Posted by mlamers in blogging, news, updates.

Lots of change programs within organizations and teams just suffer defeat. There’s an expression that goes: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that’s correct: you could agree on altering your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this designed alteration doesn’t line up with the current organizational culture, you won’t get very far…

Organizational culture describes what a team appreciates, the way they experience things, their collective ideas and beliefs about work and so on and therefore: their doings. When you look at results, organizational culture makes the difference because it has such a keen impact on behavior. The start of applying change and developing performance commences in the minds of managers and employees. It’s all about shared culture. Let it operate for you instead of strangle change.

What could make this happen? 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 nearly any change process. This instrument is formalized and extended by professors Cameron and Quinn and is currently applied by over 10,000 organizations across the world.

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

• Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
• Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
• Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
• Market Culture, based on Competing

When finishing the online survey, participants assess six essential parts of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a outline of the current culture, that’s a combination of the four archetypes above.

Regularly one of the culture types is predominant. For instance, some people might have a dominant Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.

Also, people rate their preferred culture for the future, after the change has occurred. It is highly interesting and useful to compare these 2 profiles. In case of a big difference between the current and preferred circumstances, people might be prepared for significant change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.

For example, particular colleagues have a nice working climate, but they know they should center more on results. So they agree to improve features of Market Culture and commence using parts of competition to get things done.

The initial step to lucrative, sustainable change is measuring organizational culture. It’ll tell you where your team or organization is currently and where people want to go. It’s very instructive to tell distinctive subgroups and notice where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives ideas on what to do next: how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, etcetera.

To go from the minimal but clear-cut four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization you can work out your results in a workshop. Working with all 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 actually apply the new behavior. And that is where change essentially occurs!