How to Change Company Culture

While there is much conversation these days about the importance of company culture in driving results and building a lasting legacy, the steps to advancing culture are not so clear. The notion of how to change company culture can be hard to grasp beyond a collection of behavior and policy changes designed to make employees feel better.

The First Step to Understanding How to Change Company Culture

The first step to understanding how to change company culture is to define culture. In one sense culture is seen as the personality of an organization such as the tone of its marketing, how formal or casual its dress code is, what a company does for holidays, and so on. While these attributes can reflect the culture of an organization, the true definition of culture is a collection of values that drive the behavior of an organization.

Laying the Foundation for How to Change Company Culture

Understanding that values are at the core of what culture represents, we lay the foundation for advancing culture through an honest and thorough assessment of our values—both personally and organizationally. What our greatest thought leaders are offering us are important and even powerful tools for culture, shared in the form of behaviors and values. If we want to understand how to change company culture it is important that we recognize that the values drive the behaviors, and for those pointing us to behaviors without speaking to the values that underlie them, they are only offering one piece of the puzzle.

Building the Edifice for How to Change Company Culture

Once the foundation has been laid in the form of an honest values assessment, the real process of how to change company culture is to continually enhance our values—personally and organizationally. It’s important to first do this work internally and personally so that the external work of bringing enhanced values to our organizations is authentic. If we are inauthentic in any way, our efforts to advance culture will only go so far and may not bring the intended results.

Balanced Is Guides Companies on How to Change Company Culture

On face value, the process of enhancing values may seem obvious. We all tend to feel as though we know what our values are; yet when we dig deeper into our organizational behaviors we may be surprised to find that our personal values and our organizational values are not the same. The work of Balanced Is, is about shephering leadership through an internal process of values assessment, and then values enhancement, and finally to values instilment on the organizational level. Balanced Is guides companies on how to change company culture in a unique and powerful way. To learn more visit our Home page and our How It Works section.