Senior leaders often think of culture as a nice-to-have or a cherry-on-top.
“We’ll get to it when we get to it,” they say.
But there’s nothing extra about culture.
Culture is an essential ingredient for any thriving business and a key indicator of its health, right alongside revenue and profit-margin.
An effective culture leads to psychological safety and appropriate risk-taking, durable trust and reliable accountability, lower turnover and higher job satisfaction, and an overall elevation of results and wellbeing. And it can be the differentiator for prospective customers and talent.
An ineffective culture, simply put, will sabotage your strategy.
In this way, culture can serve as a powerful yet often overlooked source of competitive advantage.
The question is:
Is your current culture a secret weapon? Or an invisible barrier?
If you suspect the latter, it’s time to speak to us…
Culture is more than a list of “corporate values” nailed to the wall.
Culture is everything that makes up “how it is around here”. Established (and often unquestioned) ways of operating. Persistent moods. Ingrained tendencies. Deeply (and sometimes fiercely) held beliefs about how things should be.
All of this (and more) contributes to a culture and determines everything that is possible within it.
Culture can be downright toxic. But more often, the existing culture simply isn’t a match for where you’re headed, and it gets you stuck.
The Granger Network works with your team to identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and to cultivate the culture needed as you close that gap.
Culture doesn’t take root on its own. It must be situated within a strategy that matches it, and it must be carried forward by capable leaders who can communicate, model, and intervene in it. That’s why all our cultural work is done with an eye towards the organization’s strategy and leadership, and by coaches and consultants with mastery in all three domains.
Like all Granger Network engagements, our culture work moves through our four-phase approach:
Situate – Culture forms slowly, imperceptibly, over time. In the Situate phase, through a variety of interviews, assessments, and data-collection methods, we identify the current culture so that it can be assessed objectively. We also do the powerful work of taking collective responsibility for the existing culture, as a clearing for what’s next.
Align – In the Align phase, we decide on the culture required to support the organization’s new vision and declared outcomes and create a context in which that culture can flourish.
Execute – In the Execute phase, we reify the culture by impacting the daily conversations and practices that contribute to it, and creating an overall accountability structure.
End – In the End phase, we put sustainment measures in place so that if culture begins to drift, the organization can re-situate and true up to the culture that will support the organization’s goals.
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