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Strengthening Organisational Culture
- Building understanding
- Measuring your culture
- Setting the organisation's compass
- Creating your Culture Development Plan
- Facilitating effective change leadership and management
When talking to most organisations, there is a disconnect between understanding what culture can deliver (by way of performance improvement), and value creation. MODAL partners with organisations to create a connection within the organisation’s leadership team. It requires clarity around what culture really is and a measure and common language by which to describe it.
Building understanding
Building an understanding around leadership and its impact on culture is key. Firstly, leaders within the business, especially the CEO, require an intimate knowledge of what culture really is. To enable this, we recommend a 360 degree feedback process which relates clearly to the current culture and the preferred culture of the future.
The first step in understanding culture is to work with the organisation’s CEO. Using LSI (a behavioural feedback tool) we start the process of educating the individual on leadership effectiveness and its impact on the organisation.
Step two uses the same process with the next level of management, followed by a workshop that describes how culture impacts performance. This generates a mandate for performance improvement and cultural change. Business case studies are used to inform and educate executive and leadership teams on the value that is created by having a high achieving culture.
The third step occurs at an organisational level. At this level we build understanding of culture by engaging with the organisation’s workforce through workshops designed to inform, educate and prepare people to participate in creating a high achieving organisation. This activity will make clear to each and every person in the organisation, that they have a role to play in change and moving the organisation towards its preferred culture.
Measuring your culture
As described in the section on How we Build an Understanding of culture, we measure culture using a quantitative method. MODAL uses Human Synergistics’ OCI (Organisational Culture Inventory) and OEI (Organisational Effectiveness Inventory) to measure the organisation’s preferred and actual culture, understand the climate of the organisation and identify the causes of the current culture.
The process involved in measuring culture has four steps:
- Step 1: Establishing an organisation wide understanding as to what the measurement process is and why the culture is being measured
- Step 2: Conducting workshops to build cultural understanding, engagement and collect data
- Step 3: The culture measurement data is processed and analysed resulting in a report which describes the preferred and actual culture, climate and causes of current culture. This is combined with recommendations for cultural change.
- Step 4: Communicate and validate the results of the cultural measurement with the CEO, leadership team and workforce.
Setting the organisation’s compass
By quoting the old Chinese proverb “if you don’t know where you are going, any path will take you there”, we begin to understand the importance of setting an organisation’s compass.
There are a few simple but vital steps to follow:
- MODAL establishes if a shared vision exists within your company. Everyone, from the cleaner to the CEO, will understand what the organisation is setting out to achieve.
- The Leadership Team is developed as a team before they engage in creating the organisation’s vision, purpose and values. They will create a vision they are passionate about and committed to.
- Share the vision with the whole organisation through a Vision and Values Cascade. Maximise buy in to the proposed changes by encouraging everyone to contribute, with leaders doing the listening.
- Business planning continues the work of setting the compass by engaging and involving people and creating alignment to the vision.
By setting the compass, creating engagement in the process and aligning people and planning to the vision, you are off to a great start in executing your organisation’s strategy.
Creating your Culture Development Plan
Once MODAL has conducted the OCI/OEI we provide analysis of the raw data into a report which defines the actual and preferred culture, the gap between the two, and the causal factors contributing to the actual culture.
After validating the results, MODAL collaborate with the organisation to create a plan of how cultural change can be instigated. The plan focuses on a variety of learning and development activities, process, structure and system changes and in some cases redesign of work to enable the organisation’s preferred culture to flourish.
The best results in planning are found where people are involved in the generation of initiatives that will change the culture and where they are then accountable for implementing those changes.
Ultimately the culture change plan becomes the basis for a project, and managing the project becomes a critical part of achieving the desired cultural change.
Facilitating effective change leadership and management
At this point, the effect of the leadership team and the whole organisation understanding the gap required to be closed in most cases, is significant. To enable this to happen requires people to move into a state of chaos. In most cases, change is historically managed poorly, resulting in negligible performance improvements, loss of credibility, and an overall waste of both financial and human resources. One could say, that the understanding of the need to lead and manage change effectively is absent!
Recognising that the natural response to this chaos is resistance is essential. Facilitating effective change management means responding to this resistance by creating a sense of order and stability where possible. Managing change requires three key phases to enable a planned approach. These key phases are outlined in the diagram (© Prosci 2005).