Culture Assessment & Transformation
“Creating a culture of innovation, agility, and creativity are the keys to ensuring your organization’s success and survival in today’s turbulent global business environment.”
– ILEC
ILEC’s Typical Client?
While we do work with Fortune 1000 organizations to help them with their transformation initiatives, our real “sweet spot” is working with small to mid-sized global entrepreneurial companies. Through our research as well as the interviews we have done with many of the top CEO’s in the world, we have discovered two reasons why small to mid-sized entrepreneurial organizations fail to grow and, if they do grow, are challenged to sustain their growth:
#1: They underestimate the important role leadership plays in creating a strong culture; and
#2: They overestimate the importance of culture per se, while underestimating the importance of building and sustaining the kind of culture that supports the primary operating imperative of the business.
What we have discovered in our research is that most CEOs, owners and entrepreneurs are correct and appropriate to focus their time and energy on creating and producing clearly differentiated products and services and then acquiring and retaining those clients and customers who need their differentiated products and services. We have learned, however, that the most successful, entrepreneurial CEO’s, place as much, if not even greater value, on creating and sustaining the right leadership and operating culture. The “best of the best” CEO’s and organizations absolutely understand, embrace, and live the belief that leadership, talent, and culture are the leading indicators to achieving and sustaining operating success. Yes, focusing on the products and services that serve a market need is important. Even more important, however, is having the right leadership and culture in place that ignites the right strategy and execution of that strategy—in support of the operating goals of the business.
What is Culture?
Your organization’s culture represents the collective character, values, thoughts, emotions, beliefs and behaviors of your leaders and individual contributors. Your organization’s culture is a product of such factors as its’ history and how your leaders and individual contributors ascribe meaning and value to it as well as leadership style (legacy and current) which is then reflected in the creation and implementation of your organization’s values, vision, mission, purpose, strategy, structure and roles.
Why is Culture Important?
Your organization’s current and future operating success is tied to the “health and vibrancy” and overall “maturity” of your culture. Regardless of your unique transformation challenge (e.g., the need to be more innovative, collaborative, global, more responsive, more efficient, execute better, become more customer-focused, or even integrate or merge with another organization, etc.), your culture and how strong and vibrant it is, will determine if you succeed or fail.
There is no organization that exists in the world today that is not interested in getting better. Organizations that are effective, want to be more effective. Organizations that are lagging their competition want to be leading their competition. And organizations that are leading their market want to make sure they continue to lead and dominate their market.
Regardless of your organizations operating imperative, two things are certain based on our many decades of experience working with leaders and organizations all over the world–achieving and sustaining operating success in your organization will always be in direct proportion to how effectively your senior leaders:
(1) create a culture that truly supports your most pressing operating imperative; and (2) continuously determining if you in fact have created this culture and, if not, quickly and decisively course-correcting to ensure this goal is met. These are the two most important jobs of a CEO, owner, entrepreneur, and their senior executive teams.
The infographic below, Transforming Culture: The 6 Critical Steps, highlights the steps to help you and your organization successfully navigate your transformation challenges.
Whether your organization is a “market leader” or “laggard” is irrelevant. The need to transform will never end as all businesses are facing growing disruption from all angles. According to research by the Boston Consulting Group, 75% of business transformations flat-out fail, resulting in an organization’s decline, failure, or their eventual extinction. A big reason for their failure? CEO’s and senior leadership teams who were not as diligent as they needed to be in creating and transforming their culture in support of their operating goals. In fact, the biggest reason for their failure? A lack of leadership.
Speaking of bad leadership again, only 25% of organization’s who are considered “market leaders”, transform from a position of strength to sustain their position of strength, while 75% of “market leaders” currently are not engaged in positive and pre-emptive transformation efforts—which almost guarantees their eventual failure.
In a global study of over 7,000 leaders from companies in 150 countries, 86% indicated that corporate culture was very important in driving operation success; however, only 28% believe they understand their culture well and only 19% believe they have the right culture.
Deloitte Human Capital Research
How Can Intelligent Leadership Executive Coaching (ILEC), Help You?
Here are some ways you can access our knowledge and experience to help you and your organization with your cultural transformation initiative. We have arranged these in order, from those that require the least investment to those that require the most.
Access Our Blogs
We have written more than 450 blog posts and articles that can be accessed directly at this site as well as the blog at www.johnmattone.com.
Access ILEC’s Assessments and Resources
Our proprietary cultural assessments are world-class assessments that are easy to administer, yet generate easy to understand detailed reports that will help you pinpoint the “health and vibrancy” of your organization’s current culture (The 5 Cultures of Culture Assessment), as well as determine your organization’s overall “readiness” to transform its’ culture (Cultural Transformation Readiness Assessment-40) in support of your operating goals.
Debrief Your Culture Assessment Results
Organizations that have used our culture assessments will often seek our expertise in debriefing their assessment results. We offer 2-hour virtual debriefs as well as half-or full-day sessions.
“ILEC’s Cultural Transformation 3-Day Retreat Program conducted for the senior leadership team of one of our most valued clients was a major success. Senior executives were highly engaged before, during and after the Retreat due to the multi-faceted and comprehensive approach he used…combining lecture, group discussion, the results from his 5CCA culture assessment, team analysis and action-planning. For the first time we can remember, our client is leveraging what they learned through this annual retreat and are now making positive improvements to their culture and operations.”
– Labeed S. Hamid
President MEMC (Middle East Management Centre)
Co-Founder and Member of the Board MCT (Management Centre Turkey)