Organizational Culture: The Keys to the Kingdom

While phrases like “organizational culture” and “business culture” seem to be used more and more often in the pop culture vocabulary, I find that many organizations have only a superficial understanding of the role that culture plays in determining success, productivity, and potential.  

What does an in-depth understanding of organizational culture actually allow for? 

One of the areas I go to work on with client organizations is understanding how to produce breakthrough results by learning how aspects of their culture can limit or suppress creativity, productivity, and potential.  Understanding the role that culture plays in defining an organization’s potential gives you the keys to the proverbial kingdom…the ability to see where people within the organization are thinking from, why they do what they do, and how they can do what they do with greater effectiveness and lower impact on the organization’s bottom line.  This kind of knowledge and insight is indespensible when it comes to engineering a competitive advantage, tapping unused resources, and producing unprcedented results. 

The question that organizations must answer is whether they’re ready to do the kind of thinking and self-evaluation that’s necessary in order to cultivate an awareness of their environment.  Culture is like the air we breathe.  It’s all around us and we can’t exist without it, and yet it’s completely invisible and often taken for granted until such a time as it suffers a deterioration of quality that makes it harder to breathe and function.

Highly effective organizations take the time to become aware of and manage their culture, before the culture itself starts to create and perpetuate barriers to their potential, productivity, and results.