THE QUALITY OF YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE MATTERS
Why? Because “Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch.” – Peter Drucker
Imagine a organizational culture where there’s excitement in the air, where everything is done to enhance the customer experience, where innovation thrives and teams easily adapt to unforeseen circumstances, where your senior leadership team works toward a shared vision of success, and where people genuinely care for one another, feel recognized and are supported within the organization.
The workplace culture described above isn’t just an imaginary organizational culture that only exists in the land where rainbows appear every day and unicorns dance on candy-coated clouds. Instead, high performing values-driven cultures like this exist in the best performing organizations on the planet. High-performance organizations like Starbucks, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, Commerce Bank, Whole Foods, Timberland, and Costco are among this group of values-driven cultures. These organizations consistently outperform the Good to Great and S&P 500 companies, on average, by a ratio of 6:1.
But organizational cultures like these are not created overnight. They also don’t magically appear like candy-coated clouds or unicorns. Contrary to what some believe, they also are not formed by policy, procedure and measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Instead, high performing organizational cultures are created deliberately. They are created by developing values alignment, mission alignment and low levels of fear. These are organizational cultures where employees are able to bring their values to work and where there’s a shared view, throughout the organization, that they have the right culture to perform at the highest levels.
CULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
Businesses have entered what many refer to as the Age of Transcendence where high performing businesses have broadened their purpose beyond the creation of shareholder wealth and are now serving as change agents for the greater good and creating high-performance cultures that beat strategy hands down. The good news for you is you can also create a high-performance culture in your organization.
CULTURE AND EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Only 33% of U.S. employees are engaged at work. Compare that to the 70% of employees who are engaged at work at the world’s best organizations. What account’s for this difference? It’s Culture. The most successful organizations on the planet have high-performance values-driven cultures that stimulate high levels of employee engagement and low levels of cultural entropy.
CULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONAL MISSION/VISION
Getting the right vision and mission for your organization is vitally important. The vision paints an inspiring picture of your organization’s destination. The mission describes how you are going to get there. Gaining buy-in for your mission and vision from your senior executives as well as your employees is critical for creating a high-performance culture. Want a values-driven culture? We can help!
HIGH-PERFORMANCE CULTURE VS CULTURAL ENTROPY®
Cultural Entropy® is the number one robber of productivity in most organizations. When cultural entropy is high, the energy available for value‐added work falls, and the performance of your organization is low. When cultural entropy is low, the amount of available energy for completing value-added work increases, and the level of performance is high. Ready to reduce your cultural entropy?
HOW TO CREATE A HIGH-PERFORMING VALUES-DRIVEN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
“ORGANIZATIONS DON’T TRANSFORM, PEOPLE DO.” – Richard Barret
In order to change your organization’s culture, you have to change the values and behaviours of the current leaders, managers, and supervisors. That, however, is not all you have to do. You also have to address the institutional legacy of past leaders who embedded their values in your organization’s structures, policies, systems, procedures, and incentives.
The best starting point in your culture transformation initiative is to intentionally decide to find out what’s currently working and what’s not working in your organization. A great way to unearth what’s working and what’s not along with the cultural values associated with what’s working and what’s not is to perform a Cultural Values Assessment for your entire organization. The report we produce in collaboration with the Barrett Values Centre following the completion of the Cultural Values Assessment may include data cuts for each business unit, department, and team, as well as organization-wide demographic categories such as gender and age.
The results of the Cultural Values Assessment will provide you with a roadmap for change and allow you to identify key performance indicators such as the Cultural Entropy® score, the level of values alignment, and the most important value jumps for your business.
To improve your organizational culture, you will need to make changes at two levels. First, you will need some change management at the level of the organization as a whole. Second, you will need to make changes within the units, departments, and teams that have the highest Cultural Entropy scores and lowest levels of values alignment. This will involve working with the leaders of these groups to reduce their level of personal entropy. The best way to reduce your leaders’ levels of personal entropy is to perform either a Leadership Values Assessment or a Leadership Development Report on these individual leaders.
Using these instruments, along with other Cultural Transformation Tools®, like the Customer Values Assessment and the Espoused Values Analysis, you will be well positioned to not only have a clear understanding of what’s currently working and not working, and you will be empowered to effect significant changes to the culture of your organization.
If your business is not producing the results you desire, there is a really good chance that the culture of your organization is having a negative impact on your business’ performance.
The best way to discover whether a cultural transformation can help improve the performance of your organization is to speak with a cultural transformation expert. That’s where we come in.
Rick Petry is a Certified Cultural Transformation Tools Consultant and together with you and the Barrett Values Centre, we can help you transform your organization’s culture and the organization as a whole from one that’s simply surviving to one that’s thriving.
Our strategic partner The Barrett Values Centre® provides powerful tools and metrics that empower leaders to measure and manage the cultures of their organizations and the leadership development needs of their managers and leaders. The Barrett Values Centre’s core product and a diagnostic tool we use with all of our organizational clients is the Cultural Transformation Tools® (CTT).
So, if your business is not performing as you want it to or your organizational culture is not like the one described at the top of this page, what are you waiting for?
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