Organization Cultural - Interesting to Know

Organization Cultural - Interesting to Know

What is "culture"?

Culture consists of the long-standing, largely implicit shared values, beliefs, and assumptions that influence behavior, attitudes, and meaning in a organization (or society). Culture influences how people behave and how people understand their own actions. As a result, culturally influenced beliefs and actions feel right to people, even while their implicit underpinnings make it difficult for those people to understand why they act the way they do or why other ways of acting might also be appropriate.

Culture is resilient. Its elements are long-standing, not a matter of fads. The resilience of culture is supported by culture being implicit. It is difficult for people to recognize their own culture and how it exerts an influence on them.

The staying power of culture is that it feels right to people; new cultural values that are imposed on people seldom replace their underlying values and beliefs in the long run.

Four keys to building a strong culture- The overall process should work within a framework of four key areas. These areas have been successfully managed in organizations of all size, type, industry, and geography.

 1.    Build an awareness of culture and commit to refine your strategies and plans based on an understanding of organizational culture. Organizations often start by clarifying some of the key challenges they have as an organization. Think about frustrations about “the way things work around here” that are holding your organization back from reaching its potential. It also helps to define strengths you need leverage in support of your vision or strategy as you understand how to further improve your culture.

2.    Measure your culture and engage the organization in understanding the results at a deeper level. Some organizations think they may be covering this but they are actually only evaluating a fraction of the overall culture. Engage your organization in the process to move from the fog of opinions and lack of clarity about your culture to a clearly defined picture of what you are all about. You’ll understand the overall culture and how it varies by department, division, level, geography or other key sub-groups. It’s like taking an MRI of your culture. This clear definition of “who we are” is critical for the next step where strengths are leveraged and weak areas improved that have been holding the organization back.

 3.    Engage the organization in feedback and prioritization to define a few key improvements. Utilize feedback and prioritization techniques to understand your culture assessment results and to identify the top improvements to leverage strengths and improve weak areas that are holding you back. Many organizations obtain feedback but then employees are left wondering what will happen next. The key is prioritization as a team and not just more feedback. It sometimes helps to focus on 1-3 current organizational strategies or plans and to engage in feedback and prioritization around how to manage them more effectively after you clarify the strengths and weaknesses of your culture.

 4.    Measure progress consistently and refine improvements with discipline and determination. How will you need to adjust meeting schedules, communication plans, measurements, tracking formats, team structures or other areas to improve how you manage the 1-3 priorities you identified? It will be important to monitor key measures related to the top priorities since culture clearly impacts performance however you define “performance” in the organization.

There will need to be regularly scheduled feedback and prioritization routines to identify and build on what’s working and to adjust actions that aren't having the desired impact. The organization will see what’s working and what’s not and will spread the good ideas of your new operating model to areas outside of the 1-3 priorities you originally identified. You’ll know at that point you have the flywheel of culture change moving and gaining momentum.