Assess Organizational Culture and Change it!
Lots of change programs within organizations and teams just suffer defeat. There is a saying that goes: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And you could concur on adjusting your strategy or your customer service, but if this change does not align with the current organizational culture, you will not be successful…
Organizational culture defines what you value, the way you grasp things, your assumptions and convictions about work and so on and therefore: your doings. Because culture affects behavior so directly, it is what makes the difference when it comes to results! Actually applying change and enhancing performance, starts in the minds of executives and people on the floor. It has everything to do with shared culture. Let it work for you instead of hinder change.
How could that be completed? Unless you have some reference you don’t know where you stand. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a clear starting point for virtually any change process. This tool is now applied by more than 10,000 organizations worldwide and is formalized and built on by professors Kim Cameron & Robert Quinn.
The OCAI distinguishes four culture types with competing values built on the Competing Values Framework. These are:
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperation
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creation
- Market Culture, based on Competition
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Control
Though this description may be uncomplicated, it works very well. Participants assess 6 essential characteristics of their organization’s culture when finishing the online survey. The outcome is a outline of the current culture, that’s a combination of the 4 archetypes above.
Mostly one of the culture types is dominant. For example, some people might have a prevailing Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.
Also, people assess their preferred culture for the future, after the change has taken place. It’s really interesting and useful to compare these 2 profiles. There could be a large difference between the current and preferred state, suggesting that people are prepared for significant change and that they’re currently feeling unsatisfied about their working climate.
Evaluating organizational culture is the initial step to lucrative, maintainable change. It’ll show you where your team or organization is currently and where people want to go. It’s very instructive to differentiate various subgroups and discover where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives approaches 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 and so forth.
Detailing your results in a workshop, takes you from the uncomplicated but clear four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization. Working with every participants, 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 occurs!
