Culture Insights from Edgar Schein

Part Two – Leadership, Humble Inquiry & the State of Culture Work
Tim Kuppler: Hello, this is Tim Kuppler with Culture University.com. We’re very pleased today
to have with us Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus with MIT Sloan School of Management and
leading thought leader in the field of culture. Hello, Edgar Schein, we’re very happy to have
you for segment number two.

Edgar Schein: Glad to be here, Tim.

Tim Kuppler: Alright, in the first segment we talked a lot about what culture is, your approach
to deal with cultural issues and focus the efforts on problems and issues and effectively
manage those. In this section, we are going to talk a little bit more about leadership, humble
inquiry and trends in culture work that you’ve seen over your career. To start things out, you’ve
talked about culture and leadership being two sides of the same coin. What did you mean by
that?

Edgar Schein: When organizations start or when groups start there is always a leader who
has a preferred way of doing things and those preferences by definition are going to be
imposed on the group members. If you don’t like the way I run this group, I’ll replace you. The
leader’s values and preferences are the first ways that a group or organization does things and
if that works it becomes eventually the culture of that group. So in a very real sense, founders
and leaders create culture and therefore it also implies that one of the best ways of studying
culture of an organization is to find out what the value systems of the leaders really were. A
quick example, a very important one, when Ken Olsen created Digital Equipment Corporation,
it was all built on his values around engineering innovation which led bright people being given
a lot of freedom. When Tom Watson created IBM, it was all built on his concept of how you do
good sales and marketing. If you look at IBM today, it is still basically a sales and marketing
company, even though its products are computers. In the case of Digital, they never did
develop much sales and marketing because their products were so good and that turned out in
that case to be their demise. So that’s how leaders create companies.

Now if you look at IBM today, an old company, the way in which they’ve always done things
limits what a leader can do, even what defines a leader in that organization. So you can’t be a
Ken Olsen and walk into IBM and do it your way. The system won’t let you. The culture has
built itself around the Tom Watson rules. A good example of how that leads to culture
indigestion is when IBM bought Rohm, the small computer company on the West Coast. After
2-3 years, they divested it because they couldn’t really deal with the informality that was
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characteristic of the Rohm Company which was much more like a Digital and a Google and I
think it is appropriate to say it gave IBM cultural indigestion.

Tim Kuppler: The common culture clash.

Ed: Yeah, but the point is once IBM is IBM, once GE is GE, only certain kinds of leaders will be
tolerated. When Carly Fiorina came to Hewlett-Packard, she immediately raised hackles all
over the place because she was too flamboyant, she wanted to do expensive stuff, so that
limited the amount that she could do as a leader. So you can see that culture constrains
leadership in a mature company just as leaders create culture in a young company.

Tim Kuppler: Well your latest book is Humble Inquiry and in the first segment we talked how
leaders should focus on a business problem and I know this book gets into how to effectively
engage their organization in dealing with those problems. So what is Humble Inquiry?

Edgar Schein: Humble Inquiry is creating a climate in which you display through your asking
genuine questions an interest in the other person such that they will want to tell you the truth in
what really is going on. Now why is that important? Because I think the major pathology in all
organizations that I’ve seen is that upward communication is very faulty. Subordinates know
lots of things that would make the place work better or safer that they for various reasons
withhold. If you survey them and say why aren’t you telling your boss what is really going on,
they’ll say, well, one he shoots the messengers, two, I used to tell him but he never really took
any interest in it, or three, I tell him but they never fix anything, so I no longer have any
incentive to tell. Now, if I’m right that that is the problem, the only way to cure that is for the
boss to change his behavior, to go to that subordinate and engage in humble inquiry. To say to
that subordinate, “I’m really interested in what you see in how we can be safer and better and
what not, and I’m listening.” If the boss doesn’t do that, we are going to continue to have
accidents and low quality products because the information isn’t surfacing.

Tim Kuppler: I see how that can work really well with a leader going into a new role. But what
about the leader that’s been in the position that maybe has asked before and received
feedback and maybe not acted on it effectively, you know, when they do have a genuine
interest in using humble inquiry as an approach, then how do they go about it so the
organization doesn’t feel like it’s the same thing it was last time and it really is different?

Edgar Schein: Well I think all of us know how to be humbly inquiring. We do it with our friends
and relatives and children and our parents, so it’s not a skill we don’t have but when we take it
to the work place, for some reason we think we should now get still and formal. That after all
my employees are just employees, they’re not human beings. So the switch I have to learn to
make, if I’m an old leader and I’m dissatisfied and want to change this, I have to wake up to the
fact that these subordinates are people and I have to get interested in them. If I get interested
in them and curious, the behavior will become natural. It is not a new skill, it is applying an old
skill in a new setting and recognizing its relevance. Now in a lot of situations that may not
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matter because you don’t care whether the subordinate tells you stuff or not because you’re on
top of it. Where it will matter is where work is so complicated where the subordinate actually is
in a position to make a difference. If he or she doesn’t do the right thing, then quality or safety
will really suffer and in that instance you better recognize that this is a human being and if you
want them to really do the right thing, you have to treat them as a human being.

