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StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Video

Common Business Performance Improvement Opportunities

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In today’s hyper competitive marketplace, no leader can afford to see his or her organization’s performance remain stagnant or, worse yet, decline. It’s become an imperative as well as a customer expectation that your company’s performance continually improve no matter what business you’re in.

It can be exceedingly difficult for a business leader to pinpoint the performance improvement opportunities enabling his or her organization to achieve its fullest potential.

At StrategyDriven, we’ve had the privilege of helping leading companies around the world improve their performance. Based on this experience, we’ve identified several common performance improvement opportunities associated with the organizational, process, and technology areas that you can look for and implement within your organization to improve overall performance.

Common Business Performance Opportunities explores the organization, process, and technology challenges frequently preventing the achievement of superior business performance.

As illustrated by StrategyDriven’s Information Development Model, business performance assessments belong to the third tier of performance data refinement. Performance reports at this level benefit from human intelligence added to supporting data during: initial data synthesis, basic trend identification and analysis, multi-trend synthesis, and basic model application. It is the infusion of human knowledge and experience at these points that makes these assessments broadly integrated and highly insightful.

To learn how to maximize the value of your business performance assessment efforts:

Register for StrategyDriven’s FREE Maximizing the Value of Business Performance Assessments online training series

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal, and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Service Provider Network

Nathan Ives Listed as a StrategyDriven Trusted Services Partner

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StrategyDriven Service Provider NetworkStrategyDriven is proud to introduce Nathan Ives as our newest Trusted Services Partner!

Having completed our rigorous certification process, we found Nathan Ives to be a market leading service provider with proven client results.

Nathan Ives’ flagship website, www.StrategyDriven.com, hosts hundreds of digital products – ebooks, videos, podcasts, articles, and full-scope training programs – and is accessed by over 31,000 unique visitors viewing over 1.8 million webpages every month.

Nathan Ives provides services in the following areas:

  • Market: Marketing and Sales
  • Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship

About Nathan Ives

Nathan Ives’ creative genius drives the elegant professionalism of numerous online businesses and digital product platforms. His flagship website hosts 100s of digital products and has been visited by millions of people.

Learn more about Nathan Ives at: https://nathanives.com

About StrategyDriven

StrategyDriven provides executives and managers with the planning and execution advice, tools, and practices needed to create greater organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior bottom line results. At StrategyDriven, our seasoned business leader experts deliver real-world strategic business planning and tactical execution best practice advice – a blending of workplace experience with sound research and academic principles – to tens of thousands of business leaders worldwide.

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StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article

Corporate Cultures – Driving and Anchoring Cultural Change

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StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article | Corporate Cultures - Driving and Anchoring Cultural ChangeBusiness leaders often talk about changing their organization’s culture… but what does that really mean? For most leaders, changing their organization’s culture is about changing how their employees make decisions and perform work. These leaders recognize that the organization’s underlying beliefs and values systems must be altered in order to change these behaviors.[wcm_restrict plans=”60723, 25542, 25653″]

So how do leaders effectively change their organization’s culture?

Changing and anchoring and organizations beliefs and values system to a new paradigm is both an arduous and time-consuming task but one that can be accomplished by following a very deliberate, systematic approach.

Step 1: Understanding the Current Culture

The journey of culture change begins by defining the organization’s current state culture. Without a clear understanding of the organization’s currently held beliefs and values, leaders are unable to establish the starting point from which to affect change. Care must be taken to not misinterpret the organization’s current culture as doing so will profoundly and often negatively impact the overall culture change. (See StrategyDriven Corporate Culture article, Common Cultural Evaluation Misperceptions)

