Define The Organisation’s Culture
Define The Organisation’s Culture
We collaborate to define our target culture for the organisation. The culture is defined by the purpose, value, behaviours and principles of the organisation. Culture is further influenced and constrained by the structures, roles and working practices of the organisation. Culture is collaborative and consensual in nature and requires conscious choice by all the organisation’s members to become real.
In A Nutshell
Culture is the thing that everyone in the organisation experiences and contributes to. They contribute either consciously or just because of the way they act, their behaviours and their beliefs.
We have observed, in accordance with Larman, that in mature organisations, culture is hugely constrained by the structure of the organisation. We may wish to emphasise the importance of product-based thinking and cross-functional teams, but if we are structured into functional stove-pipes, this will be practically impossible to achieve.
Organisations that wish to change need to be deliberately conscious about the culture they wish to create. To create the target culture may require wholesale change to the organisational structure too. Such change has a huge impact on everyone involved. So much better, then, to be well-led, deliberate, inclusive and consensual about what is to be attempted.
Leadership sets the purpose and vision for the organisation’s culture. What do we wish our culture to be? Open, flexible and transparent? Closed, hierarchical and secretive? Or somewhere between these two extremes?
Leadership communicates the vision, creating a clear case for change. The case for change must address multiple groups of stakeholders. For the wider organisation, an economic case is important to justify the inevitable cost incurred by significant change. For colleagues who will be impacted, they will be motivated by seeing the benefits to their day-to-day work from the change. They also need to understand something of the path by which they will move from today’s culture to tomorrow’s culture.
Culture cannot be created by the leadership alone. It requires everyone to contribute to the change in order for the change to become successful. We engage across the organisation to achieve consensus on values, behaviours and principles that will become the foundation of the new culture. We provide continuing information, guidance and education about what the new culture expects and requires.
Some of our colleagues will become early adopters of the new culture and will start to act as ambassadors for its wider adoption. At this point we can begin to think about models such as Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation to help guide the way we achieve the longer-term comprehensive change that we are seeking.
Related Practices
On an infrequent basis we assess the health of the organisation. The central indicator of good organisational health is the happiness of the colleagues who work in the organisation coupled with the routine delivery of planned progress towards the goals the organisation has established. We use different tools and techniques to assess different aspects of the organisation’s health.
As leaders striving to foster new and improved culture within the organisation it is critical that we model the values and behaviours that we expect from others - do as I do rather than do as I say. Being human we all mess up from time to time. When we mess up modelling the desired behaviours, we are open and honest about our mistake. We are open and honest about how we are going to put things right. We listen to and accept valid feedback on our leadership wherever it comes from. We act on the feedback in order to improve our leadership.