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A lot of people state: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. And that is true: you could concur on adjusting your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this intended alteration doesn’t line up with the current organizational culture, you won’t get very far…

Organizational culture names what a team appreciates, the way they notice things, their collective assumptions and convictions about work and so on and thus: their doings. When you look at results, organizational culture makes the difference because it has such a capital effect on behavior. The start of realizing change and boosting performance starts in the minds of executives as well as employees. It’s all about the culture they share. Let it operate for you and not strangle change.

What could make this happen? Unless you have some reference you don’t know where you stand. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a clear starting point for pretty much any change process. This method is currently applied by over 10,000 organizations across the world and is endorsed and developed by professors Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn.

Looking at the Competing Values Framework there are 4 culture types with competing values the OCAI identifies. Those are:

• Clan Culture, based on Cooperation
• Adhocracy Culture, based on Creation
• Market Culture, based on Competition
• Hierarchy Culture, based on Control

Though this description may be minimal, it works immensely well. When ending the online survey, participants assess six essential aspects of their organization’s culture. The outcome is a profile of the current culture, that is a combination of the four archetypes above.

Most of the time you’ll find that one of the culture types is prevalent. For instance, some people might have a dominant Adhocracy Culture, focusing on original products and services, being innovative and taking risks.

After the change has taken place, people grade their preferred culture for the future. It’s highly interesting and helpful to compare these 2 profiles. In case of a big gap between the current and preferred situation, people might be prepared for substantial change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.

For example, particular colleagues have a friendly working climate, but they know they should focus more on results. So they agree to enhance features of Market Culture and commence using factors of competition to get things done.

Evaluating organizational culture is the key step to lucrative, maintainable change. It’ll show you where your team or organization is currently and where they want to go. It’s very enlightening to differentiate different subgroups and comprehend where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guiding principles 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 four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization you can work out your results in a workshop. Working with every participants, you will be able to work out differences and genuinely get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and actually implement the new behavior. And that is where change really occurs!