Professional Resource Center

Breckenridge Culture Indicator™ (BCI™) LEVEL II

Trying to improve the performance of organizational structures and systems by reorganizing, changing leadership, or instituting new training and development programs creates change, but when done in a cultural vacuum without knowledge of an organization’s unique culture, people often solve one problem and unintentionally create others. Ground-breaking studies like Jim Collins’ books, Built to Last and Good to Great have shown that while an organization’s culture powerfully molds its operating style and can positively (or negatively) affect its overall performance, “culture” remains one of the least understood aspects of organizational life – until now.

Is Your Organization’s Culture Preventing You from
Getting the Results You Want?

Many managers would like to improve the performance of their organization, but are not sure how
to go about it. They struggle against the flow of overly complex structures and systems and are often
frustrated by an invisible bureaucracy that undermines their attempts to affect positive change. They
suspect that their organization’s “culture” is preventing them from getting the results they want, but
it’s difficult to identify which cultural elements are the real culprits.

The Breckenridge Culture Indicator™ (BCI™) LEVEL II is a powerful organizational culture assessment tool that helps managers identify the root causes and underlying patterns of ineffective performance in the structures, systems, and culture using the See-Do-Get Process™. The BCI™ LEVEL II infers important characteristics of your organizational culture by the way respondents answer questions about three key organizational dimensions:

1. Strategic View
2. Execution
3. Organizational Climate

A description of the interdependency between these three dimensions is shown below.

The elements shown in the diagram have an interdependent cause-and-effect on each other, so a change in one of the elements will create changes in the others.

The BCI Level II measures 18 elements of organizational structures, systems and climate as shown in the diagram above plus other key aspects of organizational culture. This includes:

STRATEGIC VIEW - The degree to which your organization takes a high-level view of the external environment and its internal operations, including:

• Leadership Focus – Have you built consensus around what your organization does best, your core ideology, and your economic driver?
• Business Results – To what degree is your organization achieving its goals?
• Business Context – Is your strategic focus aligned with customer and prospect needs?
• Strata and Talent – Have you designed the number of managerial layers (strata) to achieve your goals and are you developing the talent to fill needed positions?
• Planning and Deployment – Have you codified your institutional planning process into a strategic plan that is deployed with goals that flow down to day-to-day, week-to-week work assignments?
• Resources and Policies – Are your policies and resources allocations sending a consistent set of signals that support achieving your strategic goals?

EXECUTION - The degree to which your organization’s structures and systems are designed to execute your business strategy and to achieve the results you want, including:

• Decisions – Are your decisions based on knowledge, experience, data, and are they action oriented - with a bias toward achieving goals?
• Structure – Does your organizational structure allow the right people to work together on the right tasks, and are lateral working relationships between organizational units clearly defined?
• Information – Do people have the information that they need for effective operations and to achieve their goals?
• People – Do managers and staff members have the expertise, experience, and intellectual horsepower needed to perform their work successfully and to achieve their goals?
• Rewards – Are the desired behaviors rewarded and are undesired behaviors discouraged?
• Processes – Is work organized into enterprise-wide business processes, with little or no downtime, work-arounds, or quality issues?

ORGANIZATIONAL CLIMATE - Probably the most easily understood aspect of organizational culture, climate is the day-to-day experience that people have of working in an organization, including:

• Openness to Change – Do people openly embrace change and allow policies and decision-making to be influenced by customers and the External Environment?
• Constructive Conflict – Are people encouraged to challenge the status quo and is conflict that arises over differences of opinion used to stimulate learning and improvement?
• Tradition – Is your history and culture (stories, heroes) used to teach people how problems should (or should not) be handled?
• Creativity – Are creativity, innovation, and improvement valued as an important part of the job?
• Management Philosophy – Are managers given the authority and accountability needed to perform effectively and execute the strategic focus?
• Just Culture – Do people trust the organization to do what it says and are they free to present the unvarnished truth about organizational matters without fear of retribution?

Typical Business Applications of the BCI™

• Changes in Management – The indicator gives new managers the operational and cultural information needed to get “up to speed” quickly following a reorganization.
• Mergers and Acquisitions – When two companies are merged, or when one purchases another, the indicator helps identify misalignments between the culture and ways of working in both entities, thus facilitating the integration process.
• Aligning Organizational Culture with Branding – The indicator helps evaluate the degree to which your brand and public relations message are being supported or undermined by your culture.
• Declining or Plateaued Organizational Performance – Managers can use the indicator to identify the root causes and underlying patterns of ineffective organizational behaviors that stifle growth and prevent organizations from achieving their goals.
• Business Process Improvement – The indicator identifies the cultural context within which business processes operate so process owners can develop more effective solutions to problems like rework, poor quality, work-arounds, timeliness, and ineffective communication.
• Strategic Planning – The indicator provides input into a company’s annual strategic planning process by indicating the organization’s Strengths,Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT analysis).
• Team building – The indicator helps create common purpose and goals for work units that might otherwise operate as functional “silos,” thus undermining the objectives of the overall organization.

Call the Breckenridge Institute^® today at 1-800-303-2554 to schedule a free phone consultation about how you can best use the BCI™ to improve your performance.

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