business change management, Change Management, Culture Change, Managing change, Podcast

146: Ask Andi—How To Successfully Achieve Change Management Step 2

Posted on by Andrea Simon

Learn how to overcome the pain of change!

I hope you joined me for my previous podcast, the first segment in our series of three Ask Andi’s on change management. I explained how to identify your archetype as well as the archetypes of the people in your organization, so that you can better understand what you’re going to be changing your organization to and why this is going to be so challenging. (No surprise: people don’t like to change.) Today, I want to talk about changing your culture, what this means, and how to go about it. If your business wants or needs to change, this podcast is for you. Enjoy!

Part of why change is so hard is because as humans, we exist within a culture.

Culture isn’t something you wear to work. It’s really the essence of who you are within your community, which for this discussion is the workplace. And in a culture change process, you’re challenging the very essence of who a person is, their identity. So before you can change your culture to something different, you need to understand what your culture is now, and how changing it is probably going to be met with resistance from your employees, maybe a great deal.

The OCAI: a very insightful tool that identifies what your culture is today and where you want to go 

At SAMC, we use the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) developed by Drs. Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn at the University of Michigan, to help bring about company-wide commitment to change. The OCAI is a highly effective tool that assesses current and preferred organizational culture by asking employees and other stakeholders about their company’s culture and what they would prefer it to be in the future. It really helps you graphically see what you’re dealing with in your business, culture-wise.

When you and your employees take the OCAI, you’ll each create a graph that reveals how you think about your company culture of today, and how you would prefer it to be going forward. To help you get the picture, here are two sample OCAI graphs:

OCAI graph1-1

OCAI graph2-2

It is very interesting when you do the OCAI because it asks you what type of culture you really want, and what that really means. Do you want to be more collaborative and more innovative, or more hierarchical, rules-driven and competitive? The OCAI will reveal this so that you can see where exactly you need to change. Once you’ve done it, take a good look at what your red and blue areas are, where your culture is ticking along and where it needs to shift. If it needs to shift only a little bit, you’re not off by much. But if you need a dramatic 10-point shift, it’s time to change.

Can you guess what your company’s culture is?

When we take clients through their OCAI, we point out the four dominant types of organizational cultures, each with its own personality archetypes: Clan (Collaborative), Adhocracy (Creative), Hierarchy (Controlling) and Market (Competing).

OCAI-3

There is no one good culture, but during fast-changing times like these, the wrong culture can take you down the wrong road. Moreover, if “the way we do things here” is given too much sway, it can truly hold a company back.

Join me for Change Management Step 3 where we focus on helping your whole team change

In the third podcast in this series, I explain that as you get further into a change management process, you’re going to be changing your culture and the way things are done in your organization, and it’s going to hurt. People are going to resist. But it can be done with a minimum of pain! Please join me for Step 3 as we really dig into the nuts and bolts of how to bring about real, lasting.change.

To get up to speed on change management, check out these blogs, podcasts and webinar:

Wondering how, and whether, to change your culture? Let’s talk.

In today’s disruptive economy, your business needs to be able to sustain growth in changing times or you risk being left hopelessly behind. Often, the best place to start is with your culture. Is it ready to respond to the needs of the future or is it mired in the outdated ways of the past? At Simon Associates Management Consultants, we are culture change experts who specialize in helping organizations change, grow and thrive amidst today’s fast-changing times. Please contact us. We’d like to help.

Resources

Get the full transcript of this Ask Andi episode here.