Evaluate Organizational Culture – and Change it!

Posted in blogging, news by mlamers on August 17th, 2010

Lots of people say: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. And you could concur on transforming your strategy or your customer service, but if this change does not line up with the current organizational culture, you will not be doing well…

Organizational culture identifies what a team values, the way they notice things, their collective ideas and beliefs about work and so on and therefore: their behavior. When you take results into account, organizational culture is key because it has such a capital effect on behavior. Actually implementing change and developing performance, starts in the minds of managers and employees. It’s all about the culture they have in common. Let it operate for you instead of hamper change.

How could that be carried out? You don’t know where you stand unless you have some reference. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a very well-defined beginning for just about any change process. This tool is endorsed and developed by professors Cameron and Quinn and is now applied by over 10,000 organizations across the world.

Based on the Competing Values Framework, the OCAI distinguishes 4 culture types with competing values. These are:

• Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
• Market Culture, based on Competing
• Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
• Clan Culture, based on Cooperating

Even though this depiction may be elementary, it works impressively well. When completing the online survey, test takers assess six essential aspects of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a profile of the current culture, that’s a combination of the 4 archetypes above.

Most of the time you will find that one of the culture types is dominant. For example, some people have a dominant Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.

After the change has taken place, people grade their preferred culture for the future. It’s very interesting and helpful to compare these 2 profiles. There could be a large gap between the current and preferred circumstances, indicating that people are prepared for significant change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.

For instance, certain colleagues have a amicable working climate, but they know they should center more on results. So they agree to enhance features of Market Culture and commence using parts of competition to get the job done.

Rating organizational culture is the key step to successful, sustainable change. It will show you where your team or organization is right now and where people want to go. It is very informative to check where executives and employees differ and distinguish distinctive subgroups. That gives ideas on what to do next: how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, and so on.

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 all members, you will be able to work out differences and really get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and truly implement the new behavior. And that’s where change really happens!