Cultural Transformation in a Nutshell

Everything you wanted to know about Cultural Transformation but were afraid to ask

What is culture? Culture is the identity, the beliefs and the behaviors of all the people who work within the organization.?It’s how we show up around here. It’s how people work together and how people respond during a crisis.?

Let’s look at Google’s culture (Disclaimer Alert! We only know Google’s culture from back in the day when Google was hot, new, and exciting- we are not sure how it is now). Google had amazing teams, they hired according to culture, they fed their people, and had cool workspaces. They may have had a culture where people worked long hours, yet they were taken care of. People were hired for their talent and for whether they fit in. They were engaged and motivated. They loved working for Google.?Their culture was one of high performance.

Unfortunately, Google’s early culture is more of the exception than the rule. Most organizations are operating with a low-performance culture. And when executives realize this, they often attempt a cultural transformation that does more harm than good.

What Is Cultural Transformation?

Cultural transformation is a shift from the current cultural state of an organizational system to a more evolved organizational state.?Organizations typically seek cultural transformation to unlock organizational characteristics needed for survival, to build an engaged staff, and for talent attraction and retention.

Google brought culture into the awareness of organizational performance. They proved that if you take care of your people by creating an amazing culture, the people would take care of the organization, creating a high-performing organization. The crux of cultural transformation is about creating amazing workplaces that are very high-performing.?

One can understand a spectrum of cultures from less evolved cultures (traditional organizational culture) to more evolved cultures. We coined the term, Traditional Organizations, and Evolutionary Organizations, in our book “Leading Beyond Change,” as a way to define low-performing cultures and high-performing cultures. Traditional organizations use command and control to “get” workers to perform, while an Evolutionary Organization is people-centric and collaborative, using an engaged workforce that delivers faster, better, etc.?

All organizations are somewhere on their journey of evolution between Traditional and Evolutionary culture, low performance and high performance.

Are you ready to gain a better understanding of how a cultural transformation is a shift from the current cultural state of an organizational system to a more evolved organizational state? Continue reading the blog, by clicking here.