EPM and Corporate Cultures
Mariska Bulten sent a very interesting email, reacting to my blog on intercultural management. In her reaction, she writes:
National cultures may no longer be leading in intercultural management. Every company has its corporate culture and is becoming more and more international. If we work with 50 nationalities in our company, do we have to make one version of Performance Management for each culture? Or do we use our corporate culture as an indicator?
She touches on some very important points. In general, I believe corporate cultures are strongly US-dominated, or at least US-influenced, as I've been writing before. This may soften the culture shock a little, as we are used to certain business practices around goal setting, feedback and rewards. Founder-based cultures often are also very deeply rooted in a national culture. Volvo and IKEA are very Swedish companies, and Toyota's business system is very Japanese. These multinationals have found powerful ways how to create a somewhat homogeneous culture on a global scale. At the same time, research in the field of intercultural management shows that when push comes to shove, people's behaviors can better be explained by national culture than by corporate culture, in other words national cultures root deeper (although I am sure there is also research that points out the opposite). The bottom line remains that different companies have different cultures, impacting EPM implementations.
"The numbers speak for themselves" is unfortunately still often the credo in performance management. But they don't. In different companies, in different countries people react differently to performance management and performance indicators. I rarely see EPM implementation project plans that have a chapter on cultural issues, it stops after implementing a new process and system. But in a culture where your position is based on your social background and past achievements, you are bound to create problems implementing strict quarterly goals. And openly sharing feedback on personal performance in a highly group-based cultures will not work as well.
Mariska rightfully points out you can't have a separate EPM implementation per culture. But per culture it is important to find out how people are going to react. If negative reactions can be predicted, they can be countered. Perhaps we need to implement the same performance management program and performance indicators world-wide, but locally we need to figure out how. Performance is not in the numbers, performance is in the people. We shouldn't forget that.
--frank
