October 2022 (1) – An umbrella and a mixing bowl!

JBALLPPOSTS WILL NOW BE ON SUJAVANA.

Whether you are a seasoned entrepreneur or a fledgling start-up, there is one thing that can make all the difference when it comes to sustaining your success. It is called Organisational Culture and it can take all shapes and hues.

Two shapes that you must learn to recognize are those that represent an umbrella and an upturned umbrella. I prefer to call the latter shape as a mixing bowl.

These shapes – the umbrella and the mixing bowl – illustrate two dimensions of how an organisation’s culture can impact its growth performance. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, but when the focus is on sustainable growth, the impacts from predominance of either need to be clearly understood. Let’s look at both from this perspective.

Umbrella Culture

Many of us grew up with this culture and are comfortable with it. The organisation acts as an umbrella to the teams working for it. The umbrella shields the people and the functional roles with its structures, systems, processes –the insulation from external disruptions, are usually very useful, even if they may not be permanent. The protective nature has an inherent disadvantage, in that it limits exposure to external vagaries in the environment. It blunts the resilience and agility to counter changes. Loss of risk appetite and easier management using elaborate governance and controls are highly encouraged. Managers and leaders get too comfortable under the buffer of the umbrella. Umbrella culture offers a nice and safe environment for a mediocre performance.

Mixing Bowl Culture

This is the umbrella culture flipped over.   There is a trend to stop across-the-board protecting and shielding.Instead there is an encouragement and support for exposure and out-of-the-box experimentation.     Besides holding the existing ingredients, the mixing bowl allows addition of new ones, even being generous and allow spilling over the sides.       Some good ingredients may be lost, but other good ingredients get added and they enrich the old remaining ones, creating new flavours, odours.     The unbridled exposure and agile response to what exists on the outside creates exciting opportunities to sustain and grow.        A solid bowl casing (shared values) a mixer (leaders) and hopefully a good spatula (processes) - these provide the governance frameworks that ensure that the broad visionary goals are realized in a fair manner.

 So what do you have in your organisation – an umbrella or a mixing bowl?