Tim Kuppler: After they try it the first time, I would assume the initial feedback may not get to
the root of the issues, because they are seeing new behavior from this leader. So when can
the leader expect that their subordinates are going to open up and really start to share the real
issues?

Edgar Schein: Well, there is no way I can answer that question, that’s going to be a local
situation. I think it’s very much dependent on the history of relationships between the leader
and subordinates and it may be a long learning process because the subordinates have been
pounded on in the past are not going to overnight change their behavior. I think it is a long
uphill fight. I don’t think Humble Inquiry is going to solve all the immediate problems, but I think
when an executive, let’s say a surgeon realizes how dependent he is on his tech. and his
nurse, realizes I’ve got to somehow make sure they will help me rather than subvert me will
have to begin a process of personalizing the relationship and I’ve seen surgeons do this.
They’ll start having lunch with the nurse instead of with his buddy doctors. So at some level it’s
a very simple process of personalization. Find out a little bit about who these people are, they
have lives, not some major change in behavior.

Tim Kuppler: Okay, so what gets in the way of leaders applying the approaches like Humble
Inquiry. Why don’t more leaders use these techniques?

Edgar Schein: The larger culture of management that says, once you’re a manager, now you
have the right to tell other people what to do which is really how a lot of young manager
behave. They think, “Okay, now I’m the boss, so I get to tell.” This culture of “tell” is very
congruent with western capitalist culture because our whole foundation is built on the higher
you go, the more you know and the more you can tell people what to do. The problem is, work
doesn’t resolve that way anymore. Work now is a highly distributed process where lots of
things have to play together for the product to go out the door and so it’s no longer a case of
where the manager can tell what to do, the manager now has to orchestrate and create
relationships and make sure everything works together. I don’t think very many managers have
figured that out. They still think they’re the boss rather than the orchestrator.

Tim Kuppler: Okay, It requires a lot of vulnerability, doesn’t it?

Edgar Schein: It makes them vulnerable but I think that vulnerability was there whether they
recognize it or not. It doesn’t make you vulnerable to ask and to be a humble inquirer. You are
vulnerable and the asking just makes it more visible. But paradoxically, that might actually turn
the subordinate on. If the subordinate realizes, “hey my boss is willing to own up to his or her
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vulnerability, I will be more careful and not to sabotage them, because I don’t want the whole
thing to get screwed up.” The nurse doesn’t want the patient to die, but she also wants the
feeling that this doctor isn’t going to yell and scream at me anymore. He’s going to have lunch
with me occasionally and treat me like a member of the team rather than some outsider who
has no place in his exalted world.

Tim Kuppler: I thought it was interesting you made reference to the general management
culture and how perceptions about that kind of shake people’s behavior to some extent and
then you gave the healthcare example. How do occupational cultures influence behavior?

Edgar Schein: If I go back to my original example of Digital and Ciba – Geigy. I referred to in
the other segment (Part 1 of this interview). In one case you are dealing with a bunch
electrical engineers, in the other case you are dealing with a bunch of chemists. They all have
regular roles and the have bosses and subordinates and what you notice immediately is that
their whole mentality is governed by whether they are engineers or chemists. They come from
different logic systems, they have different time tables, and the way they think is different and
that influences how the organizations work. So if you’re a General Electric and you have an
airplane engine division, don’t expect that it will work the same way as a consumer products
division. The people who are running those places have different occupational backgrounds
and that will influence how they manage and what they manage and as the world gets more
complex, not only will these occupations from time to time clash, but the cultures within which
people learn these occupations will also clash.

Tim Kuppler: So, management culture influences behavior, occupational cultures influence
behavior. What about national cultures and the work across cultural boundaries. How does that
influence behavior and how do you deal with those issues?

Edgar Schein: A good example is a company that says we’re now going global and we’ve got
these teams who are going into different countries and each team will have members from at
least 2 or 3 different countries. That’s happening also in surgical teams. You’ll have a
Caucasian surgeon, a Latino anesthetist, an Israeli tech and maybe a Muslim scrub nurse.
They have to learn to operate together and the way they which the senior surgeon, the boss,
will treat that will be as “I’ve got to get past all these cultural differences, and down to the
personalities.” The way we’ll do that, is we’ll have a lot of lunches together. We’ll practice
together, we’ll do simulations together. So that after we get to know each other as people, we’ll
realize that the roles and organizational backgrounds of the national cultures have been
superseded by the joy culture we’ve built in the simulations and in the informal training
devices. But they have to in essence build a new culture so the old cultural elements aren’t the
factors anymore. A new culture where teamwork and relating to each other are driving the
process.

