Culture Quick Test
Article | Accountability Insights
Is your culture working for or against you? In other words, is your culture facilitating or hindering your ability to achieve your organization’s desired results? Answer the following questions to perform a Culture Quick Test:
| • | Is your current culture unable to produce the results you’ve promised? | |
| • | Will your current culture have difficulty delivering the results you need in the future? | |
| • | Are there actions your people need to stop doing because those actions just don’t get results? | |
| • | Are there actions your people need to start doing because those actions are needed to achieve your desired results? | |
| • | Are the right (necessary) experiences, beliefs, and actions being hindered or impeded by your current culture? |
If you answered “Yes” to three or more of the above questions, you need to shift the way your people think and act now, not later. Changing your organization’s culture is not an option—it’s an imperative!
Culture depends on results and results depend on culture. You can build a company culture around any set of desired results: market dominance, sales growth, technological excellence, ease of customer interaction, best-in-class quality, or stable earnings, just to name a few. Once the target results are clear, you should move quickly to create a culture that produces the necessary experiences, beliefs, and actions to achieve those results.
Consider CPI’s classic culture change story. Cardiac Pacemakers Inc. (CPI), a leader in cardiovascular technology, was “going 90-mph down an icy road and heading toward a cliff,” according to its CEO Jay Graf. The company had experienced historic sales growth, but two formidable competitors were about to introduce new products that could eclipse CPI’s. Making matters worse, CPI’s new product development capabilities had seriously waned in recent years. Graf was faced with a major turn around that would involve rebuilding the company’s new product development capability. Graf and his team made the case for change from the current results (R1) to the desired results (R2) and communicated it throughout the entire organization. As management led the way, the rest of the company felt empowered to get on board and take accountability for making it happen. Within two years, CPI created what industry observers described as “a new product-development machine” that produced 14 new products in 14 months, doubling sales and increasing the stock price nine-fold.
For more information about clearly defining the shift from R1 to R2 that can speed up culture change and thereby speed up results, we invite you to join the Accountability Community at www.partnersinleadership.com, where you can review actual client case studies.
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