Lots of change programs within organizations and teams simply go down. There is an expression that goes: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And you could agree on changing your strategy or your customer service, but if this change does not align with the current organizational culture, you will not be successful…
Organizational culture names what you appreciate, the way you understand things, your ideas and convictions about work and so on and hence: your doings. Because culture affects behavior so vigorously, it is what makes the difference when it comes to results! Actually implementing change and boosting performance, begins in the minds of executives as well as people on the floor. It has everything to do with shared culture. Let it work for you and not strangle change.
What could make that happen? Unless you have some reference you don’t know where you stand. The OCAI which stands for Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, has proven to be a well-defined starting point for virtually any change process. This instrument is formalized and built on by professors Kim Cameron & Robert Quinn and is now used by more than 10,000 organizations across the world.
Looking at the Competing Values Framework there are 4 culture types with competing values the OCAI recognizes. Those are:
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
When completing the online survey, test takers grade six essential parts of their organization’s culture. The result is a profile of the current culture, that’s a mix of the four archetypes above.
Most of the time you will find that one of the culture types is prevalent. For instance, some people have a predominant Adhocracy Culture, focusing on new products and services, being innovative and taking risks.
People grade their preferred culture for the future, after the change has taken place. It’s really interesting and helpful to compare these two profiles. In case of a large gap between the current and preferred circumstances, people might be all set for solid change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.
The first step to lucrative, sustainable change is rating organizational culture. It tells you where your team or organization is right now and where people want to go. It’s very instructive to recognize several subgroups and learn where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives approaches on what to do next: how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, etcetera.
Detailing your results in a workshop, takes you from the simple but well-defined four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization. Working with every participants, you will be able to work out differences and truly get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and truly enforce the new behavior. And there change really comes to pass!