Corporate & Organisational Culture

As much as eighty percent of organisational cultures exist by accident or default, rather than design.  Many cultures evolve ‘for better or worse’ through critical incidents, key events, characters and personalities.  We find that few organisations really have a clear understanding of identifying the core factors that shape culture and how these can be orchestrated to best effect.  Senior management teams should invest time in shaping a culture to better deliver specific business results.  Culture is too important to be left to chance.

The culture of yesterday delivers the results of today

The culture of your business will facilitate the speedy achievement of your business plan.  It is the critical success factor in success, and should be the norm for all businesses, yet too many either fail to see the need to develop the ‘culture’ or have little idea how this could be achieved.  

In many instances, the ‘culture’ may not fit the corporate plan or the company’s commercial intentions.  It may even be counter to its needs and damage the business.  

The resilience and health of your corporate culture can support you in achieving results in difficult times.   A weak or negative culture can act as a brake on innovation or change and hinder the effectiveness of recovery plans.  Culture makes things happen, or not.  A strong and vibrant culture will enable new initiatives to flourish and grow and will encourage and retain ‘high flyers’.  It will enable speedy innovations to be introduced. 

A mediocre culture will not blossom.  Results will be hard to achieve.  High potential people will pursue their careers elsewhere.  A weak culture may have no central rallying theme to provide any real focus, guidance or energy to staff. 

You can’t not have a Culture

Whether the management team does nothing or does something, your business will have a corporate culture, which could be the result of numerous takeovers, mergers and acquisitions.  It could be the result of key people impacting on the structure through their ‘joining’ and or ‘leaving’ the business.   Sometimes the sheer presence of one charismatic character will shift the organisation forward, or conversely a negative player can do untold damage and distress.  Whichever, the leadership of an organisation and its key operations are paramount in shaping the business culture. 

Leadership – shapes the Culture

Two factors are critical in shaping the corporate culture – they are “To what Leaders pay most attention” and “How they respond to critical incidents”.   People are ‘Boss Watchers’ – they pay attention to where and how business Leaders focus.  Leadership is the key issue facing most organisations and critical in shaping a culture.  Leadership is the single most important issue defining whether organisations will survive and prosper, be downsized and merged or fail to survive.    Leadership shapes the circumstances that cause business improvement. 

Innovations are not created or managed into existence – they are led and created by people with vision and imagination. 

Be brave – take action

For too many organisations ‘culture change’ can occupy too much ‘thinking’ time.   Some have difficulty defining, designing and delivering a performance culture.  Because they do not know how to shape a culture they prevaricate.  Numerous organisations have purchased the latest ‘quick fix’ or ‘training fad’ and then found that their culture had not changed at all.  Change is never going to happen by only investing in something external to the business.  Change only comes about from investing within the business – driven by the leadership team taking action. 

In many organisations the ‘thinking-doing’ process is weighted too heavily to thinking.    For example, I worked with a Biotech business some years ago which had formed a steering committee on ‘culture change’.  It had met regularly for over three years and achieved nothing.  There was no bias for action – just talking.  This is very common in a variety of organisations.

The “Thinking – Doing” Balance 

For every organisation that prevaricates, there comes a time when the thinking must stop and actions begin.  Rate your current organisation commitment to ‘thinking’ as opposed to ‘doing’ or ‘taking action’.  On evaluation, many realise they put off ‘doing something’ with even more thinking.  This risk aversion is perceived as intransigence by others who are impatient for change to happen. 

Precisely what do you want the business culture to achieve?

Cultures can be weak or strong, negative or positive, forcefully shaped or blown about like a rudderless craft in the wind – unsure of focus, intention and purpose.  Starting with the end in mind is the only criterion for development.  What the culture needs to deliver and how this fits with the business plan is critical.  Surprisingly few management teams realise how easy it is to take an apparently intangible concept such as ‘culture’ and make it live.  Culture is tangible and concrete and through careful design will lead to deliverables in terms of profitability, customer retention and new business growth.  It is a matter of establishing precise cause effect relationships within the culture.

Cultural Diagnosis – where are we now?

Organisational or corporate culture is the fabric, the infra-structure, the glue that binds together people and processes to generate results. 

Before we design a new culture, we have to establish where we are currently in order to understand the gap we have to traverse.  That means identifying the precise culture that exists and operates today,  and requires a diagnosis where the relative strengths and weaknesses of the culture are identified and measured, cause-effect relationships examined and recommendations for improvement implemented. 

The diagnostic phase should highlight precisely the relative health of the organisation.  It is important to identify the key issues starting from where we stand culturally.  This should be examined from our current position before we design the culture of the future.   Diagnostics should be tailored to the business and not be ‘off the shelf’.  It is important to collect qualitative as well as quantitative data and for this reason, some fairly unique data collection techniques can be created, whose output can be used very quickly to address some of the cultural weaknesses

Designing a Reslient Corporate Culture

After developing the diagnostic phase the core activity is building the culture for the future.  This process has been devised to act as a major building block in designing the required cultural change.  Each stage can help support building a resilient corporate culture supporting many functions and processes including different locations and geographies for the business.

The purpose of the culture change process is to enable much faster generation of a business culture that enables people to achieve results.  If you are adopting a logical approach to this process as you progress, you will create ‘small successes’ that act as milestones along the way.  The culture change process makes that which was intangible, tangible: that which was assumed, testable, and that which was practised in some localities and unknown to others, open to debate and discussion.  Much in culture change is focused upon diagnosing the current culture because the relative health of the culture will determine the strategies available and the deliverables expected.[2]  It requires assessing the culture which is desired from that which currently exists which becomes a ‘gap analysis’ exercise.  When designing a corporate culture you should focus on the following

·         Provide a ‘visual map’ of the building blocks of culture from Vision to KPM/I’s  (Key Performance Measures or Indicators)

·         Identify the core beliefs and values that drive behaviours

·         Enable the designers of the culture to focus upon a sequence of key stages and activities to build and shape the desired culture

·         Outline a sequence of activities to pursue, apply and implement within the organisation.

·         Identify the precise components of a business culture that will cause significant business improvement in the context in which the organisation operates

·         Variants of this process can be used at various levels and contexts within the organisation – or used in smaller business units, functions or across processes to refine performance and build strong committed teams who will implement, sustain, measure and pursue improvement.

‘De-Mystifying’ Culture Change

Using the Model (see diagram) it is relatively simple to examine the major components that contribute to designing the desired business culture.  In effect, the Diagnostics undertaken are central in driving the design and building of a culture. 

Without doubt, the Vision for the business must be stated and clearly articulated. Vision articulates why the organisation is in existence and its key role in the scheme of things.

How many organisations are you aware of that lack Vision?  Without Vision, it is difficult to focus time and resources to what you should be, do, and have in the longer term.  For instance, General Electric has a very powerful Vision based upon speed and versatility in change leadership.  Being number one or two in any industry is the GE mantra.  It does not matter what industry sector you work within, the GE approach is always to achieve that goal – which is particularly important to understand when you realise that much of GE’s growth has come through acquisition of other businesses.  This sends some pretty clear signals to those who work within GE as does the culture which is based on speed, simplicity and self confidence.  GE would not have achieved its pre-eminence today without its tangible and measurable progress in empowering its people.