Many people state: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. And that is spot on: you could concur on transforming your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this intended alteration doesn’t align with the current organizational culture, you won’t get far…
Organizational culture defines what you value, the way you view things, your ideas and opinions about work and so on and so: your doings. When it comes down to results, organizational culture makes the difference because it influences behavior so strongly. The start of applying change and boosting performance commences in the minds of executives and employees. It has everything to do with shared culture. Let it operate for you and not strangle change.
How could this be achieved? You will know where you stand if you have some reference. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a very clear starting point for nearly any change process. This method is now applied by over 10,000 organizations globally and is endorsed and built on by professors Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn.
Looking at the Competing Values Framework there are 4 culture types with competing values the OCAI identifies. Those are:
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
Though this categorization may be plain, it works hugely well. When finalizing the online survey, test takers assess six important features of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a profile of the current culture, that is a combination of the four archetypes above.
More often than not one of the culture types is prevalent. For example, some people might have a prevailing Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.
After the change has taken place, people measure their preferred culture for the future. It is very interesting and helpful to compare these 2 profiles. There could be a big gap between the current and preferred situation, signifying that people are ready for tangible change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.
The primary step to profitable, sustainable 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 enlightening to differentiate distinctive subgroups and see where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guidelines on what to do next: how could executives make the change program better, how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, etcetera.
To go from the straight forward but clear-cut four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization you can work out your results in a workshop. Working with every members, you’ll be able to work out differences and truly get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and really enforce the new behavior. And that is where change actually happens!