The strongest cultures bind people together across both hierarchy and geography, guiding them to make the right decisions and advance the business without explicit direction.
All organizations develop a unique identity over time. Organizational culture is a heritage acquired as the organization learns, survives and thrives in its environment. Often operational issues and economic survival occupies leaders’ attention so much that Company Culture, a core driver in ensuring success, slips the mind. The result is seen in ensuing employee relationship conflict with all its concomitant dynamics such as scapegoating and bullying, increased absenteeism, lack of commitment and loyalty, resistance and non-compliance.
Superior productivity has everything to do with excellent strategies, outstanding, cost effective processes leading to products and services with a competitive advantage, and a thriving work force with healthy corps de esprit. In order for the organisation to compete successfully, the workforce has to be rewarded through fair wages, fair labour practices and fair opportunities. All of these elements influence the cultural wellbeing of the organization
Understanding organisational culture:
Corporate culture is both intangible and all-encompassing:
- Organizational culture is the shared attitudes and values that cohesive human groups pass on from one generation to the next
- It is the company’s code, its core logic, the software of the mind that organize the behaviour of people
- At best, Organizational Culture is written as a mission statement, but it is often implied or understood by unspoken agreement. Whether conscious or unconscious, it describes and governs the ways a company’s owners, executives and employees think, feel and act.
The bottom line is that organisational culture defines “the way we do things around here”, and, “what we do when we think no one is looking”.
OCC’s focus and processes are directed at:
- Making visible the 90% of cultural assumptions and beliefs which form part of the proverbial iceberg beneath the surface
- Reflecting on inherited values built up over time in order to determine which of these will help to inform the company’s future and to find ways to enhance and celebrate these
- Clarifying expectations, perceptions, assumptions and norms, including those which exist below the surface
- Aligning the Company Culture with its desired vision, values and objectives
Building leadership:
Leaders attentive to the key role of the organization’s culture as a factor which holds the complex organization together, pay particular attention to their own contribution in the evolution and buildingof organizational culture.
The culture of organizations is created by:
- Actions and behaviour of its leaders
- What leaders pay attention to
- What gets rewarded and what gets punished
- Allocation of attention and resources, repeatedly, over time, so that it becomes views of the world and the organization, values and action patterns which can be identified
OCC offers leaders support in assessing current culture, identifying what type of culture the organization needs, then manage the drivers which shape and influence culture by:
- Setting expectations about the need for change
- Helping the leadership team to align around a common vision and required behaviours
- Focus the organization on delivering the business agenda – culture being the means to an end, not the end in itself!
- Manage the culture by managing the drivers of culture – management ‘walking the talk’ being the most important driver
- Communicate and celebrate
Tools for this process include:
- Audits/climate surveys
- Consultation
- Appreciative Inquiry processes
- Executive coaching