Step 2: Define the Future State Culture

Before embarking on the culture change journey, leaders must necessarily defined the ultimate end state. This new culture should not only reflect the beliefs and values of the organization’s leaders but should align with the optimal achievement of the organizations mission goals. Consequently, leaders should evaluate the fundamental characteristics of how decisions should be made and work performed such that the desired and results are most effectively and efficiently achieved consistent with the beliefs and values of the leadership team. Once defined, these characteristics can be used as the point of entry into a how work gets done culture model to define the specific attributes of the to-be imbued beliefs and values systems. (See StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures, Organizational Culture Model Articles)

Step 3: Changing and Anchoring the Culture

Having identified the current and end state points, leaders must now determine the actions necessary to move the organization to the desired beliefs and values system. Common activities accelerating and anchoring the culture change include:

Define What the New Good Looks Like: Leaders should illustrate desired future state behaviors in a way that directly relates the behaviors to individual performance. Optimal definitions include a philosophical description of the desired behavior and ‘stories’ illustrating the application of the behavior in common day-to-day decisions and activities. These definitions and illustrations should be formally captured within the organization’s standards and expectations documents. (See StrategyDriven Standards and Expectations best practice article, Provide Examples)

Embed the End State Beliefs and Values within Policies and Procedures: Existing policies and procedures are updated to reflect the new way in which decision appropriateness will be evaluated and work will be performed. Particular attention is given to the alignment of rewards and recognition systems and performance standards and expectations documents.

Communicate the End State Cultural Beliefs and Values: Through verbal, hard copy, and electronic communications, leaders share and reinforce the future state behaviors and values. Communications should occur through the organization’s several information channels (See StrategyDriven Business Communications best practice article, Communicate 7 Times, 7 Different Ways).

Align Decisions with the End State Culture: Leader and manager decisions should be made considering their alignment with the future state beliefs and values. During the culture transition period, decision-makers should overtly communicate the alignment between both strategic and routine decisions and the desired culture to further reinforce the change. (See StrategyDriven Decision-Making article, Evaluating Decision Options, Part 3 of 3)

Reinforce the End State Culture through the Organization’s Training Programs: Training programs, qualification standards, and evaluation guides are updated to reflect the future state beliefs and values. These training mechanisms ensure new and existing personnel understand and can skillfully implement the new behaviors during their work performance.

Reinforce the End State Beliefs and Values through Management Observations: Management observations themselves serve to reinforce the behaviors on which they are focused. Consequently, management observation cards and quotas should be aligned with the future state culture. These actions may require standard observation card updating and quota redistribution. (See the StrategyDriven Management Observation Program Forum articles)

Reinforce the End State Cultural Beliefs and Values: Leaders reinforce the future state behaviors and values through provision of feedback, rewards, and recognition aligned with the desired culture. (See StrategyDriven Leadership Lessons from the United States Naval Academy article, Providing Effective Performance Feedback)

Monitor Adherence to the End State Culture: Illustrate, communicate, and reinforce the desired behaviors and values through the organization’s performance measurement system. Achieving this may require refinement of existing metrics and/or creation of new metrics to drive and anchor performance aligned with the future state culture. These measures provide leadership ongoing updates as to the effectiveness of their culture change initiatives and insight to the degree of new culture acceptance by the workforce.

Monitor the End State Culture through Business Performance Assessments: Comprehensively evaluate long-term adherence to the future state beliefs and values through document reviews, individual surveys, personnel interviews, and activity observations. Gaps identified through these assessments provide leadership insights as to where additional definition, communication, and reinforcement is required. These assessments serve as a foundation for continuous refinement and improvement of the organization’s culture.

