Culture is perhaps the most invisible, but powerful fabric surrounding organization. It defines people's mindset, attitude, and the organization's process.
Nature is a mindset, attitude, and competency of an organization. Every organization has a certain culture, or a set of subcultures. Culture is not one level but many. To succeed in any endeavor, you need to understand the culture and the drivers behind any action. To understand the culture, professionals need to explore the implicit cultural traits-the hidden beliefs that are difficult to know and take time to uncover.
Different culture personas are in demand to analyze, design, and change culture. It takes a lot of time and effort but the results are tremendous; if your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being people-centric, then it forms a dynamic business environment and creates business synergy.
Culture Analyst: Culture takes all forms, culture is invisible, but directly impacts on all critical aspects of the organization. Most enterprises have primary culture and many subcultures as well. What sociology refers to as culture is a reaffirmation of values through totems and history. Culture is collective value and corporate brand; these values are driven by deeper primal motives which are the mysterious need that humans have to connect with each other. The structure of these connections transcends culture and even values. Culture analysts play a significant role in assessing, analyzing existing culture effectiveness, and then raise a series of questions to help understand culture deeply, identify culture related concerns, gaps, or the cause-effect of culture evolution.
In reality, most companies have trouble seeing their own culture as they are so immersed in it. Culture represents the box in which decisions are framed and the footprint the organization actions occur. It impacts directly or indirectly on the business management effectiveness, and employee satisfaction. A positive culture such as a culture of learning and creativity helps to build differentiated business advantages. The negative culture such as bureaucracy or resist-to-change can cause long term pain such as process inefficiency, structural inflexibility, capability incoherence, etc. When the culture fails to enable effective strategy management, it’s important to diagnose the root causes, behaviors are on the surface, attitudes are in the middle, and mindset are underneath. It is only when we have to go beyond words and conventional wisdom, dive into the collective thoughts, so that we are actually able to understand culture, as well as our role in influencing culture or being influenced by it. Part of the key in this situation is that the culture analyst needs to not only know how to communicate analytical details of the culture, but also, how to apply them to fix the culture related problem at hand.
Culture designer: Whereas the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity following the principles and practices to understand different cultures. If you want to create a great culture to unlock business potential, you need to be responsive to feedback either individually or collectively. There are many cultural models around. As a culture designer, often, their task is not to completely "design a complex structure like a culture"; but to redesign some aspects in an existing organizational culture to drive change needed to build a workforce for building organizational competency.
Culture needs to be reinvented at the different stages of the organization. In a fast-growing company people tend to have similar ideal values that then get manifested in their corporate culture. When the company grows, this corporate culture tends to stay the same over time –that is culture inertia. However, in order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be redesigned for adapting to the emerging digital trend. In the digital era with rapid change and frequent disruptions, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to design and develop a digital fitting culture and an engaging workforce.
Culture change agent: Changing the organizational culture is not so easily done because traditions are closely held as norms, values, and beliefs. But it’s imperative if certain culture-related issues keep coming back, causing deep concerns about organizational long-term competency. Great culture ingredients such as openness, transparency, collaboration, empowerment, respect for the value of people add value to the enterprises and become part of the organizational brand. It’s important to set proper guidance coupled with deep understanding, both based on clear visibility to enhance multidimensional culture understanding; focusing on creating the fitting organizational culture, in which people can take ownership of their processes and believe better-than-expected results.
Cultural transformation may be the desired outcome, but it cannot be mandated, it must evolve. Culture is created and shaped by a cascade of influences. The attributes displayed are a product of other actions. These are things that can’t be easily manipulated. The organizational differentiation can be facilitated by a culture encouraging innovation individuality and collectively. Reinforcing the culture change requires shared vision plus innovative, committed and passionate leadership and a commitment to alignment and integration of people, processes, practices, and technology across the enterprise. Become a culture change agent to retool the organizational culture for achieving high business performance potential. The spirit comes from the top, the top leaders should become organizational culture change agents by setting right principles or guidelines, grounding rules, and setting examples to shape desired culture and improve business maturity.
