"The only effective approach to quality is to make it part of your culture, this is our aim."

Cultural Evaluation

Managing Your Corporate Culture

How can you achieve the greatest management leverage?

What we see most often are managers interjecting themselves into all levels of the busy-ness of the business. Sometimes this is called ‘paying attention to details’, other times it is called ‘micro-managing’. In the absence of a crisis, this behavior of management is always wasteful and very often destructive.

At the opposite end of the management spectrum from micro-managing the details is managing the corporate culture . Top level managers should spend a significant portion of their time developing, planning, measuring and supporting the type of culture their business needs to excel. In so doing, they can create a strong and appropriate corporate culture.

Once developed, this allows the workforce to:
--Understand what is expected of them. Once accomplished, now they can decide quickly, and with confidence, how to proceed, and
--Since they can proceed with confidence, they have a greater sense of contribution and are more likely to work hard to meet the goals of the business.

In order to successfully manage your corporate culture or to begin changing your corporate culture:

1. The first task is to determine the appropriate type of corporate culture for your business. This will require a thorough and clear understandings of your products, your markets, your customers and your competition; both as it now is and as you expect it to be in the future.
2. Second, a thorough assessment of your current corporate culture must be completed. To codify and quantify your culture a great deal of data will be collected. Data gathering techniques will include structured interviews of employees throughout the business and will include interviews with suppliers and customers as well. Frequently we will use structured surveys to validate the interviews. In addition, some data will be gathered by observation of various business activities, meetings being the best source of this type of data. These data are then entered into the Cultural Matrix to codify and quantify the current corporate culture.
3. Having determined what type of new corporate culture we need, and what type we have, a “gap analysis” is performed. This analysis will determine which cultural dimensions need to be modified.
4. The gaps are then prioritized and typical problem solving is done. The resultant tasks or projects are executed as your corporate culture dictates they should be completed.
5. While this process, steps 1-4 above, is underway, an on-going assessment, using the Cultural Matrix, will be done to highlight early successes as well as to find problem areas which will need different countermeasures. Then at some predetermined period, usually 3-9 months later, we will return to step 1.