Having driven culture changes across many organisations that I have been part of, I have always felt the need to measure culture building. It is important to know if the needle has moved on the intended change and then accelerate / course correct or make changes / adjustments as needed.
I am defining a framework below which will help emphasize measure culture on a digital meter in terms of the shift made over time intervals.
Culture-O-Meter
Step 1 - Define the Organizational Core Values
The first step is to define the organizational core values and this is ‘inside out’ definition of the organizational core habits that holds the enterprise together. It is necessary to validate this across the stakeholder continuously because the ‘what’ and ‘how’ define the way, we deliver stakeholder value. This is recommended to be administered by a culture expert who validates this with leadership, employees, customers, investors, suppliers and other key interfaces. This needs to be done over personal discussion face to face or calls etc. but questionnaire is not the right approach. Devising this and discovering FAQs along with recording inputs in a structured manner is key to the process. This step will help define the core values that establish the organizational way of doing things and what works and what does not! This will be seen through the stakeholders’ lens, so it’s now a fully validated set of discussion that organization need to focus on.
For simplicity, let’s assume the following dimensions as examples:
· Customer Centricity
· Innovation
· Cost competitiveness
· Growth pioneering
· People leadership
· Technology
· Fun
· Sustainability
Step 2 - Define the Culture Meter with Proficiencies of Behaviors
The above values need now to be defined in the culture meter with proficiencies of behaviors displayed like a BARS (Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale). This exercise is a bit exhaustive and one needs to define the GOLD standards of behavior for the set of values that anchors the enterprise culture. The culture meter is now ready for use.
How do we apply this?
Step 3 - Validate Leadership Behaviors with the Defined Values
Let us move to Step 3 and validate leadership behavior of this defined values. Identify the top X number of organizational leaders who drive culture and change across the stakeholder community. Keep this set using the Pareto principle of 20:80 i.e. 20% of the leaders who drive 80% of the enterprise value /outcome. Map this 20% people for all important meetings they chair with their internal teams. After the meeting is over, the leader / chair of the meeting should necessarily discuss the core values practiced during the meeting with the participants and he / she should plot transparently in front of the team and submit it in the digital meter.
Now a few things start happening post this:
- The leader has commenced the process of driving change and is doing a process of awareness and sensitization. This makes the culture tick. Score submission by the leader in front of the team enhances the credibility of the process.
- All leaders plotted for their respective meetings, will necessary need to go through this. It should not be discretionary.
- Initially the leader will realize that there are certain dimensions that they are not touching upon in any of their meetings / action and hence would consciously start making the steps to assimilate those neglected values.
- Every leader will also be able to see how they are feeling after a few meetings on their individual and cumulative scores across various values. This will make them conscious and practice better.
- All leaders aggregating into a team can be analyzed as one team /department / function etc. Now leadership aggregation scores starts to emerge and we can slice & dice the top team.
- All the team scores will now aggregate into enterprise score making it easy to track at any point of time.
- The difference in enterprise scores over the periods will tell us the shift in culture and how the needle has moved.
This will clearly act as a starting point of leadership measuring themselves singularly and collectively as to how they are doing. It will now be easy to identify steps to accelerate this as the system matures and everyone starts contributing to the discussion. Leadership starts getting truly inspirational as now leadership will need to ‘walk the talk’ in front of their teams.
Step 4: Leadership Alignment
Having outlined the processes and steps to find out how the needle is moving at the leadership level, it is time for us to drive leadership alignment as we will clearly get patterns of behaviors with depth of proficiencies as to how each influential leader is driving the culture, so every leader’s SWOT on culture need to be plotted and change needs to commence for the next 6 months to ensure all the identified values change unidirectionally across the teams. A strong facilitated expert on culture will need to drive this unified change and leadership will need to come forward to witness experiences, stories and broaden the understanding. They will all go back with a clear action plan on their SWOT and will act for the next 6 Months in a focused manner.
Post 6 Months, evaluate leadership behaviors and it will show that, the entire leadership is completely synced on this change.
Few facilitation tips during this journey of 6 months:
1. Provide help in understanding, elaborating etc. and set up time for follow-ups to check if they need any alignment.
2. Leaders who are rigid and don’t fall in line with the organizational core values despite all help, will need to be phased out.
3. Ensure new leadership being brought in to the company from within or outside are completely evaluated on this cultural readiness framework before placing them in their roles.
Step 5: Team Behavior
Having completed the exercise of measuring leadership culture, it is time to cascade this to the respective teams. It is advised to take it up to 2 levels (N-2) below the leadership to start with. Every single N-1 and N-2 will now need to be readied for the cultural change workshop. Put this large team through a complete culture makeover driven by the leadership as one team.
This will be case-driven and role-play facilitated, so that, these team are able to understand each element of value behaviors and what does it take to achieve the ‘GOLD’ standards of behaviors. This will need to be a very open workshop and strongly facilitated. Post the workshop, all the members will get back to their roles and leaders will need to hand-hold their N-1 and N-2 to drive this change effectively.
Give the process, 3 months of time. Post the 3 months, measure each members of N, N-1 and N-2 using a 180 degree feedback approach (using carefully picked raters, who know the assesse well and are able to relate with their behaviors) and see the initial SWOT of each member. Plot a plan using culture experts for every members of this large community and drive the change of behaviors for the next 6 months. This plotting of behaviors is an online JIT feedback and every respondent can plot a rating and change it on real time basis. So at any point of time, we have a live multi-rater feedback of the entire population up to N-2 and watch the change happen across the organization. It is important to remain positive during this phase and help the team to go through this transition well.
Step 6: Stakeholder Feedback
Post having a complete view on the Leadership measurement on Culture and validating it internally through self-measurement and team evaluation, the last step is to get a free flow of feedback from stakeholders and customers. This has to be administered by a culture expert with the stakeholders measuring perception through an objective questions technique. The design of the questionnaire becomes important and it has to have all the dimensions that define the company culture as outlined in step 1.
This all round objective feedback is essential as they receive the outcome and will give an unfiltered ‘outside in’ view of the CULTURE. The stakeholder should include investors, Independent Directors, Customers, Suppliers, Channel Partners and Essential Process Intermediaries. Cover this as widely as possible and split the weightage as 50:50 between Customers: Rest of the Stakeholders.
The Final Culture Meter Score Table will look like as below. I am picking up the same representative sample I used and showing you a card that can be populated for an Individual, Team or a Company.
If one were to draw this report from time to time, across Leadership, Team and Company, various insights can be built with respect to the progression.
‘The Culture Meter Helps Us Move Forward Objectively and Clearly’
CULTURE METER
