5 Archetypes of Organizational Culture
According to Freire (2007) (video) there are Five Archetypes of Organizational Culture. Naturally, these cultures are based on, developed and perpetuated by leadership.
Leaders Send Messages
- How do you as a leader do things
- Distance between walk and talk
- What you do says what is important, role meeting
- How do you run meetings, how much time in meetings are spent focusing on customers, change, etc.
- Symbols are the calendar and the checkbook
- Time spent on things shows value
- Money spent on things shows value
- Who gets promoted, why, office space
- Role as storyteller, what are the stories? They show values
- Planning and budgeting process
- Compensating people based on achievement, learning, customer
- What are people rewarded for doing?
Customer-Centric Culture
- CEO spends a lot of time with customers
- Effective listening is widespread
- Client issues are part of every meeting
- Top investments go to client initiatives
- Untrained staff never put in front of the customer
- People proudly share stories of exceeding customer expectation
- Customer feedback integrated into everyone’s compensation
- Those closest to the customers know more about their needs than senior leadership
- Are you really a humble organization?
- Are you really a learning organization?
- Is the relationship based on trust and reliability?
- Arrogance, reject feedback?
One-Team Culture
- Willing to sub-optimize subsystem to optimize overall system
- Once agree on what is best for the firm, will follow decision
- Work is done by one group on behalf of the whole
- Remuneration encourages facilitating the work of others
- Reporting lines and structures recognize dual-citizenship
- Move people around through the organization to gain broader perspective
- Most people have good motives
- Generosity and sharing, trustworthiness, openness
- Not territorial or silo mentality
Innovation Culture
- Experimenting, risk taking
- Experience is valued
- Resources given to R&D
- Lots of learning processes and meetings
- A lot of rigorous measurement focused on continuous improvement
- Curiosity, courage, openness, learning
- If it isn’t broken, break it anyway
- Not risk averse
- Shoot for the stars
- We are not here to count the pens, we are here to change the world
Achievement Culture
- Culture of accountability
- Meritocracy, my word is my bond, truthfulness
- Bottom 10% needs to go
- Clarity in communication of goal-setting
- Healthy confrontation when excuses for nonperformance are given
People-first Culture
- Encouraging people to grow
- Give under-performers a second chance
- Symbols of lack of hierarchy
- A lot of training, workplace development
- Believe in diversity, opportunity, trust
- No distrust
- Find people the right place in the organization
Related posts:
- Motivation and the Six “F”s – Organizational Culture
- The Five Most Important Questions – Peter Drucker
- McNeill Minute for Wednesday, 2007-10-03
- Blogs, blogging, bloggerific, blogtastic
- Everyone is smarter than me
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