Lots of change programs within organizations and teams just go down. There’s a saying that goes like this: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that is right: you could concur on adjusting your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this intended alteration doesn’t align with the current organizational culture, you won’t get far…
Organizational culture describes what you value, the way you comprehend things, your ideas and convictions about work and so on and therefore: your behavior. When it comes down to results, organizational culture makes the difference because it affects behavior so vigorously. Actually applying change and increasing performance, begins in the brains of executives as well as employees. And it is the culture they share. The trick is to let it operate for you and not strangle change.
What could make that happen? Unless you have some reference you don’t know where you stand. The OCAI which stands for Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument, has proven to be a well-defined starting point for almost any change process. This tool is validated and developed by professors Cameron & Quinn and is now used by more than 10,000 organizations across the world.
The OCAI identifies four culture types with competing values based on the Competing Values Framework. Those are:
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
- Market Culture, based on Competing
Participants assess 6 vital features of their organization’s culture when finalizing the online survey. The outcome is a profile of the current culture, that’s a mix of the four archetypes above.
Most of the time one of the culture types is prevalent. For instance, some people have a prevailing Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.
After the change has taken place, people grade their preferred culture for the future. It is highly interesting and helpful to compare these 2 profiles. In case of a big gap between the current and preferred circumstances, people might be prepared for tangible change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.
For instance, a few colleagues have a warm working climate, but they know they should focus more on results. So they agree to improve features of Market Culture and start using factors of competition to get things done.
Rating organizational culture is the primary step to profitable, maintainable change. It shows you where your team or organization is currently and where they want to go. It’s very enlightening to distinguish several subgroups and see where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives approaches on what to do next: how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, and so on.
To go from the minimal but clear-cut four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization you can work out your results in a workshop. Working with every members, you’ll be able to work out differences and really get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and truly enforce the new behavior. And that is where change truly happens!