The near and far enemies of organisational culture

While an organisation might be judged by its profitability or reputation, it is ultimately defined by its culture.

Culture influences everything: individual and team performance, change management, and how the organisation navigates complexity and uncertainty. And when companies face ethical scandals or breaches, the root cause is often be traced back to cultural issues. 

Culture isn’t just about employee engagement; it’s about how an organisation functions at its core. Yet culture is notoriously difficult to define and measure. Turning to traditional methods like employee surveys, pulse checks, or 360-degree reviews can be insightful, but they rarely provide a complete picture. A more profound understanding lies beneath the surface by identifying and understanding the role an organisation’s “shadow values” play in shaping their culture. These are the implicit, unspoken attitudes and beliefs that profoundly influence behaviour, often in ways that are not immediately apparent, but which are often key drivers that explain the ethical challenges an organisation experiences.

Shadow values: The invisible force shaping culture

By recognising and understanding shadow values, organisations can make meaningful improvements, aligning both individual and collective behaviours with the company’s goals.  

Corporate values, such as collaboration, integrity, or innovation, are stated, documented, and promoted. However, even companies with admirable stated values can experience significant ethical failures due to the existence of implicit, shadow values that run counter to their formal values. 

At their worst, shadow values and principles run in opposition to official values. At their best, shadow values provide a nuanced expression of what an organisation actually values. Either way, they are an essential element of identifying and measuring an organisation’s actual operating culture.  

The positive side of shadow values and principles can be demonstrated by a financial services company The Ethics Centre worked with where “putting members first” was identified a shadow principle. This principle was so deeply embedded that when employees faced ambiguous situations where decisions and actions weren’t guided by clear policies or procedures, they defaulted to acting in the best interests of their members, even though this value was not formally part of the organisation’s stated principles. 

On the other hand, shadow values and principles can also have a negative impact on an organisation’s culture. Another company we worked with had the common shadow principle of ‘shareholders matter most.’ As a publicly listed company providing essential services, providing value and managing and responding to multiple stakeholders was part and parcel of day-to-day business. However, this shadow principle become a default when trade-offs invariably had to be made between various stakeholder interests. This engendered a high level of cynicism and disaffection with staff who heard a lot about the importance of customer service and the value of staff but other actions – workload, resourcing, remuneration, and informal communication from managers – led them to infer that they existed only insofar as they met shareholder’s interests.  

Near and far enemies: A Buddhist lens

To better understand and identify the impact of shadow values and principles on an organisation’s culture we can borrow the concepts of near and far enemies from Buddhism.  

In Buddhism, the Four Brahmavihārā (compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy, and equanimity) represent the highest virtues humans should cultivate. Each of these virtues has a “far enemy,” which is an obvious opposite, and a “near enemy,” which closely resembles the virtue but is actually a distortion. 

For example, the far enemy of compassion is cruelty – easily identifiable and universally understood as negative. And because it is easily identifiable and its manifestations and impact are readily recognised, it can be directly addressed.  

The near enemy, however, is pity. Pity masquerades as compassion, superficially appearing to embody the traits of compassion. However, this is only a superficial resemblance as pity creates a sense of distance or condescension, because it stems from feeling sorry for someone rather than genuinely empathising with their experience. Pity lacks the connection and motivation to act that true compassion entails. 

The near enemies in organisational culture

This concept of near and far enemies is incredibly helpful when diagnosing the shadow values that can function as root causes of organisational culture failings.  

Just as it is in the case of the Brahmavihārā, while the far enemies of a company’s values are easy to spot and address, the near enemies are more insidious, because they masquerade as positive behaviours, and as such they exercise a disproportionate impact on people’s decision making and actions.

In an organisation The Ethics Centre worked with, “collaboration” was codified as a core company value. The far enemy of collaboration is competition, which is relatively easy to identify. If employees begin hoarding information or undermining one another, it’s clear that competition has taken root, supplanting the value collaboration and steps can be taken to address it. 

However, competition wasn’t the root challenge for this company; it was harmony, a near enemy of collaboration. While harmony seems positive, it can manifest as a reluctance to engage in constructive conflict or make difficult decisions.  

In the case of this company, a large incumbent experiencing organic year on year growth, their strategic challenge was shifting the culture to be one that was more responsive, innovative and adaptable to change. However, harmony as a shadow value was so deeply embedded as a shadow value that employees avoided conflict at all costs. Decisions were often delayed, and consensus-driven processes became bureaucratic, impeding the company’s ability to be agile and responsive to the changing environment and future competitive pressures, with innovative ideas often deferred. 

Another example comes from a large financial services firm that codified “excellence” as a core value. 

While the far enemy of excellence is easily and readily identifiable as mediocrity, it played little role in explaining some of the foundational ethical challenges the company was facing. Instead, it was ‘success,’ the near enemy of excellence, which was a core driver of cultural misalignment. ‘Success’ can give the appearance of excellence, however while excellence is about high standards of consistent performance and achieving great results through effort and learning, success had a singular focus on achieving results for their own sake, regardless of the means by which those results were achieved. 

This near enemy generated a range of systemic organisational challenges including:   

• An increasingly competitive internal environment – described by many staff as ‘dog-eat-dog’ resulting in people avoiding senior appointments. 
• A proliferation and reliance on individual sales targets/performance payments, which promoted a highly competitive work environment which undermined teamwork and mutual accountability. 
• Competing KPI’s that weren’t aligned across the business, undermining integrity in an attempt to get sales or outdo other teams to achieve different KPIs. 
• Withholding information for internal competitive advantage – business units across the company did not disclose information or actively withheld it out of self-interest.  

Combatting the near enemies

A company’s culture is complex, influenced by both visible and invisible forces. While explicit values like collaboration or excellence are important, it’s the shadow values operating beneath the surface that often have the greatest impact on behaviour. By understanding the near and far enemies of their values, companies can better align their culture with their strategic goals, fostering an environment that supports both individual and organisational success. The challenge lies in identifying these shadow values and addressing them before they become barriers to progress. 

The Ethics Centre’s new program, Teamview can help organisations and teams of any size or ambition explore how their culture operates in practice, identify their strengths and chart a roadmap to closer alignment with their purpose and values. For more information contact  consulting@ethics.org.au