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Culture - everybody talks about 'organizational culture' but how can you define it, measure it and then change it (if it needs changing)?

Asked by LeadersIn Editors on 16/07/2012

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3 answers on "Culture - everybody talks about 'organizational culture' but how can you define it, measure it and then change it (if it needs changing)?"

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  TonyNicholls

  10 months ago

  Lucy, your answer is a good one. Changing culture has to be a whole-system approach. I like to think of changing culture from the outside-in and from the inside-out. New markets, competitors, stakeholder pressure, customer habits, amongst other things, can all influence a culture from the outside-in.

  More powerful, and to a large degree under our influence, are the inside-out culture change levers. These include policy and practice (particularly performance maagement practices), leadership behaviours, what gets measured, the environment (premises, location), skills development, employee diversity, communication, etc.

  Knowing which levers to pull as a priority is the difficulty. As you say, a target culture is important and translating this into recognisable desired behaviours is one part of the solution. Next is to measure the current culture against this ideal. There are both quantitative and qualitative assessment methods in use that allow this to be done relatively easily. The hard part is taking the data, combining it with other salient information (business performance, HR metrics, etc) and producing insights that can stimulate understanding and debate at all levels of the orgnaisation.

  I say all levels, because culture change cannot be driven by the leadership team alone. That is the route to command and control, and ultimately resistance to change. It is better to include all the employees and allow them to co-create their new culture.

  Having seen which levers to pull, the final stage is to create interventions that support the emergence of new thinking and, ultimately, new behavours. Writing new policy and introducing new practice can help. New people can help. There are also a myriad individual, team and large group interventons available from the field of OD that can also assist.

  No one intervention will do the trick. As I said at the beginning of my comments, this has to be a whole-system approach.    

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  MikeMorrison

  5 months ago

  There are many tools to measure culture

   

  but often this is missing the point

  what is the culture that THE leader wants and sesires?

  many HR & Organizational Development (OD) teams try to introduce culture change programs, but the reality is that culture is set, directed and measured by those that sit at the top table.

  sure we can measure it - to help senior leaders understand what they are fostering, and help them to align different actions and behaviours to steer the culture a little left or right of where they are.

  but there is only one successful and unique approach to really chanhing culture - change the leader!

   

  others have said that leadars cannot "do it all" - I disagree - "managers" cannot do it all - but a true leader can.

  leaders set direction and guide people, managers attempt to push conformity - that is not sustainable.

  changing culture is not about "driving" change - but leading it by the hand

  subtle but vital differences

  OD strategis can assist, much like steering a canoe down a river, with the tide. But an OD strategy cannot push a canoe against the tide for very long (or far).

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  Lucycanning

  11 months ago

  There are many others using this site who are better placed to comment on defining and measuring culture - a science in itself! However, in terms of changing a culture, it certainly can be done. It is not easy and tends to require a number of key factors: strong leadership from the top, plus a clear defintion of the required culture plus a practical understanding of how it translates into behaviours, management against those behaviours as well as recruitment. However, depending on how big a culture change is required, it may only be achieved once you reach a tipping point where there are a sufficient number of people who buy in to and practice the culture in key roles... and this means both losing people who don't buy in and a lot of time. If you can't change the people, change the people is a maxim that one of my bosses had and at a certain level, it is accurate if the change is necessary enough, as no change (however positive) is easy and it will always be resisted to some extent.  

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