Building Culture From the Middle Out

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Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section | 1

Building Culture From the Middle Out

By Spencer Harrison and Kristie Rogers | MIT Sloan Management Review | February 22, 2024 

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Organizational culture is the set of shared values that guide how work gets done. There used to be a debate about whether culture predicts high performance or whether high performance affords leaders a strong and cohesive culture. Evidence now overwhelmingly supports the former.  But for a business to harness the power of culture, it needs midlevel leaders across the organization — the managers and team leaders — to go beyond believing that they are responsible for culture to actively building it.  The most successful midlevel leaders find ways to link the “big-C” culture of their organization — its official set of values — with the “small-c” culture that plays out in the narrower and vibrant daily patterns of interaction.

Middle managers can be empowered to effectively enrich company culture when they adopt the belief that companies have both big-C and small-c cultures. Big-C culture refers to the company’s official set of stated values, while small-c culture describes the qualitative experience of day-to-day patterns of interaction — this is where someone might find the culture to be supportive, rigid, confrontational, dog-eat-dog, and so forth.  Big-C culture is what most leaders at all levels in an organization think of when they talk about culture: the written, often public, statement of what the company stands for, presented as a set of canonized documents. 

The role of midlevel leaders is to link the big-C and small-c cultures, aiming to find big-C seeds that will thrive in the small-c soil they are responsible for tending. Rather than creating subcultures that may be different from the broader companywide set of values, these leaders figure out how to create small-c cultures that bring big-C culture to life in vibrant, unique ways.

Four strategies that were most successful: endorse big-C culture through celebration and preservation of select features, endorse big-C culture by learning from other managers, enrich small-c culture through cultural innovations, and enrich small-c culture by empowering employees to innovate. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Organizational culture is the set of shared values that guide how work gets done. There used to be a debate about whether culture predicts high performance or whether high performance affords leaders a strong and cohesive culture. Evidence now overwhelmingly supports the former.  
2. For a business to harness the power of culture, it needs midlevel leaders across the organization — the managers and team leaders — to go beyond believing that they are responsible for culture to actively building it.  The most successful midlevel leaders find ways to link the “big-C” culture of their organization — its official set of values — with the “small-c” culture that plays out in the narrower and vibrant daily patterns of interaction.
3. Four strategies that were most successful: endorse big-C culture through celebration and preservation of select features, endorse big-C culture by learning from other managers, enrich small-c culture through cultural innovations, and enrich small-c culture by empowering employees to innovate.

Full Article

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Topics:  Organizational Culture, Organizational Behavior, Teams, Organizational Performance