Center for Business-to-Business Consulting

Why Culture Matters

In a world of increasing stakeholder expectations and decreasing resources, aggressive cost cutting programs have run their course. Where do you turn next? Studies have shown that 85% or more of the root causes of performance problems are in the organizational structures, systems, and culture within which people work – put good people in bad systems and you get poor performance. But trying to improve organizational performance by reorganizing, changing leadership or instituting new training and development programs creates change, but when done without understanding an organization’s unique culture, managers often solve one problem while unintentionally creating others.

In fact most managers struggle against the flow of overly complex systems and are often frustrated by an invisible force that undermines their attempts to affect positive change. Their instincts tell them that the organization’s people and its culture are preventing them from getting the results they want, but despite myriad books and articles that have been published on the subject, “culture” remains one of the least understood aspects of organizational life. Organizational culture has remained so illusive and paradoxical because it acts like an Invisible Bureaucracy™ that frustrates and undermines business performance.

The primary purpose of the Breckenridge Institute’s assessment tools and methodologies is to help make the Invisible Bureaucracy™ visible by establishing cause-and-effect links between the invisible force of culture, and highly visible and measurable performance indicators that managers care deeply about. The Breckenridge Institute’s staff will help you transform your organization’s culture into a powerful resource that effectively performs day-to-day operations on autopilot, e.g. effectively and seamlessly without thinking about them. When done effectively, autopilot operations can be your greatest ally because they increase your ability to compete and achieve your goals. But in most cases they are self-defeating because they perpetuate problems with work performance, communication, interpersonal conflict, and decision-making and then derail attempts to create positive change.

The Institute’s unique approach to organizational culture helps managers take ineffective operations off autopilot, reconfigure them, and then migrate them back to autopilot operations that produce the desired results. This allows managers to focus on more pressing matters like increasing their level of service to clients, streamlining delivery channels, and growing their portfolio of revenue streams. Understanding how these invisible forces actually work begins to transform “culture” into a more reliable resource that can be used to achieve an organization’s goals and objectives.

The Breckenridge Institute’s unique methodology and tools will benefit clients in the following business situations.

• Changes in Leadership – Our methodology and tools give 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 acquires another, our methodology and tools can help identify misalignments between the cultural characteristics and ways of working in both entities, thus facilitating the integration process.

• Strategic Planning – Our methodology and tools provide quantitative input into an organization’s strategic planning process by indicating the organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT analysis).

• Declining or Plateaued Organizational Performance – Senior or middle managers can use our methodology and tools to identify the root causes and underlying patterns of ineffective organizational behaviors that stifle growth and prevent organizations from achieving their goals.

• Improve Marketing and Sales – Our methodology and tools reveal 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.

• Business Process Improvement – Our methodology and tools help identify 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 methodology and tools to create the new organizational structures, systems, and competencies needed to manage growth.

• Reorganizations – Our methodology and tools 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.

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

Personality in Context^®