Influencing organisational culture
Today every organisation has some sense of its culture: the ‘how we do things around here’ elements of day to day life within that organisation.
Often however, there is a need to understand more fully the impact of the culture upon the performance of the organisation or how well it manages to carry out its primary tasks, meet its clients’ needs and fulfil its societal requirement.
Our approach to influencing culture begins with a collaborative process to diagnose and address the hidden obstacles and “known secrets” that impede performance or change, or prevent change from sustaining over time, at times of major change, expansion or merger. These are often the ‘difficult to confront’ issues.
By providing a deeper diagnosis of your organisation’s culture, and by surfacing the critical elements of the culture, our way of working enables those difficult cultural or dynamic elements to become the real material that is worked with. In this process the strengths and opportunities are also harnessed for the development of the people and the organisation as a whole.
The analysis of culture by this collaborative method, via interviews, workshops, surveys, observations, focus groups and discussions, allows the client organisation to understand and integrate certain aspects of the culture, whilst managing the effects of less desirable elements.
In this way, we are working to change the culture by confronting it at its times of most impact – during the actual project work itself. This method is fundamentally about working with the real issues that are ‘brought to the table’ and ensuring that the dynamics and other difficult aspects of the organisation’s functioning are made overt.
