Organizational culture x supplier improvement program

By Amancio Moraes
July 26th, 2012

For about 4 years, I had been working in a program to develop preferred suppliers of a multi national company in its management and quality system improvement.

After program closed, I did my own evaluation about success and failures that I reached with that experience and one that frustrate me more was the fact that most of those suppliers did not keep lessons they receive into their organization

Looking for answer about my disappointment, I found out searching into wikipedia such paragraph I transcribe below:

“Mergers, organizational culture, and cultural leadership

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of the merging of two organizations is organizational culture. Each organization has its own unique culture and most often, when brought together, these cultures clash. When mergers fail employees point to issues such as identity, communication problems, human resources problems, ego clashes, and inter-group conflicts, which all fall under the category of "cultural differences".

One way to combat such difficulties is through cultural leadership. Organizational leaders must also be cultural leaders and help facilitate the change from the two old cultures into the one new culture. This is done through cultural innovation followed by cultural maintenance.

• Cultural innovation includes:
  • Creating a new culture: recognizing past cultural differences and setting realistic expectations for change
  • Changing the culture: weakening and replacing the old cultures
• Cultural maintenance includes:
  • Integrating the new culture: reconciling the differences between the old cultures and the new one
  • Embodying the new culture: Establishing, affirming, and keeping the new culture”

Reasoning about that, I got some own conclusion:

• what exactly we did was somewhat related to merge culture of company I was working for, with culture of supplier company (even in a unconscious matter);
• assuming as true previous paragraph, the main point we needed work firstly, was convincing the supplier company board about importance and potential gains they could achieve with such program (and we didn't that accordingly).

Without a cultural leadership awareness, what happened was actually the [frustrated] results we reached, I mean, culture clash.

That culture clash resulted in such kind of lost time applied in training and experience within suppliers environment.

That is why the success obtained in our company was quite different from those noted in its suppliers.

Thus, lesson I got from that is:

- it is not enough know a lot about technical and/or managerial knowledge without complementary knowledge about people, mainly in regarding to cultural behavior and leadership.

Something good and efficient within a environment can do not work accordingly in other one.

Therefore, before starting some improvement program, ask to yourself and mainly to the board of "client" that will be working on, about what he/she think about such intention.

Without acceptance and commitment to change their organizational culture, almost nothing will be changed toward improvements.