Introduction:
Having the right organizational culture is a key strategy to achieve desired results. Strategy tells you how you will work together to achieve your goals and objectives, while organizational culture is the “strategy” that dictates how you behave. It is integrally interwoven with all other key elements of your organization, including your strategic plan, operational plans, and day-to-day activities.
Recognizing the Importance of Culture
In reality, even if the culture is not clearly articulated, it exists. It can be either unifying and supportive or divisive and counterproductive. Unless you make an effort to clarify the overall culture, the different sub-cultures within your organization, such as fundraising versus program, will lead to group conflict. An unexamined culture is like an unkempt, messy, disorganized, self-conflicted person – difficult or impossible to work with.
Without an involving and supportive culture, your plans are missing a key component of how to work together to do it all. A unifying organizational culture helps everyone work better together. However, you need a strategic plan before you develop the culture to support it. People need to know what you want to accomplish and the results you want before they can successfully address the culture needed to “oil” the process.
Image Placement:
Place the first image after the paragraph ending with: "A unifying organizational culture helps everyone work better together."
Developing a Clear Organizational Culture
When you develop a clear organizational culture, it binds your organization together and unites everyone in their work. This facilitates common pursuit and support of agreed goals in all fundraising, administration, and program work for the entire organization.
Culture as the Organization's Personality
The culture of an organization shines through as its personality. Similar to national culture, the culture of an organization is made up of the values, beliefs, assumptions, and norms of its members and reflects their behaviors, internally and externally. You can tell a culture by what people talk about, what they smile about, and what they criticize. It is demonstrated in the rewards at staff meetings, attitudes about donors and beneficiaries, stories about the organization, and most especially the comments at the end of a bad day.
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Place the second image after the paragraph ending with: "A unifying organizational culture helps everyone work better together."
Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts
In planning, it is important to distinguish outputs, outcomes, and impacts. Here are some tips I have found to be helpful when discussing the culture an organization needs to support the vision, mission, goals, and operational plans:
Expected Outputs: A better understanding by everyone of the importance of a healthy, productive culture; clarifying how you want to work together now and into the future; and gaining commitment to translate agreed values and culture into working smoothly together to achieve objectives.
Expected Outcomes: Reduced conflict and wasted time; more productive work individually and as teams; increased satisfaction for staff, board members, and volunteers; and better fundraising, management, and program work.
Expected Impacts: A more efficient and effective organization, more funds raised, more productive partnerships, more motivated staff, better program results, and greater success.
Culture as the Glue
A well-tuned organizational culture combines vision, mission, values, and people. Good culture requires commitment by everyone to live it and support it. It may take six months or longer with leadership and persistence to fully achieve your new, desired culture.
Example: How Culture Changed a Small Community Organization
This story exemplifies how changing the culture changed an entire organization. My wife Rebecca and I were living in an economically diverse neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. It had a diverse population and a large number of historic homes from the nineteenth century, which were the two main reasons we were living there. However, it also had serious problems with litter, graffiti, crime, drugs, and abandoned houses.
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Place the third image after the paragraph ending with: "Having a clear organization culture lets people know what is expected of them."
Assessing Values and Culture – Essential Session
The right, strong values coupled with an involving, supporting culture will inspire and empower your staff, leaders, board members, volunteers, and others to support your organization’s strategic plans with energy and commitment. On the other hand, a culture that is stuck, negative, or blaming will undermine (or even sabotage) those plans. And values that are weak will not serve to strengthen your culture.
For nonprofits, the challenge in having a healthy culture may come from differing management styles of leaders, conflicts between different departments (especially fundraising and program), not addressing the culture issue effectively, or contradictory attitudes between board members and staff. This discord results in strong opinions held by different individuals or even units, because there is no unifying statement or commitment for the culture.
Designing the Desired Culture
In this chapter, you and your staff will assess current culture and design your new, desired culture. In addition to the guidance presented here, I encourage you to download and use the tools I developed and refined over many years while consulting with hundreds of nonprofits in dozens of countries: “Assessing Your Core Values and Organization Culture.”
Revisiting and Updating Core Values
Start by confirming the core values and assuring they are strong enough. Although you may have already addressed values early in the planning along with vision and mission, it is still definitely useful to review values more thoroughly along with culture at this point in the planning process.
Conclusion
Strong core values and a supportive culture will energize stakeholders and help achieve organizational goals. Involving everyone in the process and addressing discrepancies candidly will create a unified, positive culture that propels the organization forward.
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