Why Does My Organization Need Culture Change Consulting for Success?

Looking at photographs of Google offices and their employees makes you casually wonder about work culture and related topics. Most people are dressed in t-shirts and jeans through the week and the offices have splashes of colors from their logo. It’s a winning culture that attracts some of the brightest talent in the industry.

What makes the highest performing organizations different from the others? Sharp strategies? Superior products and services? Talented people?

It’s very possible that these three reasons make them different, but only for a short period. Any advantage ebbs away if not built on something more fundamental. It’s ‘culture’! You can’t keep beating your competitors and maintain the competitive advantage without something that truly belongs to your organization and they cannot emulate.

Why does the culture at an organization matter?

Culture begins with what people do and how it’s done. What people are doing might not greatly differ in any industry, but the high performing ones consider how they do it as the distinguishing factor. This cumulative effect of what is done and how it’s done determines an organization’s performance.

“Culture’ also includes why people do what they do. Many have miscalculated a company’s culture by just looking at observable behaviors and ignoring a much larger portion which is the shared mindsets and beliefs that influence how the organization’s staff behave. If you are trying to judge or understand an organization’s culture, see below the surface at what cannot be seen easily - the more critical reasons are invisible. In short, culture is behaviors and underlying mindsets that cannot be seen easily that shape how people work and interact daily.

Two reasons you need a Culture Change Consultant

If you aren’t convinced that culture matters or belongs in the workplace. Read the two critical reasons explained below.

Performance and culture are correlated – According to the findings from a research undertaken by McKinsey of one thousand organizations that covers three million people, the ones with top quartile cultures (as per measurement by their Organizational Health Index) post returns to shareholders sixty percent more than median companies and two hundred percent higher than those in the last quartile.

It is inherently difficult to copy culture – Competitors can eventually replicate your products and business models and always work towards dissecting the leader in their industry. In this business landscape, the most cutting edge competitive advantage is one which is a “healthy culture that adapts by default to changing conditions and discovers new ways to succeed.” Seventy percent of organizations that fail their attempt to change have an unhealthy culture which does not respond well to change.

In a nutshell, over a period it has been observed that organizations with unhealthy cultures greatly dip in performance that can cause the company to close. Avoid this fate with a Culture Change Consultant that knows about much more than the tip of the iceberg related to culture.