Building a values driven organisation

Who are the people in your organisation and what values are most important to them?

This could be the most important question you as a business leader considers in next 12months? Why?

“Cultural Capital is the new frontier of competitive advantage” - Richard Barrett

A portfolio of the top twenty publicly listed best companies to work for in the USA in 2008, returned an average annualized return of 16.74% over the last ten years – compared to 2.83% for the S&P 500.

What is the link? Well organisational values drive behaviour, environment, actions and ultimately outcomes. Thus it is crucial for the right values to be in place and more importantly for the employees to be fully aligned to these values ie Personal values compared to organisational values.

The degree to which these are misaligned is a measure of Cultural Entropy and is directly related to revenue growth.

Misalignment can occur in 4 distinct ways within an organisation:

Personal misalignment

Values misalignment

Structural misalignment

Mission misalignment

How can you then measure your current culture and implement sustainable change?

Richard Barrett has devised a set of Cultural Transformation Tools which provides powerful metrics to enable leaders to actively measure and manage culture. It links culture directly to performance.

Mike Raal is an accredited CTT facilitator and has worked with as number of large and small organisations. For more in depth discussion please contact him under the Contact us icon.