Final Thought…

All cultures possess unique strengths and vulnerabilities. When changing an organization’s culture, there is likely to be a period of time during which the organization is exposed to the vulnerabilities of both its current and to-be cultures. Therefore, leaders should implement culture risk mitigators to ensure these vulnerabilities do not result in undesired adverse operational impacts. (See StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures article, Culture Change Penalty)[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”60723, 25542, 25653″]

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article

Corporate Cultures – Common Cultural Evaluation Misperceptions

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StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article | Corporate Cultures - Common Cultural Evaluation MisperceptionsIn identifying organizationally shared values and beliefs, there are several common misperceptions that result in an invalid understanding of the actual corporate culture. These misinterpretations should be guarded against as cultural understanding serves as a foundation for many of management’s decisions.[wcm_restrict plans=”60697, 25542, 25653″]

Cultural Evaluation Misperceptions

The following are common errors made when determining the nature of organizational culture:

Equating documented values statements with the actual culture. As revealed in Corporate Cultures – Why Policies Don’t Match Actions, an organization’s documented values, policies, and goals often promote socially acceptable positions that deviate substantially from the actual beliefs reflected in leadership decisions and workforce actions. Therefore, it is erroneous to conclude that documented values equate to the organizations actual culture without other supporting, observable evidence.

Accepting corporate communications as a reflection of the actual culture. Verbal communications, like documented values, typically reflect socially acceptable positions and may not necessarily reveal the organization’s actual culture. While organization members are often bombarded with numerous values related communications, observable decisions and actions should be used to substantiate these assertions.

Correlating the ‘facts’ surrounding the organization’s legends and heroes as representative of the culture. People tend to impose their beliefs and values on past occurrences when creating an organization’s legends and heroes. Caution should be exercised when using these stories as representative of the culture and an independent, objective review performed to ascertain the true motivators and facts of the associated event’s decisions and actions. Legends and heroes exist when everything turns out well… ask whether the actions taken would be culturally acceptable if undesired results were achieved.

Organizational spend reflects true values. Somewhat more difficult to ascertain is the fallacy that the amount of resources dedicated to a particular value proposition equates to the organization’s actual values. Just because an organization dedicates significant resources to a given proposition does not necessarily mean it is committed to a successful outcome. For example, an organization may expend a great many resources on safety but have a far poorer safety record than comparable organizations that spend relatively little on safety. While some organizations are highly committed and expend a great deal of resources on the achievement of a values related initiative and fail, others make similar expenditures with no intention of succeeding. In this latter case, the spend is symbolic or a ruse but not reflective of the culture. Before equating spend with an organization’s culture, determine the strength of commitment by assessing leadership time; political clout; rewards and recognitions; change management; organization-wide involvement; breadth, frequency, and depth of communications; and organizational awareness and focus on initiative success.

Believing need or desire determines culture. On occasion, organization leaders identify certain cultural traits needed to achieve a desired outcome. That need however, does not automatically drive those particular cultural behaviors. In fact, the two are independent of each other because failure is an option. Desired outcomes can create a need for changing organizational culture but desired outcomes themselves do nothing to miraculously redefine the culture.

Associating long ago performance with today’s culture. Organizational cultures change over time because people change (positional changes, turnover, etcetera), business environments change (regulations, marketplace demands, etcetera), and societal values change (political, relational, etcetera). Consequently, cultural analyses need to consider a timeframe that is long enough to eliminate near-term efforts to demonstrate the perceived desired culture and short enough to be reflective of contemporary values and beliefs. In our experience, a one or two-year evaluation period tends to be optimal for slow-moving organizational cultures. Cultural assertions made using evidence in excess of the two-year timeframe, even for slow-moving cultures, should be treated with some suspect as to the accuracy of their reflection of the true contemporary corporate culture.

Using performance extremes to define the culture. Cultural assessments focus on norms – mean, median, and modes – because culture itself is a reflection of the shared values and beliefs of the organization’s members. While important to understand the norms, it is also important to understand the shape of the bell curve associated with those averages (when quantified). Identifying cultural characteristics based on the extremes, the outliers, is not reflective of the commonly shared values of the organization. Thus, cultural determinations based on the extremes are highly suspect and typically invalid.

