Ed Schein is the Professor Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. He has a Ph.D. in Social Psychology and worked at the Walter Reed Institute of Research for four years before joining MIT, where he taught until 2015. He is extensively published, with books including Helping and Humble Enquiry, which won the 2013 Business Book of the Year Award from the Department of Leadership of the University of San Diego. He recently published Humble Leadership: The Power of Relationships, Openness, and Trust, authored by his son, Peter Schein, and himself. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award in Organization Development from the International OD Network.
Peter Schein is a Strategy Consultant in Silicon Valley, assisting start-ups and expansion-phase tech companies. He has more than twenty years of experience in corporate development, product strategy, and marketing—developing products and services for Apple Computer, Inc. and Pacific Bell in his early career. Peter has developed an in-depth understanding of organizational culture challenges from growth in innovation-driven enterprises. He has a Bachelor’s degree in Social Anthropology with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University and a Kellogg MBA in Marketing and Information Management from Northwestern University.
Ed and Peter join me today to decode organizational culture. We break down the initial culture models, including their structure, living history, and practice, as well as the values and behaviors thereof. We discuss how to get a sense of your company culture to understand, label, and deal with it. We explain how your company climate differs from your company culture and why it is vital for organizations to build a usable vocabulary. We highlight the main characteristics of today’s successful leaders, including an aptitude to recognize the culture they are within and identify the things that will allow them to shift it toward new values. We also explore a helpful wave metaphor for cultural change.
“The structure and practice of culture are in a continuous and reciprocal iteration of each other.” - Peter Schein
This week on Insert:Human
- The evolution of organizational culture and its comparison to character and personality
- The components of the initial model of culture
- The three levels of cultural practice: macro cultures, social cultures, and technical cultures
- How to observe, capture, and label the current state of your culture with active, passive, and constructive behaviors
- How leadership creates culture and the issue of mature cultures limiting the type of leadership organizations will accept
- How the pandemic has created a positive adaptation through a collapse in professional distancing and the re-humanization of organizations
- The meaning of humility and embracing the fact that you don’t have all the answers
Resources Mentioned:
- Book: Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
Connect with Ed and Peter Schein:
- Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute (OCLI)
- OCLI on LinkedIn
- OCLI on Twitter
- Book: Helping
- Book: Humble Inquiry
- Book: Humble Consulting
- Book: Humble Leadership
- Book: Organizational Culture and Leadership
- Book: The Corporate Culture Survival Guide
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