How to Identify the Culture You Have and Fix What’s Missing
By: Jared R Chaffee
Tags: Work, Culture, Leadership, Leadership Development, Professional Development

How to Identify the Culture You Have and Fix What’s Missing

“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” — Simon Sinek

In part 2 of this series, I covered how to build upon the foundation of a winning culture to make it unique to what you’re trying to accomplish. You can read it here:

If you’re new to this series, you should start back at the beginning. Catch up here:

Unless you’re creating a brand new organization from scratch, you likely already have some existing culture to work with. You need to take some time to determine the type of culture you currently have so you can reconcile that with the one you want. The best way to do this is to perform a culture audit. The goal is to understand what’s unique about your organization, what’s strong in your current culture, and what’s missing. Here’s how:

Hold one-on-one discussions with a broad range of employees

When meeting with them, use a standard set of questions, but don’t be afraid to dig in for more details. Remember that the most important question is the follow-up. Questions like “what are we trying to do?” or “where are we trying to go?” can give you a lot of valuable insight into your culture. Do your employees even know the answers to these questions? If not, then there are some cultural gaps you need to fill. Remember the follow-up question here- ask them for their thoughts on what needs to change and any potential solutions to problems they see.

Organizational wide survey

Another option is to conduct an organizational-wide survey. Although this is more scalable and can touch on more employees than by doing one-on-ones, it’s more difficult to ask probing questions. Usually, it’s best to conduct the survey first and then use the results to help guide questions you may want to ask in your one on ones.

What are your cultural icons

This includes any vision or mission statements, lists of organizational values, and core principles. Based on what’s already written and disseminated to employees, what does this say about the culture? Also, think about how forceful the organization is with these cultural icons. Can employees recite them by heart, or does hardly anyone know they exist? Are they publicized for all to see? All of these are indicators you can use to determine what the current culture is and how strongly it resonates with the staff.

Identify cultural shortfalls

Cultural deficiencies may not be immediately obvious, but can still be there, holding the organization back from achieving its strategic goals. Take a look at past shortcomings. Why wasn’t the organization able to achieve its strategic goals. What was holding it back? Chances are, the organization was aiming for something that the existing culture wasn’t ready to support.

Assess the team

If you’re trying to change the culture, assessing the team can give you a good indication of how difficult that change might be and why. Identify who is likely to be on board with change and who is likely to push back. Find out why these people are opposed to change- maybe they aren’t inline with the new culture. Unfortunately, after giving people a chance, you may need to move old managers out to create room for new leaders with a fresh perspective. Culture change doesn’t happen without enthusiasm and momentum, which can often come with the renewed energy of fresh talent.

The bottom line: the best way to assess the culture is by observing how your employees act, not what others tell you. The organization will behave in a way that helps them survive and thrive.

Now that you’ve learned to reconcile the wants and needs of your organizational culture, it’s time to get down to brass tacks and start implementation. Remember that culture building and/or large organizational change does not happen overnight. It’s the culmination of years of effort and leadership design. Check out the next post in this series, where I’ll cover the tools you’ll need so you can start putting your cultural virtues into practice.