After almost 7 years of Actively working in this niche of Culture and Corporate Culture, I can say that the biggest misconception about Corporate Culture is the fact that the leadership should work on it ONLY when things are more under control, and they can afford the time and the resources to do all “the improvements”. This is like an individual saying that they’ll go to the doctor only when they’ll feel healthier, hoping that the doctor will not take away from them even more energy, time, and resources.
Let me clear out some of the myths about working on your Corporate Culture:
- You don’t need weeks of interviews to measure the Corporate Culture. Actually, by applying a reliable instrument and using maximum 90 minutes to debrief the results with two of the leaders, an expert on Corporate Culture can give you a good feeling about where your pain points and blockages are, as well as which systems can be already considered strongly integrated in people’s way of working.
- After correctly measuring the current Corporate Culture, the only thing remaining to be done (if needed) will be the identification of the current business dilemmas on which your organization should use wise internal negotiation and pivot according to the resources and the external environment. “Dilemmas” are positive states of affairs that cannot be pursued in the same time (because they use the same resources). These dilemmas can be identified in a maximum 2-day workshop with the extended management team. Nothing more.
- Having a coherent strategy in place, and alignment and clarity in the leadership team, the snowball effect is enabled. Even if one of the leaders would still want to work in an unconstructive manner (“the way we got used to doing things around here”) it would feel so unnatural that either the person will adapt fast or they will leave the company. On the personnel, there is no need to retrain everyone. There is no need to brief everyone on what was decided. BUT, the common sense systems are important: it is important to have a communication strategy in place, it is important to have an aligned recruitment, a concise, yet effective onboarding, and most of the other systems that an organization should have, regardless whether they went through a transformation or not.
- After the Transformation, if you have a long TO DO list, you did it wrong! An efficient transformation will assess what you have, and with the available resources it will unblock the group’s energy by aligning their behaviors to the goals of the company, and sometimes that means simply not doing some things that are in opposition with the needed ones. It is not recommended to work on everything just because a leader believes that by doing so, fast change will happen. Actually, by focusing only on the important few things coming out of the transformation and ensuring that the Organization’s purpose is always the most important, will be the most energizing way to “fix” your Corporate Culture.
So, the best moment to measure and work on your Corporate Culture is when you feel your organization might be “sick”, in a light way or in a heavy way.
Of course, the transformation can go further into a 6 to 12 months Leadership program, into the redesigning of a particular function, or a business unit, or a department. It can go into a monthly or a quarterly support to help with the refinement of some of the systems. It can go into coaching for some leaders, and so on. But the beauty of a correct Organizational Transformation is the fact that you have the control to STOP the external support at any moment without feeling that you’re putting at risk your psychological investment in this transformation or its outcomes.
Check out below some of the reasons for which you could use the Corporate Culture paradigm, in order to “fix” your Organization:
If you want to take the first fast reliable steps in understanding your Corporate Culture, check out the opportunity below:
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