Reputational Crises And Organizational Culture
Reputational crises frequently emerge from dysfunctional organizational cultures
. Long before a reputational crisis appears, the seeds for the crisis have been sown and cultivated deep within the organizations culture.
So what is organizational culture?
Organizational culture is a system of shared basic assumptions that helps people within the organization to cope with external forces, solve problems and pass along the learned methods for dealing with operational issues. In other words, the organizations culture describes its values, how it gets things done, what types of behaviors are allowed or not allowed, and the way it explains or doesn't explain problems to employees. Organizational culture is not visible per se, but it can often be sensed by the tone of the environment of the organization.
Examining an organizations culture will give clues as to why an organization has difficulty really solving problems.
Why do the same problems keep coming back?
Studying the attributes of an organizations culture assists in identifying the actual source of problems as well as crafting effective solutions. The actual source of the reputational crisis occurring today may be a set of assumptions or beliefs attributed to the organizations founder or to a management model used when the organization was first started.
Crises rarely emerge out of nowhere. With most reputational crises, the clues were clearly in evidence long before the crisis erupted. For many organizations, problem-solving involves finding the quickest and cheapest solution to make the presenting problem go away. The presenting problem is what appears on the surface. Dealing with the presenting problem is not necessarily dealing with the genuine problem. This type of superficial response rarely is effective.
Why?
Organizations often do not recognize that serious problems exist until either a crisis erupts or some other disruptive incident occurs that fully grasps their attention.
Problems are often ignored because the organizations board and management tend to be more concerned about production deadlines, operational issues or short-term/long-term performance. In other words, executives are so focused on operational outcomes that they cannot summon the political will to make difficult decisions. Delving into difficult decisions may include taking the necessary steps to get at the root of the problem. For many organizations, Band-aids are quicker, easier and sometimes more politically correct.
One of the most effective ways to reduce the potential for reputational crises is to fully solve problems within an organization, particularly if these problems relate to financial controls, human resource management or operational areas such as manufacturing. The genuine problem may be systemic and require a much more extensive examination and remedy.
A quick fix will make the obvious symptoms go away but the underlying problem will still exist because the decision-makers did not take the time to dig deeper to identify the actual source of the problem. For example, if you had a laptop computer that kept crashing, you might try replacing the hard drive or operating system software.
But what if that didn't work?
You would probably arrange for a computer technician to determine the underlying mechanical cause of the problem and make the necessary repairs. Replacing the hard drive or operating system software are superficial approaches that probably would work well unless the laptop was experiencing a larger mechanical failure.
Clearly, organizations are more complex than laptops. However, just as in the example of the laptop computer, superficial solutions applied to deep systemic problems do not render a satisfactory outcome.
Copyright (c) 2010 Peg Jackson
by: Peg Jackson
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