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Cultural Transformation
Every organization has a culture. The question is whether your organization’s culture is supporting or hindering the ability to achieve its strategies and goals, and the ongoing transformation into a high-performance organization. Do you know how to manage your culture and how to pinpoint areas that need to be enhanced?
We, at enSpirit, llc., have recently incorporated a tool (Denison Model) that effectively assists companies in assessing and evaluating how effective their cultural environment is at reaching their desired performance level. Through a short sixty question survey, companies and individuals are able to obtain an accurate analysis concerning the four major traits as defined by the Denison Model. This tool benchmarks your organization’s performance with the scores of over 1000 other organizations. It highlights where your company may be struggling and targets one of twelve key indexes as to truly identify where your company’s money, time, and energy needs to be focused. Especially in this time of tight economics, the Denison Model takes the guess work out of where companies and organizations need to focus their investments.
The Denison Model
The Denison Model is divided into four traits (quadrants):
Mission: Do we know where we are going?
Adaptability: Are we listening to the marketplace?
Involvement: Are our people engaged, aligned, and capable?
Consistency: Do we have the values, systems, and processes in place to execute?
Inside each trait are three indexes, which describe more specific behaviors for each trait. These indexes will give the specificity that will allow for improving relevancy and actionability.
The Link to Business Performance
The Denison Model is the result of two decades of research performed by Dr. Daniel Denison. He focused on what cultural characteristics correlated with bottom-line business performance, such as profit, growth, quality, innovation, and employee satisfaction.
High scores on the stable side tend to correlate with measures of profitability, while strength on the flexible side tend to indicate high innovation and customer satisfaction. Organizations that are more externally focused tend to have high growth, while internally focused organizations tend to have higher quality, better operating performance, and higher employee satisfaction.
The most successful organizations are balanced across all four traits. They have become adept at balancing the tensions of being both internally and externally focused, and finding the right balance between flexibility and stability.
The bottom line is that you already have a culture, but is it working for you or against you? With these tools, you will be able to measure that culture, identify strengths and weaknesses, and then implement a strategy to make the necessary changes to close the gaps. Are you prepared to lead your organization through thoughtful cultural evolution and transformation?
"The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures
in which they are embedded, those cultures will manage them. Cultural
understanding
is desirable for all of us, but it is essential to leaders if they are to lead.
~ Edgar Schein
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