Evaluate Organizational Culture and Change it!
A lot of change programs within organizations and teams just fail. One might state that Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And you could agree on altering your strategy or your customer service, but if this change does not align with the current organizational culture, you will not be doing well…
Organizational culture characterizes what a team values, the way they notice things, their collective assumptions and opinions about work and so on and so: their doings. When you take results into account, organizational culture is key because it has such a great impact on behavior. It is in the minds of managers and employees where implementing change as well as increasing performance commences. It’s all about the culture they share. The trick is to let it operate for you instead of hamper change.
How could that be completed? You will know where you stand if you have some reference. The OCAI which stands for Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, has proven to be a clear starting point for almost any change process. This tool is formalized and built on by professors Cameron & Quinn and is now used by more than 10,000 organizations across the globe.
The OCAI identifies four culture types with competing values founded on the Competing Values Framework. These are:
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
Though this categorization may be plain, it works hugely well. Participants assess 6 crucial characteristics of their organization’s culture when finishing the online survey. The result is a profile of the current culture, that’s a combination of the four archetypes above.
Mostly one of the culture types is predominant. For instance, some people might have a dominant Adhocracy Culture, focusing on original products and services, being innovative and taking risks.
After the change has occurred, people rate their preferred culture for the future. It’s really interesting and useful to compare these 2 profiles. In case of a big gap between the current and preferred situation, people might be set for tangible change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.
The number one step to profitable, sustainable change is evaluating organizational culture. It will show you where your team or organization is right now and where people want to go. It’s very enlightening to discover numerous subgroups and learn where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guiding principles on what to do next: how could executives make the change program better, how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, and so on.
Specifying your results in a workshop, takes you from the minimal but well-defined four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization. Working with every participants, you’ll be able to work out differences and genuinely get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and truly enforce the new behavior. And that’s where change actually happens!