ALIGNING YOUR CULTURE WITH SUCCESS
At Chandler Macleod, we describe culture as the personality of an organisation, created from messages that are received about how people are expected to behave or the ‘way we do things around here’. Rather than allow a culture to be established by default, we believe that the smartest organisations design their culture, and that those organisations that shape their culture explicitly will have the greatest chance of success.
With over 20 years of experience in the Culture and Leadership disciplines, we are ideally placed to help you make the subtle yet important changes to your Organisational Culture, that can make all the difference to your business.
NOT A LUXURY
- Is your company losing market share, or struggling to retain or attract top talent?
- Are deliverables regularly not met, or is bureaucracy stifling growth?
- Are innovative ideas failing to materialise, or are customers leaving and not coming back?
- Or could it be that your business is good, and decides it wants to be great?
If the answer to any of these is yes, you should look at your culture as a starting point.
The link between culture, leadership and strategy, and its impact on the bottom line is now indisputable. Chandler Macleod can demonstrate our ROI from our services by looking at the direct link between our culture and leadership work with clients and the increase in their profitability and financial performance.
At Chandler Macleod, we believe that Organisational Culture is like a flow of water –left uncontrolled, it will go where it wants. But if you control it, it can be a source of great energy, which will have a positive effect on any business.
WHY YOU NEED TO SHAPE YOUR CULTURE
Our experience and research shows that:
- Culture determines the extent to which your people play at their full potentialAligning culture to strategy is a key to success
- The momentum generated by great leadership creates the platform for that success
- Permanent change is achieved only when people change the way they think
- Strategy works best when backed by congruent behaviour, symbols and systems
SIX LEVERAGE POINTS
In any intervention around culture, we begin by asking two important questions. What is your culture now, and what do you want it to be?
Culture within organisations is essentially about the messages that an organisation gives out, and is created through six levers:
- Leadership. Importantly, not just what the leaders say, but also what they do.
- Mindsets. Existing mindsets within an organisation may need to be challenged, if they are holding an organisation back.
- Behaviours. What’s expected within an organisation, and what’s not – often, ‘what people can get away with’.
- Structures. The size of the organisation, how different parts of it fit together, and how individuals advance within it. Who is getting promoted?
- Is it the best person, or the most political, that is, the one who can best negotiate the structures?
- Systems. Are they clear, robust, fit for purpose? How are decisions made and success measured?
- Symbols. Is there a disconnect between the symbols of the organisation – like the look and feel of the workplace – and the reality?
Organisational Culture is complex. Changing a culture is straightforward but not necessarily easy. We help leaders understand the pathways for success, and build a greater awareness of what enhances or limits a culture.
A UNIQUE TOOL
At Chandler Macleod, we have developed our own flexible, proprietary tool – the Mettle Culture Gauge (MCG) – to assess, shape and develop the current and desired culture of an organisation. The MCG is a unique, statistically valid and reliable on-line survey that measures the degree to which performance-enhancing cultural qualities are embedded within an organisation.