Center for Business-to-Business Consulting

Why Culture Matters

In a world of increasing expectations and decreasing resources, organizations need “short cuts” – ways to effectively migrate more and more of their day-to-day operations to automatic pilot, e.g. to effectively perform them without thinking about them. But this operational efficiency is a double-edged sword. When done effectively, automatic pilot operations can be your greatest ally because they increase your ability to compete and achieve your goals. But they can also become too automatic and ultimately self-defeating if they perpetuate problems with work performance, communication, interpersonal conflict, and decision-making and derail attempts to change.

The key is learning how to raise ineffective operations back into organizational consciousness, reconfigure them for more effective performance, and then migrate them back to automatic operations that produce the desired results. Transforming your culture into a more predictable resource creates enormous competitive advantage. The Breckenridge Institute’s unique Harnessing Process™ teaches you how to understand and harness the invisible power of culture, enabling your organization to:

• Adapt to the frenetic pace of change in today’s global economy, and at the same time have a central set of core values around which you are aligned, e.g. the organization speaks with one voice.

• Understand your organization’s preferred ways of working (its personality type) that becomes an indicator of which cultural elements are out of balance, thus undermining high-performance, and which ones are functioning effectively.

• Identify potential misalignments between organizational levels on key business issues and squandered time and energy that could be used to achieve objectives and goals.

• Establish cause-and-effect links between your culture and important leading indicators like customer satisfaction, employee motivation, product-service innovation, and succession management.

• Establish cause-and-effect links between your culture and financial performance measures such as: Sales Growth, Cash Flow, ROI, ROS, and ROA.

• Compare the common-sense perceptions of leaders and managers about the root causes and underlying patterns of ineffective organizational behaviors with objective, quantitative performance data.

• Evaluate an organization’s ability to ignite and sustain change.

• Transform intangible elements like creativity, innovation, climate, and employees’ positive personality characteristics into more predictable resources that contribute to the bottom-line.

• Establish the “fit” of key players in the organization’s culture.

Business Applications

Organizational culture has been shown to be the key element in sustainable business success, yet it has remained the least understood part of organizational life – until now. The Breckenridge Institute’s unique approach to Harnessing the Power of Culture™ will benefit clients in the following situations.

• Changes in Leadership or Management – Our approach gives new senior or middle managers the operational and cultural information they need to get “up to speed” more quickly.

• Mergers and Acquisitions – When two companies are merged, or when one company purchases another, our approach can help identify misalignments between the cultural characteristics and ways of working in both entities, thus facilitating the integration process.

• Improve Marketing and Sales – Our approach is an indicator of the degree to which your organization listens to, and focuses on, its customers and whether or not your structures and systems are operating to meet customers’ needs and requirements.

• Declining or Plateaued Organizational Performance – Senior or middle managers can use our approach 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 – Our approach identifies the cultural context within which business processes operate so process owners can develop more effective solutions to problems like rework, poor or inconsistent quality and service, work-arounds, timeliness, downtime, ineffective communication, interpersonal conflict, and lack of employee motivation.

• Organizational Growth – Proactive companies can use our approach as a tool for creating the new organizational structures, systems, and competencies needed to manage growth.

• Reorganizations – Our approach can be used prior to a reorganization to identify pivotal issues that need to be addressed and to predict where potential barriers to change will be.

• Strategic Planning – Our approach provides quantitative input into a company’s annual strategic planning process by indicating the organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT analysis).

• Teambuilding – Used with teams of managers or work units, our approach helps create common purpose and goals for work units that might otherwise operate as functional “silos,” thus undermining the objectives of the overall organization.

We Deliver Insights, Change, Results™