news & trends: Corporate culture
News and Trends: Corporate culture
Back on the floor now after a longer summerbreak in blogging, due to some really inspiring and challenging coaching sessions with managers from many deifferent parts of the world. Now let´s have a look at the role of corporate culture and how it is perceived in quite different ways in one organization:Â
The estimated impact and role of a corporate culture are perceived in different ways â depending on the organizational role the person has. This is the latest outcome of the Kienbaum Study 2011: Unternehmenskultur 2011 â Rolle und Bedeutung (corporate culture 2011 â role and impact) which was done in cooperation with Harvard business Manager and Institut fĂźr Entwicklung zukunftfähiger Organisationen. Â
Leaders are experiencing more positive corporate culture than middle management or Human Resource HR people: 59 % of the topmanagers are perceiving a well lived and introduced corporate culture. This falls short for the middle management and HR, where only 30 % say, that the corporate culture is lived in a good way. This is the essence of the very interesting survey, which furthermore points out the growing orientation towards outer. Â
What are the consequences in short? You might be afraid to guess the answer already. Yes, the motto is:
communicate, communicate and communicate. obviously selfview and other´s view on the same topic are differing, so communication might bring amore consensus.Assuming, that what you perceive is reality, there seems to be a kind of black hole in between the two management levels resp. hr, where the perceived realization of corporate culture gets sucked up. Seems like the nearer people get to the operational level, the more negative their perceiption is coloured. So do something different from what has been done, to bring more changes â even in perception. Â
So there might be different ways to fill up this gap:Â
improving exchange of informations in both directions: giving better (not more) informations, using appropriate info channels, that also the younger staff will get involved, like instant messenger, tweets, blogs. It is important to involve not only top management in informations. Implementing standup morningmeetings as a new short form of exchange, to actively bring up topics that target the living of corporate culture.
Involve the middle managers more and in different ways to provoke more acceptance of values. This includes new ways of delivering informations, new learning styles, âŚ
Management has to be â and this is a very self understanding baseline â living the corporate culture and its values. Besides this, it is a typical leadership task to discuss the reality with the employees.Â
So the essence for filling the gap is communication â information has to be given actively, and the values have to be filled with life. That´s today´s leaders job â and tho find a proper way to approach people. I know many managers, who are spending a great deal of their time investing the needs of their teams. I guess, this is a corporate culture, that is perceived as matching the standards
