Cultural Evaluation
Managing Your Corporate Culture
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How can you achieve the greatest management leverage?
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At Quality Consultants we are experts in cultures. Whether you wish to define, analyze or change your culture, we can help. In so doing , we provide teaching/training/coaching and mentoring as well as problem solving to augment your bottom line.
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.
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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 addition, after many years of analyzing and changing cultures we have found that cultures are the “system of all systems” and as such have “High Leverage Points” which allow you make the greatest cultural changes with the least effort. Those high leverage points are: leadership, employee engagement, planning, and supervision; we are experts in all four, and can make you experts as well. Then you can have a business that is:
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a better money making machine;
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a more secure workplace for all your employees, and;
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the supplier of choice to your customers
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In order to successfully manage your corporate culture or to begin changing your corporate culture:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
