There’s a saying that goes: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that’s true: you could concur on modifying your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this planned change doesn’t align with the current organizational culture, you won’t get far…
Organizational culture names what a team appreciates, the way they comprehend things, their collective ideas and beliefs about work and so on and thus: their doings. When you take results into account, organizational culture is leading because it has such a big impact on behavior. Actually applying change and increasing performance, starts in the brains of executives as well as people on the floor. It’s all about shared culture. The trick is to let it work for you instead of hamper change.
How would this be possible? If you have some reference you will know where you stand. For just about any change process the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) is a very well-defined beginning. This instrument is now used by more than 10,000 organizations across the world and is formalized and built on by professors Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn.
Built on the Competing Values Framework, the OCAI identifies 4 culture types with competing values. Those are:
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
Participants assess 6 vital features of their organization’s culture when ending the online survey. The outcome is a outline of the current culture, that’s a combination of the four archetypes above.
Most of the time you will find that one of the culture types is prevalent. For instance, some people have a dominant Adhocracy Culture, focusing on new products and services, being innovative and taking risks.
After the change has taken place, people measure their preferred culture for the future. It’s really interesting and helpful to compare these two profiles. There could be a big gap between the current and preferred situation, showing that people are all set for tangible change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.
For instance, some colleagues have a amicable working climate, but they know they should center more on results. So they agree to enhance pieces of Market Culture and begin using components of competition to get things done.
The first step to profitable, sustainable change is measuring organizational culture. It’ll tell you where your team or organization is currently and where they want to go. It’s very instructive to recognize distinctive subgroups and notice where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guiding principles 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 and so forth.
To go from the simple but clear 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 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 essentially occurs!