What to do when your company culture needs to evolve

This article is based on ideas from my upcoming book The Center of Experience: a Blueprint for the Experience-led Enterprise

A particular organizational culture definition is not good or bad, only more successful or less successful in achieving its goals. There are times, however, when an organization needs to evolve from one dominant type of culture to another.

The importance of both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) is now well-known, with a majority of companies competing based on both factors for both top talent, and customers. Because of this, a comprehensive brand experience, or customer and employee experience combined, must be achieved by companies. I refer to this combination of EX and CX within the enterprise as a Center of Experience.

As outlined in my latest book (and first identified within the longstanding Competing Values Framework), The Center of Experience, organizational culture can be plotted somewhere in a quadrant consisting of 4 areas:

• Collaboration (team-oriented, where connectedness is valued)

• Creativity (innovative, where new ideas and approaches are valued)

• Competition (externally-focused and sales-driven, where beating the competition is valued)

• Control (organization and hierarchy, where efficiency and repeatability is valued)

A particular organizational culture definition is not good or bad, only more successful or less successful in achieving its goals. There are times, however, when an organization needs to evolve from one dominant type of culture to another.

Is there a single archetype that fits an organization over its lifetime? While that may be the case for a handful of companies, what is more likely is that, as it evolves, it may need to shift its culture across the quadrant.

Over time, an organization might need to adopt different types of culture, both as the dominant culture, but also specific ones within teams.

Cultural needs can be affected by organizational maturity, size, industry, external competition, and more. An adaptive organization with a clear strategy understands when a different cultural emphasis is needed, whether as the dominant company culture, or as the dominant culture within a specific division, practice area, or team.

For instance, an organization with aggressive growth goals and a reliable product or service may need to shift to a dominant culture of competition in order to meet its objectives. The caution, however, is that if it stays this way for too long, it may lose its focus on innovation at the expense of becoming a sales-driven organization.

A strategic executive team would be able to identify when to modify the cultural focus, and with what teams to make the most drastic changes. In the example above, the sales team within the organization may be the last group within the company to shift even slightly away from a culture of competition, and even then, it may always be the most competition focused. Instead, the product development team may shift to a more collaborative and creative mindset and culture in order to fill the company’s pipeline with new and innovative products.

By measuring and understanding a company’s culture, leadership is able to adjust factors like the above example in order to maximize revenue potential and long-term growth.

The ideal culture

An organization is an ever-evolving organism, with continually shifting priorities and needs. Its organizational culture is a key component that helps its leadership, employees, partners, and customers understand its focus and values.

Assessing your organizational culture should involve describing the ideal scenario, where a company understands its desired culture, its current perceived state, and has a plan to reach its ideal state.

This ideal state will have a dominant culture, but never a monolithic one. This is important for many reasons, including the value of diversity (people, ideas, and methods), and the need of an organization to evolve and shift over time (so as not to get “stuck” in one way of being). 

A successful culture values alignment, adaptivity, innovation, and diversity in its goals and the strategies used to reach them. The ways in which those goals are achieved may be as diverse as the individuals that make up the organization, but they can all utilize the methods discussed on the preceding pages to facilitate, measure, and optimize.

[i] Gallup. State of the American Workforce. 2017.