Culture is perhaps the most invisible, but powerful fabric surrounding organization. It defines people's mindset, attitude, and the organization's process. Changing an outdated culture that perhaps existed for centuries at national or global level is like boiling an ocean. To be effective in culture change, we need three things - awareness, knowledge, and skills to build intrinsic, fluid and cultural intelligence. Culture reinvention is a tough journey to make collective progress and advance humanity.
Culture Analyst: Culture takes all forms, culture is invisible, but directly impacts on all critical aspects of the organization. Most enterprises have primary culture and many subcultures as well. What sociology refers to as culture is a reaffirmation of values through totems and history. Culture is collective value and corporate brand; these values are driven by deeper primal motives which are the mysterious need that humans have to connect with each other. The structure of these connections transcends culture and even values. Culture analysts play a significant role in assessing, analyzing existing culture effectiveness, and then raise a series of questions to help understand culture deeply, identify culture related concerns, gaps, or the cause-effect of culture evolution.
In reality, most companies have trouble seeing their own culture as they are so immersed in it. Culture represents the box in which decisions are framed and the footprint the organization actions occur. It impacts directly or indirectly on the business management effectiveness, and employee satisfaction. A positive culture such as a culture of learning and creativity helps to build differentiated business advantages. The negative culture such as bureaucracy or resist-to-change can cause long term pain such as process inefficiency, structural inflexibility, capability incoherence, etc. When the culture fails to enable effective strategy management, it’s important to diagnose the root causes, behaviors are on the surface, attitudes are in the middle, and mindset are underneath. It is only when we have to go beyond words and conventional wisdom, dive into the collective thoughts, so that we are actually able to understand culture, as well as our role in influencing culture or being influenced by it. Part of the key in this situation is that the culture analyst needs to not only know how to communicate analytical details of the culture, but also, how to apply them to fix the culture related problem at hand.
Culture designer: Whereas the cultural aspect is an intrinsic factor that drives the organization's business longevity following the principles and practices to understand different cultures. If you want to create a great culture to unlock business potential, you need to be responsive to feedback either individually or collectively. There are many cultural models around. As a culture designer, often, their task is not to completely "design a complex structure like a culture"; but to redesign some aspects in an existing organizational culture to drive change needed to build a workforce for building organizational competency.
Culture needs to be reinvented at the different stages of the organization. In a fast-growing company people tend to have similar ideal values that then get manifested in their corporate culture. When the company grows, this corporate culture tends to stay the same over time –that is culture inertia. However, in order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be redesigned for adapting to the emerging digital trend. In the digital era with rapid change and frequent disruptions, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to design and develop a digital fitting culture and an engaging workforce.
Cultural transformation may be the desired outcome, but it cannot be mandated, it must evolve. Culture is created and shaped by a cascade of influences. The attributes displayed are a product of other actions. These are things that can’t be easily manipulated. The organizational differentiation can be facilitated by a culture encouraging innovation individuality and collectively. Reinforcing the culture change requires shared vision plus innovative, committed and passionate leadership and a commitment to alignment and integration of people, processes, practices, and technology across the enterprise. Become a culture change agent to retool the organizational culture for achieving high business performance potential. The spirit comes from the top, the top leaders should become organizational culture change agents by setting right principles or guidelines, grounding rules, and setting examples to shape desired culture and improve business maturity.
Culture is perhaps the most invisible, but powerful fabric surrounding organization. It defines people's mindset, attitude, and the organization's process. Changing an outdated culture that perhaps existed for centuries at national or global level is like boiling an ocean. To be effective in culture change, we need three things - awareness, knowledge, and skills to build intrinsic, fluid and cultural intelligence. Culture reinvention is a tough journey to make collective progress and advance humanity.