Tim Kuppler: Okay, and that requires the social interaction and so the informal things...
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Edgar Schein: That will require what we call teambuilding, teaming, but it’s more than the old
concept of teambuilding, because now it’s not just getting coordination. It is now creating a
new joined culture.

Tim Kuppler: Does Humble Inquiry work across cultural boundaries, occupations, national
cultures?

Edgar Schein: Well, again, Humble Inquiry is not some esoteric new thing. Humble Inquiry is
a conversation based on pure curiosity and interest and every culture has its own norms for
what’s personal, what’s private and how you can have informal conversations. In the Japanese
culture, they get to humble inquiry when they drink together. In other cultures, there are maybe
some other rituals. But every cultural has its version and the trouble with national cultures is
we don’t know what is considered personal or private in another culture, we risk offending
people. That works across occupations too. I think the nurse and doctor relating to each other
in occupations often offend each other unwittingly, because they say something or do
something the other culture finds offensive, like the doctor yelling at the nurse.

Tim Kuppler: Okay, well humble inquiry is extremely interesting. We want to move on to some
of what your thoughts about how work on culture has changed over the years, from your early
days to today. It sure seems there is a trend of a lot more people being interested in the
subject of culture. It is a lot more in the popular press, you know, how have you seen things
change over your career?

Edgar Schein: It’s a good news-bad news situation.

Tim Kuppler: Okay.

Edgar Schein: The bad news is it’s caught on as a concept but actually just as a word and
that the word culture is being used in so many different ways by so many different people that
in that sense it has lost its meaning and therefore it is very hard to work with and therefore
anytime someone comes to me and uses the word culture, I immediately say, “what do you
mean? Tell me what you mean by the word culture.” Only then can we begin to talk about it.
The good news is that there is a lot of recognition that at the deeper levels, all groups,
organizations, occupations-if they have any kind of a history, they do develop a culture. It’s as
much a part of our life as much as personality and character is a part of our individual life. So
becoming sensitive to how norms and values very quickly become behavioral routines is a very
important insight for employees and managers to have. With that comes a further insight that
what really stabilizes culture is what works. It’s not that the boss says this is what we’re going
to do-that’s the first step but it doesn’t go anywhere unless what they do actually works better.

Tim Kuppler: So the only way to build momentum is to see results.

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Edgar Schein: Is to see results, exactly. And if people can see that a behavior change
produces results, it is legitimately called a new cultural element. Not because someone said
you should do it but because it produces a result. Culture is built by feedback from the
environment and internally by more comfort in what we do things. In that sense, everyone has
to have some cultural sensitivity and insight just to be aware of this process because it drives
you so that at the level of larger systems, I think people have to become aware that ninety
percent of their behavior is not driven by their personality but by cultural rules. That we’re
always behaving in a culturally appropriate way. We learn that in the family, in the school, in
the subgroup, tact, etiquette, good manners is culture operating in us and the more we
become aware of that the more we are going to manage the culture in the organization. So the
biggest input, or the biggest important input of cultures, is to discover how much we are our
culture and how much we not only limits leadership, it limits our daily behavior. Because we’re
not going to be rude to each other, we are not going to threaten each other’s face. We all play
by a set of rules and if we violate them, we offend each other, then work doesn’t get done
anyway. So culture has become central and important, if we take it seriously.

Tim Kuppler: So we talked about how you know, a lot of people are gaining at least an
awareness of the importance of culture, but it is kind of diluted as far as everyone referring
things connected to culture. Who are some either thought leaders or executives that you follow
or that you pay particular attention to their insights and approaches when it comes to dealing
with culture or business problems, as far as learning from their approaches?

Edgar Schein: Well, I think the important leaders today are the sociologist and anthropologist
who study actual occupational cultures, so they would be the younger generation. There’s a
woman at MIT, but the name of Katherine Kellogg, who studied how the law that says
residents are no longer allowed more than 80 hours and how it is being implemented in 3
different hospitals. She wrote a book about that. Reading that and seeing how in each of these
hospitals, there was different change process, different leaders did different things, that
reeducates you to how culture really works, by seeing how students of it can bring out case
examples. I think I can’t think of how, well, my old colleague John Van Maanan would be a
thought leader in all of this. But I don’t see the psychologist doing very much. It is the
sociologist who are doing field work and studying real occupations and really cultural
phenomenon that are the real leaders. So the consultants, like yourself, will become leaders if
you publish your cases.

