Organizational Approaches and Culture Flashcards
Groyberg, B et al: The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture Westermann G et al: Leading Digital p15-17
What is the Digital Mastery model used for?
Model to look at an organisation’s capabilities and approach to digitalization.
Digital Mastery: What are the four levels?
X-axis: Leadership capability
Y-axis: Digital capability
(1,1) Beginners (Many of them adopt a wait-and-see strategy trying to gain certainty before they act)
(1,2) Conservatives (Can focus more on controls and rules than making progress)
(2,1) Fashionistas (They buy all the new tech but lack leadership capabilities so they waste much of what they spend)
(2,2) Digital masters (They know how and where to invest, and their leaders are committed to guiding the company powerfully into the digital future)
Leaders guide to cultural change: What is strategy defined as?
Strategy provides clarity and focus for collective action and decision making.
It relies on plans and sets of choices to mobilize people and can often be enforced by both concrete rewards for achieving goals and consequences for failing to do so.
Leaders guide to cultural change: What is culture defined as?
Culture is a more elusive lever, because much of it is anchored in unspoken behaviors, mindsets, and social patterns.
Expresses goals through values and beliefs and guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms.
Leaders may lay out detailed, thoughtful plans for strategy and execution, but because they don’t understand culture’s power and dynamics, their plans go off the rails. As someone once said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Leaders guide to cultural change: What dimensions apply to culture?
People interactions: Independent <-> interdependent
Response to change: Stability <-> Flexibility
An organization’s orientation toward people interactions and coordination will fall on a spectrum from highly independent (autonomy, individual action, and competition) to highly interdependent (Emphasize integration, Managing relationships, and coordinating group effort).
Leaders guide to cultural change: Cultures emphasizing stability proritizes what?
Consistency, predictability, and maintenance of the status quo
Leaders guide to cultural change: Cultures NOT emphasizing stability proritizes what?
Flexibility, adaptability, and receptivneness to change
Leaders guide to cultural change: Cultures emphasizing stability tend to what?
Those that favor stability tend to follow rules, use control structures such
as seniority-based staffing, reinforce hierarchy, and strive for efficiency
Leaders guide to cultural change: What is the model presented used for?
Insight about dimensions of people interactions and response to change.
The eight styles can be used to diagnose and describe highly complex and diverse behavioral patterns in a culture and to model how likely an individual leader is to align with and shape that culture.
Leaders guide to cultural change: What 8 styles apply to both organizational cultures and individual leaders?
- Caring
- Purpose
- Learning
- Enjoyment
- Results
- Authority
- Safety
- Order
Leaders guide to cultural change: Cultures emphasizing flexibility tend to what?
Those that favor flexibility tend to prioritize innovation, openness, diversity, and a longer-term orientation.
Leaders guide to cultural change: what is the model presented used for by managers?
- Identify subcultures that may account for higher or lower group performance.
- Rapidly orient new executives to the culture they are joining
- Measure degree of alignment between individual leadership styles and organizational culture to determine what impact a leader might have
- Design an inspirational culture and communicate the changes necessary to achieve it
Leaders guide to cultural change: What are the four levers for evolving a culture?
- Articulate the aspiration.)
Creating a new culture should begin with an analysis of the current one, using a framework that can be openly discussed throughout the organization. - Select and develop leaders who align with the target culture.)
- Use organizational conversations about culture to underscore the importance of
change.)
To shift the shared norms, beliefs, and implicit understandings within an organization, colleagues can talk one another through the change. - Reinforce the desired change through organizational design.)
When a company’s structures, systems, and processes are aligned and support the aspirational culture and strategy, instigating new culture styles and behaviors will become far easier.
Leaders guide to cultural change: Putting it all together, how can the organizational performance be improved through culture change, using the powerful models and methods in this arcticle?
- First leaders must become aware of the culture that operates in their organization.
- Next they can define an aspirational target culture.
- Finally they can master the core change practices of articulation of the aspiration, leadership alignment, organizational conversation, and organizational design.
What are the generally accepted attributes of the culture definition?
Culture is a group phenomenon.
It is manifested in collective behaviors, physical environments, group rituals, visible symbols, stories, and legends.
Other aspects of culture are unseen, such as mindsets, motivations, unspoken assumptions
People are drawn to organizations with characteristics similar to their own; organizations are more likely to select individuals who seem to “fit in”; and over time those who don’t fit in tend to leave.
Thus culture becomes a self-reinforcing social pattern that grows increasingly resistant to change and outside influences.
An important and often overlooked aspect of culture is that despite its subliminal nature, people are effectively hardwired to recognize and respond to it instinctively.
