What are the key characteristics of your organizational culture?

This is an early question in the Baldrige Criteria because an organization’s culture determines how it will act. If you have a culture of continuous improvement, you will act daily to improve performance. If you have a culture of quality, you will set quality goals and measure quality performance in all you do. If you have a culture of safety, you will design and refine processes that ensure safety.

A recent article on BP drives this message home. In “BP Pays Lip Service to Culture of Safety,” the International Herald Tribune chronicles a culture that claims to support safety but clearly does not. (Article behind firewall)

According to the article, BP was fined $21 million for numerous violations at its Texas City refinery after an explosion killed 15 workers and injured hundreds more. That happened five years ago. Four years ago, a corroded pipeline in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, caused BP to shut down oil operations after spilling more than one million liters of oil on Alaska’s North Slope. In the last three years, BP has been cited for 760 “egregious and willful” violations in its refineries by OSHA, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

With that history, the Deepwater Horizon rig disaster is completely understandable. It fits BP’s culture. Based on results, safety is not a priority at BP. It’s not part of BP’s culture. Unless that culture changes, more environmental disasters will litter BP’s future.

With effective leadership, the culture can be changed. The article provides an example. Prior to the current Gulf travesty, the worst oil spill in memory was the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, which leaked 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska. (The Deepwater Horizon does that much in four days.) Exxon Mobil has not had a serious accident since 1989 because it dramatically changed its culture following the accident. “By every measure,” the article concludes, “Exxon Mobil has by far the best safety record in the industry.”

So it can be done. Not by talking about it and not by making promises, but by designing and implementing processes that put safety first, measuring performance, improving those processes, and holding people accountable for achieving the highest standards.

That is true for every organization: Your culture dictates how you will behave. If your culture says that profit is more important than customer or employee satisfaction, then you will have dissatisfied customers and employees. If your culture says that profit is more important than safety, you will suffer the impact of unsafe operations.

Just look at BP.

To read more about organizational culture, click on these articles:

• BP and Oil Company Irresponsibility
• Seeking Authentic Leaders
• Sustainability: A Business Imperative
• Management’s Five Deadly Diseases
• Why Organizations Fail

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