It is case work that will educate us. Because you’ll discover things that aren’t visible and yet
that are very exciting. For example, in these three hospitals, it’s worth just reviewing very
quickly what she found. Two of the hospitals basically avoided the law and had the surgeons
still or residents working long hours. Because the resistors who were the senior macho
surgeons said, “we went through this nonsense, you’re going to go through it too. Besides its
better for the patients to have this continuity with residents all the way through.” The one
hospital that implemented the program had several factors causing it. One, fewer residents
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going into surgery. So they were less interested in being the macho. Secondly, more women
residents who were more interested in going home with their kids, than spending 120 solid
hours. Third and most important, the reformers who really wanted the 80 hour rule had a place
to work where they could really consolidate and become a force. And this, this author,
Katherine Kellogg found that made as much a difference as anything. Now who would’ve
thought that? Who would have said if you really want a subgroup to be powerful, give them the
space to work in, because then they’ll have more opportunities to interact and that’ll make
them more powerful. So that’s to me an example new important work that comes out of case
work, not out of formal resurge, this is formal research, but the survey stuff and the sort of
casual surface cases don’t really educate us. I think it’s these deeper studies that will.

Tim Kuppler: Do you think that will be a trend where there’s a lot more research and focus on
specific business problems and specific industries that might be shared to where those
insights, I mean, really have an impact on more clearly versus maybe general culture work so
to speak?

Edgar Schein: I would hope so, but I’m a little bit pessimistic because it’s so much easier to
work with surveys and statistics and superficial stuff that it drives out the more intensive case
work that the field worker gets involved in. So I think we need the field work. Will we get it in
the business schools? Will we get it from consultants? I think consultants hide their good stuff.
They don’t tell the stories that really would educate the field. So I think we need we need it. I
think I’m somewhat pessimistic whether we will get it.

Tim Kuppler: Okay, well what about your future? You’ve been working on this for over fifty
years. You know, what do you hope to do going forward? Are you still researching and learning
new things about culture?

Edgar Schein: The way in which I will always succeeded I think is in clarifying issues. My
research on cultures know better than others research on culture, but I think my writing about it
and my clarifying has been more successful than other writers. That’s what I’m continuing to
do. The Helping book was an effort to clarify what’s really involved with helping and the
Humble Inquiry is yet another step in saying: Let’s examine this micro-process of how we really
talk to each other and ask ourselves, why don’t we ask questions, why are we always telling?
And that’s what leads me forward. What I really want to work on next is, what is the
relationship, what is trust? Uh, and I’m working with a colleague now where we’ve been trying
to examine this process we call seeing another person. What does it mean for me to say, I
think I see you now? And seeing how that process is integral to the relationships. That when
things don’t work, it’s when people don’t see each other clearly, or what not. So, I’ve also
written some memoirs that lead to various kinds of small books, so I’m basically a writer and
continue to write.

Tim Kuppler: Well, that’s wonderful because you’ve had a huge impact on the world.
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Edgar Schein: Thank you.

Tim Kuppler: With your prior work, I know many people are excited to see what comes next.

Edgar Schein: Okay.

Tim Kuppler: Um, one final question for you. You’re the first of many guests on Culture
University.com. What’s one question that you think every guest should answer, whether they’re
a thought leader in the field, an executive, a consultant, you know, what’s one question you
think would be important for any guest?

Edgar Schein: Well, you didn’t start me this way, but you could’ve and that would be the
question of what in your field or in your life or in your organization or whatever is troubling you?
Start with trouble. Start with something that energizes you.

Tim Kuppler: So what troubles you?

Edgar Schein: What troubles me is the misuse of the word culture and so, and the failure of
people to see that culture is not this surface phenomenon, but it is our very core, that we live in
culture, we display a culture, we are always driven by the culture. It troubles me that people
don’t see that.

Tim Kuppler: So what can we do to go about changing that?

Edgar Schein: Consciousness raising.

Tim Kuppler: Raising the awareness.

Edgar Schein: Raising the awareness by giving people examples. I do that by pointing how
well behaved you and I’ve been for the last hour or so. We didn’t violate any of the cultural
rules of etiquette. We didn’t swear at each other. Just think how compliant we are.

Tim Kuppler: Right. Alright, well thank you again for your time.

Edgar Schein: You’re welcome.

Tim Kuppler: I want to show your books again. To learn more about the work of Edgar
Schein, Corporate Culture Survival Guide, a great body of work. His book, Helping, and then
the subject of the good part of our discussion today, Humble Inquiry. Thank you for your time.
We hope to see you again at Culture Univeristy.com.