Organizational culture is complex, and according to many experts, not well understood. EHS professionals often think about culture in terms of safety. Yet, while safety is clearly important, the topic of culture is all-encompassing.
An area that I continue to explore is how EHS departments and their professionals can impact overall organizational culture. Said another way, how can you build and leverage your EHS culture?
I recently heard Professor Ed Schein of MIT, regarded as an organizational culture pioneer, speak. The title of his lecture was, “From Managing Organizational Culture to Leading Multicultural Teams.” He discussed the ways in which his thoughts on organizational culture have evolved over the past several decades and reviewed some of the material in the soon-to-be-released 4th edition of his landmark book, Organizational Culture and Leadership.
Schein suggests that it is no longer enough to talk about organizational culture simply in terms of an organization; rather, with globalization and advances in information technology, the concept is now multi-dimensional. He identifies four Cultural Units of “organizational culture”: macro-cultures (e.g., country, region); organizational cultures (e.g., the company); subcultures (e.g., a division or business unit); and micro-cultures (e.g., a work team or department). In a similar fashion, EHS management in an organization has evolved, with numerous dimensions.
I’ve shared the thoughts of Betty Sue Flowers and Peter Senge regarding what they label as the current Era of Ecology (1/14/10). I’ve also talked a lot about management systems and their value way beyond third-party certification. Building on the concept of EHS professionals as change agents, Shein’s insights provide a framework (the four units) for EHS professionals to impact their organizations well beyond their normally conceived influence (e.g., a new dimension). Leveraging the macro-level issues of sustainability and corporate responsibility and using management systems as a vehicle at the micro- and sub-culture levels, real impact can be made.
In a Harvard Business Review article from March 2002, titled “The Anxiety of Learning,” Schein writes, “Transformational Learning requires something more than profound individual learning. Indeed, one of the greatest business challenges is to find some models for how a whole organization can learn.” He goes on to say, “the phrase learning organization has become a handy label to talk about almost any company. The fact is, we don’t know a lot about organizational learning. We don’t know how to systematically intervene in the culture to create transformational learning across the organization.”
With an expanded, multi-dimensional concept of what it means to be an EHS professional, with systems thinking and organizational learning skills, it may be that the illusive key suggested by Schein lies within the EHS department and its professionals.
© Redinger EHS, Inc. (2010)