Corporate Cultures – Driving and Anchoring Cultural Change
Business leaders often talk about changing their organization’s culture… but what does that really mean?
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Business leaders often talk about changing their organization’s culture… but what does that really mean?
In identifying organizationally shared values and beliefs, there are several common misperceptions that result in an invalid understanding of the actual corporate culture. These misinterpretations should be guarded against as cultural understanding serves as a foundation for many of management’s decisions.
When evaluating an organization’s culture, it is important to understand that variations likely exist vertically among personnel levels and horizontally across divisions, departments, and workgroups. Consequently, it’s important to establish the degree of alignment between the various organizational levels and business units to the cultural characteristics being evaluated in order to fully understand the cultural adaptation and adherence within the organization.
An organization’s culture – its commonly shared values and beliefs – is both highly complex and interrelated. As such, no one cultural artifact should be used in isolation to describe an organization’s culture and each artifact contributes differently to the painting of the overall culture picture. Objectively viewing the collection of cultural artifacts and identifying their individual contribution significance is critically important to developing an accurate understanding of the organization’s culture.
While many organizations publish value statements, they tend to be rather general and lofty, indistinguishable for those of most other organizations. Other organizations have no values statement at all. Either circumstance makes it difficult for cultural analysts to divine where on the each value’s spectrum the organization resides and to ascertain the alignment between individual organizational groups to the values because of this lack of definition specificity.
