Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs’ culture came under fire following an employee’s scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times.
The employee lambasted Goldman Sachs for claiming to uphold one set of
highly moral written cultural rules but in reality operating on quite
another. He wrote about the enormous gap between what employees were
told to do and what they actually did when interacting with customers
and colleagues.
Unfortunately, corporate cultures, or
cultural operating systems, like the one contested at Goldman Sachs are
the rule rather than the exception. Powerful and toxic unwritten rules
are steering our organizations to year-end reports filled with
disgruntled employees, dissatisfied customers and mediocre results.
Cultural operating systems (COS) are the
written and unwritten rules that guide employee behavior and influence
the bottom-line. The measure of a good cultural operating system is the
degree to which it enables an organization to execute superbly and innovate consistently.
Read More: Four Key Skills to Change Company Culture
More Related at: Human Capital COP
