… Are you sure it’s fully compatible with your vision and strategy ?
On November 17, 2017 Phil Geldart reminds us in his paper «6 Signs Your Organization May Need a Culture Transformation » :
« An organization’s culture can be a leading factor in success – or derailment. Your culture is a reflection of how individuals behave: how they solve problems, communicate with each other and get things done. The results you see are the consequences of those behaviors, and if the results are not what you want, individual behaviors need to change. »
Is your company’s culture vision friendly ?
I really appreciate the general message of his paper which lies, for me not, in the list of the 6 proposed signs but indeed in one of its sentences :
« It is a best practice to never become complacent in the evaluation of your culture. »
So the golden rule is to precisely identify to which extent the comapny’s culture is non or misaligned with its vision and strategy. Every effort made to indentify its non alignment and consequently every effort to correct (and so, to change) the culture are beneficial.
How to proceed ?
Not aiming at being exhaustive, I ‘d say that you haven’t to try to evaluate the culture but more precisely, to track the discrepency between it and the main needed culture traits supportive of the vision and enabling its delivery.
A series of interviews (between 15 and 40 according to the company’s size) looking for evidences of these discrepencies (and they always exist) till you are struck by a sudden revelation : « Eureka, I’ve got it ! ».
Often the declic comes from a very specific fact illustrative of the non or misaligment of the culture with the vision and strategy. This fact like in a police investigation sheds, all of a sudden, light on the company’s true reality which, then after, appears clearly and understandtably.
The aim is not to find a culprit but to reveal uncomplacently the reality in order either to embetter the alignement of the company on its vision or, if needed, to redefine the vision on a more realistic and pragmatic basis.
