Assess Organizational Culture - and Change it!

Lots of change programs within organizations and teams simply fail. There's a saying that goes: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that's right: you could agree on changing your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this planned change doesn't align with the current culture, you won't get very far...

Organizational culture defines what a team values, the way they see things, their collective assumptions and beliefs about work and so on and thus: their behavior. Because culture influences behavior so strongly, it’s what makes the difference when it comes to results! Actually implementing change and enhancing performance, begins in the minds of executives and employees. It’s all about the culture they share. Let it work for you instead of hamper change.

How would that be possible? You don’t know where you stand unless you have some reference. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a very clear starting point for almost any change process. This instrument is validated and developed by professors Cameron & Quinn and is now used by over 10,000 organizations.

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

1. Clan Culture, based on Cooperating

2. Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating

3. Market Culture, based on Competing

4. Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling

Though this typology may be simple, it works tremendously well. When completing the online survey, participants assess six crucial aspects of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a profile of the current culture, that’s a mix of the four archetypes above.

Mostly, one of the culture types is dominant. For instance, the people in the picture might have a dominant Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling. They value cooperation and friendliness very much and are open to other people.

Also, 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 large gap between the current and preferred situation, indicating that people are ready for substantial change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.

For instance, the colleagues from the picture have a friendly working climate, but they know they should focus more on results. So they agree to enhance aspects of Market Culture and start using elements of competition to get things done.

Assessing culture is the first step to successful, sustainable change. It tells you where your team or organization is right now and where people want to go. It’s very informative to distinguish different subgroups and see where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guidelines 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.

Detailing your results in a workshop, takes you from the simple but clear four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization. Working with all 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 actually implement the new behavior. And that’s where change really happens!

I realize this is a very short way of telling you about organizational culture, presenting you the OCAI tool to assess it and how to go about changing culture and organizations.

Please be patient, I’ll be back with more if you like. Meanwhile, assess your organizational culture

Just email me or respond if you have any questions!