Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Fiona Robertson, Major Street Publishing, $29.95.
There’s more to Rules of Belonging than meets the eye. Culture change expert Fiona Robertson says organisational culture has been way over-complicated and has been understood in a flawed way.
“It’s not easy, but it is simple.” Culture is the rules of belonging. Change those rules and you’ll change your culture. ‘Change your organisational culture, delight your people and turbo-charge your results’. Once you know what to look for, you can identify the current culture of any group by the current rules of belonging in that group. You can articulate your desired culture, creating it through a series of clear, deliberately managed steps.
It’s an entertaining read with practical advice for busy leaders and all employees ‘dreading to go to work each day in a toxic culture’.
The subject of organisational culture has become a particularly hot topic in Australia as a result of the recent Royal Commission into misconduct in the financial services industry. However, it is also a hot topic globally with regulators of financial services and other industries increasingly seeking to enforce culture measurement and management and to sanction leaders who do not properly do both – up to and including criminal prosecution.
“They consistently confuse culture with employee engagement (they are not the same thing!) and are running around trying to solve the wrong problem. We are seeing lots of frantic activity, most of which won’t achieve anything other than making it look like someone is doing something, but almost none of which will result in actual culture change.”
Improving the culture of a team will speed up the ability to implement and radically reduce the time taken to spend on managing conflict and dysfunction. This book shows how.
If culture is the rules of belonging, what happens if you change your organisational culture? If your answer is correct, then you could win one of two copies of Rules of Belonging. Entries should be sent to [email protected] by Monday, 24 August 2020. Names of the winners will be announced in Frank Cassidy’s PS-sssst…! column on 25 August 2020.
