I was reading an article on the BBC website yesterday about the Maasai people in Africa. It reported how the Maasai are organising themselves and hope to prevent companies using the Maasai brand without their permission.
In it Isaac, a Maasia leader, elder and chair of a new organisation, the Maasai Intellectual Property Initiative (MIPI), is quotd as saying: “I think people need to understand the culture of the others and respect it. You should not use it to your own benefit, leaving the community – or the owner of the culture – without anything.”
The problem is that until now there hasn’t been a unified Maasai body to approach to seek permission to seek permission to use the brand, though the inititative seeks to change that. And MIPI hopes that selling the rights to use the Maasai brand might earn the Maasai people millions of pounds of income each year.
In this instance MIPI is seeking to establish ownership of the brand and the culture which is associated with it on behalf of the Maasai people. But in business, who ‘owns’ culture?
It’s clear that responsibility and accountability for culture rests with the board and senior management team of any organisation. Failure to recognise that has cost some business leaders dearly in recent years. Bob Diamond lost his job because of it. So did Rebekah Brooks. And Sir David Nicholson still might lose his. Some have argued that they understood their responsibility for it but that their knowledge of it wasn’t sufficient, that they didn’t understand it with sufficient clarity, a clarity that enabled them to act to manage the risks inherent in it and which, when they came to fruition, couldn’t be mitigated. Others claim that they understood their responsibility but didn’t want to accept accountability. In truth, there may be an element of all of those, but I think all indicate very strongly a need for large organisations to have a unit responsible for monitoring culture and being the conscience for it within the business. Reporting in to a member of the executive, it also needs to have a degree of independence so that it doesn’t become part of, and subject to, the culture of the business. If it lacks that independence it loses impartiality and as a result, value.
But responsibility is different from ownership. Culture is about groups rather than individuals. As Hofstede said: “Culture is the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others”. Consequently ownership cannot lie with an individual, instead it rests with the group who constitute it. They may not recognise it, or want to accept it, but they own it nevertheless.
The distinction is an important one for leaders to understand. They must accept their responsibility for culture and that they are accountable for it whilst also accepting that ownership lies elsewhere – with the group as a whole. This understanding is key to the process of changing culture. Accepting responsibility means mitigating the risks (and maximising opportunities) of the current culture and failure to do so may see them held accountable for the consequences.
But they must also accept that the actions they take to adapt and evolve culture will very rarely produce the immediate and intended result. It’s not like shifting the track and changing the direction – as a signal operator might do with a train. There is no lever to pull to produce a guaranteed response. A leader must instead take actions that affect the environment in which the group works so that it collectively engages and moves. The leaders role is to create the conditions in which those who own it make it happen.
