Organizational Development Church - Changing Culture

The culture of an organization is similar to ethnic or social culture.  In an organization, culture refers to the traditions, rituals, practices and expected behaviors that define how the organization behaves to accomplish its mission.  Even very similar organizations may have distinctly different cultures.  Consider the US Air Fore and the US Marine Corps, or Microsoft and Google.  Each of those organizations has a culture that works for it; the culture supports its strategic mission. 

Leader behavior and the values to which leaders adhere represent the single most impactful drivers of organizational culture. 

Culture change usually begins when an organization finds itself on a burning platform, in a situation or condition that requires the organization to change and adapt, or shrink and perhaps fail.  The academic who coined the term organizational culture famously said, “Culture eats change for breakfast.”  This axiom is especially true in larger and older organizations, and almost always true in organizations that have functioned well for long periods but now find themselves on a quickly burning platform.

The goal of culture change is to unfreeze the old culture, install the necessary changes in practices, traditions, rituals and behaviors, then re-freeze the culture.

​Change Leadership and Change Management

Change is a universal, across history, location and organizations.  It is the subject of endless – and sometimes truthful – clichés:  “The only constant is change.”  “Adapt, overcome, improvise and survive.”  “People don’t like change.”  “The best laid plans of mice and men oft time go astray.”

However, nowadays so many dynamics drive change that both the extent and speed of change accelerates constantly:  technology, globalization, geopolitics, climate change, and innovation….

A body of research and best practices to plan, communicate, implement and sustain organizational change has grown into a discipline of its own in the past several decades.  All change creates downturns in performance/outputs, quality and impacts organizational morale.  Well-done change processes minimize these impacts through careful planning, over-communication and committed leadership. 

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