, understanding the cultural mindset of this country’s leaders, your organization has agreed to forgo sending the most talented female negotiator, but will send her less experienced, less skilled, but promising male counterpart so as not to offend their corporate culture (wait do get angry yet!) However, it is understood within your company’s leadership team that this strategy does not reflect your company’s actual cultural mindset. Everyone in your company knows individual accomplishment is valued and believe in equality within the organization, but all agree to take this approach. After all, it will be huge raises and bonuses for everyone!

Corporate culture side Two:

Your company is driven by Lao-tzu leadership. That is, leadership that believes a leader is best when people barely know he or she exists. Your company’s primary goal is to serve and bring value to your clients. Your organization is driven by 2 GLOBE’s cultural leadership profiles. 1- Charismatic and value based leadership which is the ability to inspire and motivate followers through core values and high- performance expectations. 2 – Participative leadership which involves all stakeholders in decision making. Your organization has been very thoughtful about developing a cultural mindset to be one that develops leaders regardless of race, gender and any other non-performance related factors. Your company considers the cultural mindset of every potential client they seek to work with. Your organization always stays true to its corporate culture, even if it will jeopardize their ability to win business. Because of culture values, your organization has elected to send the most experienced and most talented negotiator, who happens to be a woman. They have invested much time and resources into her leadership skills, mentoring her within an incubator egalitarian culture which focuses on taking care of leaders individually and giving them the latitude to do their job. As a result, she emerged as the best qualified leader. Your organization is willing to take the risk of losing a business deal to protect this corporate culture. They practice future orientated cultural values, which invests in the future rather than in the present or past. They believe that demonstrating to the organization that they put people over profits will be more beneficial long term than getting a short term financial gain. Your organization see’s this choice as an opportunity to possibly influence and impact the national as well international corporate culture of companies to promote equality regardless of race, age, gender or any other non-performing factors.

So, the choice is yours! Which one do you pick as the right corporate culture in this context?