Your culture is being diagnosed all the time. Your customers, employees, and the people you are trying to attract and hire are constantly making assessments. Therefore, as a leader, it is important for you to make sure you are also continually looking at and diagnosing the state of your culture.
To design a culture, you must start with your customer. What does your customer want or need, and how does your company fulfil your customer’s needs? That is your Purpose. From there, you ask what you want your company to be; that is your Vision. How you are going to get there is your Strategy. And the behaviors you want your people to embody to get there are your Values.
To diagnose your culture, you go in the opposite direction. Do your Purpose and Vision align with your customers’ needs? Are you getting the results you want for your customers? What behaviors are driving your results? What environmental elements are driving your behaviors? Are your environmental elements supporting your strategic initiatives? Are people behaving in ways that align with your Values? By going backwards, you can diagnose where the disconnects are in your culture.
The way to remedy those disconnects? Alignment.
An Introduction to Alignment
Culture is established by determining an organization’s Purpose, Vision, Values, and Strategy (PVVS); an organization is aligned with its culture by ensuring that every person within the organization and every system within the organization is aligned with the PVVS.
Strategic cultural alignment happens on two levels:
- Horizontal alignment: making sure that every leader—each person who has the responsibility for leading other people—understands, agrees with, and is skilled at helping you execute your direction.
- Vertical alignment: making sure that all employees understand, agree with, and support the direction, and ensuring that all organizational systems are supporting and connected to the direction.
Systemically, culture is aligned by making it the central consideration in these six areas:
- Structure
- Processes
- Decision making
- Communication and information sharing
- Rewards/incentives
- Employee development
To have a healthy culture, you need to make sure all six of these elements are aligned to drive behavior that delivers the desired results. This means that when you diagnose the state of your culture, you need to assess each of these elements.
The Diagnostic Process
To diagnose where your culture is misaligned, start by collecting qualitative data. Gather your executive team in a room together, or conduct individual interviews, and discuss the current mission, vision, values, and strategic initiatives—if they exist. Do people know what they are? How do they live them? Do leaders reference them when speaking to employees?
I would not recommend using a survey for this part of the process; right now, you want to dig deep and get to know the executive team and what’s on their minds—going deeper than a survey allows. You will also want to expand your qualitative research beyond just the executive team to see what other levels of the company are experiencing, which could be very different from what the executive team perceives.
In this part of the process, an outside perspective from an external advisor—ideally someone with expertise in qualitative data gathering and analysis—can be invaluable. A seasoned qualitative researcher can gather all this information, extract the themes, and identify the levers for continuous improvement.
Analysis
Once you have collected all this data, analyze it to create a report laying out what is working and what is not. Again, this is where an expert in quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis is invaluable!
Once the data on these elements is gathered, analyzed, and synthesized into a report, you can make decisions about how to implement culture alignment. You can’t fix all the disconnects at the same time, so you decide what levers are the best levers to pull first. Then, you can work on one or two things a year until your whole organizational culture is transformed.
Keep in mind that this is a continual diagnosis. This diagnostic process is not a one-time tool; it is essential to run tests regularly—once a year, for example—to ensure you are still in alignment. It takes continual attention!