Unhealthy culture makes a mess. Healthy culture sustains a mission.
It's especially a great time to audit your organizational culture when:
- Going through or exiting a transitional season in staff, vision, or focus.
- Experiencing high turnover.
- Recovering from difficult or little "t" traumatic events or removing unhealthy leadership.
- Establishing new leadership or ownership.
- Entering a substantial hiring season.
- Your established organization hasn't intentionally clarified and aligned strategy with your desired culture in the past 3 years.
Culture: social and behavioral norms within an environment
Culture is both what you choose and what you allow in your team or organization.
Structure: systems, organizational charts, processes, and strategies
Structure is the framework to get things done.
Culture is what it's like while you're doing those things.
Most organizations emphasize structure.
Structure is orderly, tidy, and straightforward.
The healthiest organizations build structure and emphasize culture.
Culture is gooey, and gets on everything.
A healthy culture's stickiness is what makes the structure work and keeps people sticking around.
"Culture eats strategy for breakfast." - Peter Drucker
Strategy has value. But where culture and strategy come head-to-head, culture wins every time. It's what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group and is often portrayed in unspoken ways.
Your organization wants its strategies and it's culture to align and fuel one another, not work against the other.
Value of a Clear Culture
A well-established culture is an integral part of the experience each person has with your organization. From one-time visitors to loyal members, and volunteers to staff, healthy culture is what keeps people sticking around.
"Fish have water. People have culture." - paraphrased from David Foster Wallace
Because culture is both what you choose and what you allow, an undefined culture doesn't mean you don't have one. You simply have a culture that's grown a little wild and is largely impacted by the loudest personalities, voices, and often disrupters in the environment.
By intentionally evaluating your existing culture against your desired culture, you can then align your goals, communication, and structure elements accordingly, and map out a game plan to close the gaps from where you are to where you want to be.
Clarified culture allows your organization to:
- Articulate the ideal culture as part of consistent messaging, allowing others to know what to expect and emulate as they engage.
- Select and develop leaders who align with the ideal culture.
- Reinforce the desired culture through organizational design, structure, and priority initiatives.
- Increase retention, motivation, and stability as you lead through change.
What is a culture audit?
Typically offered as part of a larger coaching package, our culture audit allows for an independent inspection of existing cultural norms within your organization.
Phase 1 | Information Gathering
Phase 2 | Data Review
Phase 3 | Summary Findings
Phase 4 | Action Plan Development Aligned with Existing Organizational Priorities
Phase 5 | Implementation
The Culture Audit is customized for your organization based on the number of people involved, key areas of emphasis, and the scope of desired coaching & consulting for phases 4 & 5. Please contact us here for more information.