Rate and Revolutionize Organizational Culture
One may say that Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that’s right: you could agree on changing your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this designed change doesn’t align with the current organizational culture, you won’t get very far…
Organizational culture defines what you appreciate, the way you look at things, your ideas and convictions about work and so on and so: your behavior. Because culture affects behavior so avidly, it’s what makes the difference when it comes to results! Actually realizing change and increasing performance, begins in the brains of executives and people on the floor. It’s all about shared culture. The trick is to let it operate for you instead of strangle change.
What could make that happen? If you have some reference you will know where you stand. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a clear beginning for virtually any change process. This instrument is validated and built on by professors Cameron and Quinn and is now used by over 10,000 organizations across the world.
Looking at the Competing Values Framework there are 4 culture types with competing values the OCAI distinguishes. Those are:
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
When completing the online survey, test takers value six vital parts of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a outline of the current culture, that is a mix of the 4 archetypes above.
Regularly one of the culture types is prevalent. For example, some people have a prevailing Adhocracy Culture, centering on original products and services, being innovative and taking risks.
People assess their preferred culture for the future, after the change has taken place. It’s very interesting and useful to compare these two profiles. There could be a big difference between the current and preferred circumstances, showing that people are ready for real change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.
For example, some colleagues have a nice working climate, but they know they should concentrate more on results. So they agree to improve pieces of Market Culture and begin using ingredients of competition to get things done.
The primary step to successful, maintainable change is evaluating organizational culture. It’ll show you where your team or organization is currently and where they want to go. It’s very instructive to identify several subgroups and find out where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives approaches on what to do next: what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, how could you overcome resistance, and so on.
To go from the uncomplicated but well-defined four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization you can work out your results in a workshop. Working with every participants, you’ll be able to work out differences and genuinely get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and actually implement the new behavior. And there change really takes place!