Final thoughts…

Remember that actions speak louder than words (or documents). Cultural evaluators should seek to draw and validate their conclusions based on a variety of inputs – individual surveys, personnel interviews, document and data reviews, and activity observations – with preference given to observable decisions and actions. (See StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability articles: Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 1 of 3; Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 2 of 3; Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 3 of 3)

It’s important to understand that organization leaders and members of the workforce can have misperceptions about the organizations culture. In fact, misperceptions among the workforce may result in them culturally resisting organizational change. For example, the workforce may resist efficiency improvements if they equate organizational spend with safety and value safety above productivity. Consequently, it is important for leaders to recognize cultural misperceptions within the workforce and incorporate activities to mitigate or alleviate these misperceptions as a part of overall initiative implementation. (See StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures article, Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Change)[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”60697, 25542, 25653″]

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability Article

Organizational Accountability – Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 3

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StrategyDriven Organizational Accountability ArticleWhen evaluating an organization’s culture, it is important to understand that variations likely exist vertically among personnel levels and horizontally across divisions, departments, and workgroups. Consequently, it’s important to establish the degree of alignment between the various organizational levels and business units to the cultural characteristics being evaluated in order to fully understand the cultural adaptation and adherence within the organization.[wcm_restrict plans=”53524, 25542, 25653″]

Culture assessors should keep in mind the need for an alignment evaluation during performance and analysis of surveys, interviews, observations, and reviews. Once these baseline activities have been completed as described in Evaluating Organizational Culture part 1 and part 2, determination of cultural alignment should be performed.

Determining Cultural Alignment

Assessing the relative alignment of cultural characteristics relies on the transformation of qualitative inputs into quantifiable categories. Underlying this transformation are the cultural attributes and traits being assessed divided on a spectral basis. These spectrums typically include 5 or 7 categories such as:

  • Category 1: Strongly Disagree
  • Category 2: Disagree
  • Category 3: Neutral
  • Category 4: Agree
  • Category 5: Strongly Agree

Transforming the several cultural assessment inputs into these quantifiable categories requires data collection and/or assignment by culture trait/attribute and spectral division. This commonly occurs as follows:

  • Surveys: individuals taking the survey assign a categorical rating to specific cultural characteristics through their responses to questions
  • Interviews: questioners categorically rate individual and/or group responses against specific cultural characteristics
  • Observations: evaluators watching activities categorically rate the statements, decisions, and behaviors of those observed against the several specific cultural characteristics
  • Reviews: assessors reviewing documents and data categorically rate findings against specific cultural characteristics

Organizational Alignment Cultural Assessment Analysis ChartsOnce data from the several sources has been collected and normalized (to enable comparison between levels and across the organization), demographic adaptation and adherence to the cultural attributes and traits can be determined and alignment between demographics identified. While initially in tabular format, assessors often find it easier to make their determinations using spider and stacked bar graphs. (See Figure 1: Organizational Alignment Cultural Assessment Analysis Charts) These graphs reveal three key features about each demographic’s cultural adaptation and adherence for comparison:

  • Mean, Median, and Mode Comparison (spider graph): Reveals the relative difference in strength of the culture between analyzed demographics
  • Cultural Characteristic Strength Comparison (stacked bar graph): Reveals the relative difference (tall, narrow bell curve = strong adherence | broad, flat bell curve = week adherence) in strength in cultural trait/attribute between analyzed demographics
  • Cultural Leaning Comparison (stacked bar graph): Reveals the relative bias (strongly disagree to the left, strongly agree to the right | right skewed bell curve = positive | left skewed bell curve = negative) for or against the cultural trait/attribute between demographics

Final Thought…

Having determined the cultural consistency between organizational demographics, assessors should seek to identify the mechanisms fostering or hindering alignment. If improvement in cultural alignment is needed, hindering mechanisms should be improved and/or fostering mechanisms put into place.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”53524, 25542, 25653″]

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Additional Information

For additional information regarding organizational alignment and aligning mechanisms see:

Return to the Organizational Accountability Forum

About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.