This will be my 6th year as an independent consultant and I have had the opportunity to work with many organizations, leaders and management teams. And I can imagine all the efforts they have been putting in the last quarter of 2014 to lay out plans for 2015 - adjustments, re-alignments, re-structuring, large scale changes, strategy overhaul etc.
Many staff will always feel that management strategies are merely management whims and fancy hoping to catch on - if it does not work, try something else and hope it works, and often in an opposite 180-degree turn-around - the pendulum swings the other way.
My own take is it really boils down to - Leadership!
Leaders set the tone, mood and culture and if the organization intends to make changes to it's business, process or strategy, it MUST address the culture. Culture = Leadership.
When one talks about organization culture - you cannot Not know Edgar H Schein and his model of organizational culture from the 1980s. He offered the foreword on a recent work in this area called Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations (Jossey-Bass, 2012)
Authors Denison, Hooijberg, Lane & Lief make a compelling case, with relevant real-life case studies of companies, to support their assertions, that for successful culture change to occur, organizations need to manage these critical dynamics in order to remain competitive:-
- Support the front line
- Create strategic alignment
- Creating a single culture out of many (esp in M&A situations)
- Exporting culture (in a globalised, connected but diverse world)
- Building In an emerging market
- Building From an emerging market
Schein, who is professor emeritus at MIT, calls this "a milestone in the culture studies arena".
This was one of my holiday readings last December and I seriously recommend this to all managers and leaders who want to make and see, lasting and sustainable changes in their own organizations as they lead them into 2015 and beyond.
As this books famously says - "culture eats strategy for lunch!"
Get your culture right and everything will fall into place.
*Footnote: seriously, not kidding, just a day after I did this post,ST printed this on an ACCA study.
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