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Organizations also have this hidden dimension of tight and loose. The people, the practices, and the leaders in these organizations are very different. Senior leaders really should be diagnosing how tight or loose their organizations are. And you can think about three different layers of tightness.
Three Layers of Tightness
People – we know that tight cultures tend to have people who are attracted to those organizations who are more conscientious, whereas loose organizations tend to have people who are more risk-taking and more open. But then you can diagnose the practices in the organization. Tight cultures tend to have more formal practices, and efficiency is a focus. Control is very important. Also, they tend to have a lot of onboarding, a lot of strong socialization, just like the military where people are coordinating effortlessly, whereas loose organizations have more flexible practices. There’s less standardization. There’s more discretion. And then, of course, leaders also vary: who’s guiding the ships varies. Tight cultures tend to have independent leaders, whereas loose cultures have more collaborative leaders.
And they evolve for good reasons. Just like in other levels of analysis, tight organizations tend to operate in pretty threatening conditions. Think airlines or nuclear power plants. Or they operate in contexts where there’s a lot of accountability like government organizations, the military (also clearly threatened), where people have to follow rules because they’re accountable. Loose organizations – start-ups, design, advertising – they’re not subject to as much threats. They have a lot of mobility. They’re constantly changing clients, and that looseness is very functional in that environment.
Of course all organizations can also have tight and loose elements in them. Auditing is much more tight than sales, for example. And so we can kind of zoom into organizations and see pockets of tightness and looseness, as well as differentiating across organizations.
Shifting Your Culture
Senior leaders, first of all, can use the tight-loose lens to diagnose first and foremost where they are on this continuum. And also think about strategically, where do they want to be? And then we have to think about how do we make that change, because there’s going to be a lot of resistance from people who are used to a different level of norm strength. Once leaders can identify the fears that people have – in the case of tight groups, the loss of control, the loss of predictability, the loss of efficiency, as well as for loose groups, the loss of autonomy – they can start to negotiate those underlying fears, and they can work together to try to identify domains they can keep as tight or they can keep as loose but things they can maybe adjust. And create these kinds of collective goals that everyone is excited about. So leaders really have to be ambidextrous. They have to be able to understand when to tighten and when to loosen and how to bring people along who might have underlying fears in that change.