CREATING HIGH PERFORMANCE CULTURE
What is Culture?
Part of the problem with culture change is that people are not clear what culture is. Consultants may bring in frameworks without even being clear on what culture is.
Culture is constituted by the shared practices and results of an organization, and by the background interpretations, distinctions, standards, conversations, emotional repertoires, and values that shape the practices. To change culture we must change its practices of how people observe, coordinate, converse, and make choices.
The culture change process
What is our desired culture?
We begin with creating the future with you – what is the desired culture of this organization?
What is our current culture?
Once we have identified the end goal with you, we start to look at the staring point. What is the current culture of your organization? This then helps us draw out the bridge to move from where your organization is currently to where to desires to be. Please see figure below
What behavioral standards would be required?
The bridge to the new desired culture would mean the organization would need to have new behavioral standards at different levels of the management team, middle managers and first level employees? Behaviors include standards of professionalism for what individuals do, how they interact with others, and how groups behave.
What new learning would be required to embody these new behavioral standards?
How will we produce behavioral change through learning? What is the needed learning process? How can this learning be embodied, rather than simply being conceptual? These and other such questions need to be looked for the culture change project to be effective and long lasting.
If the desired behaviors were in place, what outcomes would we measure?
Once we have identified the end goal with you, we start to look at the staring point. What is the current culture of your organization? This then helps us draw out the bridge to move from where your organization is currently to where to desires to be. Please see figure below
What is our current culture?
For the high performance culture change exercise to be truly effective, it is important to measure high performance. Hence the last, and not the least important point to be discusses is how will we measure high performance? How will we know we have achieved the new desired culture that we set out to achieve?
