The Importance of Assessing and Transforming Corporate Culture
What are your company’s values? Do you have them defined at all? Do your employees know what they are? Even if you can answer “yes” to all of these questions, unless you can definitively say that your employees both believe in and regularly apply your organization’s values, your company culture likely needs a boost.
Revamping your company’s culture involves playing to its strengths and filling in the gaps where its weaknesses exist. You might never know what these strengths and weaknesses are, though, if you don’t conduct a comprehensive corporate culture assessment.
In this post, I’ll walk you through an introduction to my process for assessing (and ultimately transforming) a company’s culture. I’ve made my career as an executive coach working with firms of all sizes, from scrappy start-ups to the world’s largest Fortune 500 companies. One of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way is that corporate culture is one of the key drivers to operational success. Let’s get started.
Why You Need to Assess Your Company’s Culture
You might have exactly the corporate culture that you think you do: one of innovation, inspiration, and accountability. Or, you might have the seeds of these things, seeds that need care and attention to grow. If your organization is like most, it has both strengths and weaknesses. The existence of weaknesses necessitates the demand for growth and improvement. You’ll never know what—or where—those weaknesses are if you never conduct a thorough assessment. But if you know what they are, and can exactly pinpoint them, you can eliminate them and continue to improve.
The mark of a great company is one that responds to its weaknesses not with denial or anger, but with eagerness to get better each day. This principle is behind the core of the corporate culture assessment. The point of a corporate culture assessment is to shine a light on what needs to change so that real and lasting change can begin to occur.
Why is it Important to Improve Corporate Culture?
Some leaders believe that all that matters is the company’s bottom line. If they’re running a public company, they may be right… in a way. But driving the growth of a company’s bottom line in a way that is truly sustainable involves much more than a consideration of how much the organization is earning for its shareholders.
Organizations can’t produce the highest revenue without the industry’s best talent. And to state the obvious, you can’t recruit or retain the best talent with competitive salaries alone; you also need a solid corporate culture. companies report A recent report states that “companies with a robust culture have up to a 72% higher employee engagement than those whose cultures are misaligned or need improvement. Happy employees, who get fulfillment from their jobs, work harder.” If your corporate culture isn’t one that all employees can recognize and implement on a day-to-day basis, your leadership needs to change that.
What Will a Corporate Culture Assessment Show My Organization?
Many organizations feel that they can sum up their corporate culture with a few buzzwords. At Intelligent Leadership Executive Coaching (ILEC), we seek to deliver you greater insights. Our comprehensive assessment garners an analysis that is representative of the true picture of what is going on, from the bottom up, at your company. ILEC 5 Cultures of Culture (5CCA) Assessment system shows you how your corporate culture feeds into (or is hampering) your operating success through several measures.
Our strategy starts with the inspection of your proverbial culture pyramid, where there are three building blocks:
- Your company’s capability culture, or its “can do” attitude.
- It’s commitment culture, or its “will do” attitude.
- Its alignment culture, or its “must do” attitude.
These building blocks create both the individual performance culture and the team performance culture within your company, which in turn contribute to your overall culture. The 5CCA system generates a powerful 52-page report detailing the analysis of each of these subcultures.
With a corporate culture assessment, you’ll gather insights far greater than you ever could with an employee engagement survey. A corporate culture assessment is an objective analysis of how things are working at both the employee-to-employee and employee-to-employer levels of your business.
Why Getting Ready for a Corporate Culture Transformation is Half the Battle:
A corporate culture assessment will help your leadership team identify the gap between what your corporate culture is, and what it one day could be. But getting ready for this corporate culture shift is truly just half of the battle.
Not all organizations can jump into immediate cultural change the moment the light is shone on their weaknesses. Some need revitalization or a shift in their leadership structure before they can move forward. Determining whether your organization is ready starts with the Cultural Transformation Readiness Assessment-40 (CTRA-40). The Readiness Assessment is properly positioned for lasting, sustainable change through the use of six proprietary cultural change readiness predictors. Determining readiness marks the beginning of the journey.
Start with a Corporate Culture Assessment from a Leading Executive Coach.
ILEC is in the business of changing the world, one leader and one coach at a time. Leaders know that corporate culture is crucial to driving operational success. That’s why our company has developed the Corporate Culture Assessment and Cultural Transformation Readiness Assessment, tried and true tools to help your organization examine its culture, identify its strengths and weaknesses, and start implementing lasting, transformative changes. If you’re interested in determining whether now is the right time for your corporation to make a cultural change, reach out to us to learn more.