Understanding the Culture of your Organization
Introduction
One critical ingredient to managing effectively as a leader is to understand the context and culture of an organization. When managers and leaders understand the culture of their organization, they are better able to build off of the strengths of the organizational culture to implement change.
Using the Tool
To help you understand the culture of your team, your department, or the Institute, follow this three-step process. During this process, you should be able to develop an understanding of what truly drives the culture of your organization. Then, complete the table that follows to help you think about how to use the strengths of the culture to implement change.
Step 1. Begin by thinking about some of the artifacts of the organization. What do you see, hear, and feel?
What hours do people work?
How often do meetings take place?
What rites and rituals take place?
How formal or informal are relationships between a manager and the people who report to him or her?
How are disagreements and conflicts handled?
What is the balance between work and family?
2. Then consider the values the organization says it espouses:
What is the mission of the organization?
What does the organization officially say it values?
What is the organization’s vision of itself in the future?
What are current organization-wide strategies and goals?
3. Now, delve a bit deeper and think about the following:
What are the values and beliefs of leaders in the organization that have made it successful in the past?
What are the values that are shared and taken for granted by people who work in the organization?
What is the relationship between what you see, hear, and feel and/or the espoused values? Are they consistent? Are they in conflict?
What do these consistencies or conflicts tell you about what is really going on in the organization?
Your answers to these questions are the underlying assumptions about the organizational culture. These assumptions are the aspects of the organizational culture that are deep, imbedded, and most likely will not change in the near future.
4. Now, complete the table below.
Once you’ve finished, you should have a better sense of where you should focus your energies to initiate change. (An example is provided for you in the first row.)
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List an underlying assumption of your team, department, or company.
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What change are you trying to implement?
This is your change effort.
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Could this assumption help or hinder you in your change effort?
How? |
How might you alter your change efforts, given this underlying assumption?
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The culture rewards entrepreneurialism and individualism.
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Lead a change effort to share services between three offices that have not shared anything in the past.
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Hinder: Many of the people affected by this change may resist sharing services because they see themselves and their work individualistically. They are not used to sharing.
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Maybe I can delegate some responsibilities to some of the entrepreneurial-thinking people in my team so that they could apply their entrepreneurial spirit to implementing this change. And then I could reward the team but also reward specific individuals for their work in implementing this change.
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