Key Takeaways:

• • Company culture is built through norms — and you see it most clearly when they’re tested.
    The norms a group follows will either support adaptability or reinforce resistance when change is needed.
  • Consistency is what makes culture work.
    Clear norms create reliability and structure — but over time, they can also make change harder.
  • People resist change because they trust proven methods.
    What once delivered results often becomes something teams are unwilling to question.
  • Don’t confuse principles with methods.
    It’s not the method that makes something successful. It’s the principle behind it — what you believe and how you apply it.
  • Principles should stay; methods should evolve.
    Leaders that reinforce this distinction make it easier for their teams to adapt, innovate and grow.

If you’re familiar with my work, particularly, Fostering Culture: A Leader’s Guide to Purposefully Shaping Culture, you know that I define culture as the atmosphere that results from the decisions a group makes in accomplishing its purpose. Put another way, culture is how the norms of the group make people feel. And workplace culture is most visible in how teams respond when something needs to change.

Norms are the understood practices of a team — simply “how we do things.” Teams have norms for everything from formatting invoices to quality assurance procedures to where coffee mugs go in the break room.

And people get really upset when someone goes against the norms: “Seriously, who left their mug in the sink again!?!”

What Are the Benefits of a Strong Company Culture?

The importance of norms goes far beyond keeping the break room clean.

Consistency is crucial in delivering quality products and services. We want customers to be able to count on us to deliver and to have the same great experience every time. For that to happen, we need standards.

Norms also make teams more productive. We rely on one another to do our part consistently so we can operate efficiently.

Teams that have worked together for a long time and really understand each other often speak in shorthand. They share experiences, work from a common understanding and can usually finish one another’s sentences so easily that they communicate with few words:

“Hey, the customer said they are having a problem with the thing again.”

“OK, so you’re going to check the…”

“Yep.”

“And then I’ll talk to…”

“Yep.”

“Got it.”

Teams with a high mutual understanding of norms are super effective. They have strong cultures.

But while strong company culture creates consistency, that same consistency can make change more difficult.

Here’s a different conversation:

“Hey, the customer said they are having a problem with the thing again.”

“OK, so you’re going to check the…”

“No, they said they want something different this time. We’ve got to come up with a different solution.”

“But that’s the way we do it. They’re going to have to just deal with it.”

“I’m not telling the customer to just deal with it.”

“We’ve always done it this way because it works. I’m not changing. You can figure it out on your own.”

Suddenly, the culture doesn’t feel so strong.

Where Do Company Norms Come From?

How did our norms become normalized? Every decision we make is based on our values and beliefs. Values are things that hold great worth to us, and beliefs are things we think are true or work to accomplish a goal.

Just as our values and beliefs drive us as individuals, they also shape our organizations. As groups, we coalesce around shared values and common beliefs about the most effective ways to work.

At some point, our team faced a dilemma and applied our beliefs about what would work best. If what we did worked, we kept doing it and it became a habit.

Except now, things have changed. The circumstances surrounding that decision all those years ago are different now. What was once best practice doesn’t work as well as it used to. Or maybe we can see something coming that may soon make how we do things irrelevant.

Understanding the Distinction Between Principles and Methods

One of the challenges we face is that we often confuse methods with principles. We apply principles (things we value or believe) to a problem to come up with a method to solve that problem. But when circumstances change and that method no longer works, we resist letting it go.

The issue is we’ve misread what is important. We’ve relied on the method as the solution to the problem, when what truly mattered was how we applied our principles.

“Principles are sacrosanct; methods are not.”

I have an entire chapter in my book Fostering Culture devoted to this misunderstanding. In it, I make the case that some principles are timeless and worth defending — and that they rightly inform our methods. But circumstances change and so our methods should change, too. We should hold tight to our principles, yet loosen our grip to be more flexible with the methods we employ.

It is not always easy, however, to differentiate between the two. We all have things we do that work for us — some methods may serve us well for an entire career. But confusing the two, and even worse, holding on to outdated methods, can create real risk. Conversely, understanding the difference enables teams to comfortably navigate change and thrive regardless of circumstances.

How to Build a Company Culture That Embraces Change

One of the three core values at our company is “Growth,” which we define as “Keep Getting Better.”

Inherent to growth is the creative destruction of old methods as a way to learn and develop better ways of doing things. This principle not only helps us expect and accept change, it compels us to create it.

In cultures that embrace growth, change becomes an expected part of how work gets done. It creates norms of behavior, such as questioning the status quo and challenging assumptions. It makes the dissenting voice accepted and even assured during conversations. Debate becomes expected, constructive and safe.

In this environment, innovation no longer becomes a threat to “the way we do things,” but an understood part of our culture. For example, market changes that challenge our business model are anticipated, and the fear of them becomes healthy instead of debilitating.

Company culture can either hurt or help during times of change. Groups that have strong cultures, where everyone knows how things are done, are very effective in stable environments, but the longer methods succeed, the more resistant people become to changing them.

That’s why it is vital that leaders continually differentiate between principles and the methods they drive. Doing so enables teams to understand the difference. Most importantly, groups that cultivate cultural norms that proactively cause change will build a culture equipped to weather uncertainty.

Questioning, testing and learning should always be part of how we approach growth and how we embrace change. When we work with our teams, we must speak to why we do things, not just how. Doing so helps remind them what we value. We must be intentional and disciplined about encouraging, even pushing, our teams to take on the tough, transformative work of innovation.

In the end, company culture amid change is defined by what a team holds on to: outdated methods or enduring principles applied in new ways. As leaders, we should always be thinking about — and reinforcing — the fundamental aspects of our company culture that allow us to keep getting better.

Learn more about how leaders can actively shape workplace culture in Fostering Culture: A Leader’s Guide to Purposefully Shaping Culture.

Shane Jackson is president of Jackson Healthcare^®, the trusted authority in healthcare talent and workforce solutions and one of the nation’s largest private companies. Under his leadership, the organization is recognized as an employer of choice, having appeared on the Fortune® 100 Best Companies to Work For® and Best Workplaces in Health Care™ lists; the PEOPLE® Companies that Care list; and earning both national and global recognition as an Inspiring Workplace.

A trusted voice in leadership and company culture, Shane’s work centers on how leaders shape culture through their actions — and how they can build environments where both people and businesses thrive. As a keynote speaker and author of Fostering Culture: A Leader’s Guide to Purposefully Shaping Culture and This Is the Thing: About Life, Joy, and Owning Your Purpose, he challenges others to live and lead with intention — aligning principles with practice and purpose with action.