Of course we all want our organisation to be the best, and we learn from other organisations who we see as being the best so we can implement what they are doing. Our plan is to copy the behaviours of successful organisations to achieve the same degree of success. It’s a great plan and a very common one, except it doesn’t really work when it comes to organizational culture.
A great article in the digital magazine Strategy+Business by John Katzenbach and Alice Zhou (Read it Here) highlight the difficulties of trying to copy culture They point out that a company’s culture is made up from that company’s history and heritage, the journey of its development, and the resulting behaviours and emotions. These are things that cannot be transplanted from one company to another. They are as individual and unique as fingerprints
Rather, it is the identification of your company’s unique element of habits, behaviours, relationships and ways of thinking that then enable you to gradually move in a direction to capitalise on your strengths. Using a culture survey can help with identifying the key elements of your company culture. When identified, you are able to focus on those things that can help you get from where you are to where you want to be. Your goal, according to the authors, is to create an effective culture “in which the elements that energize people are also those that support the organisations strategy.”
Don’t try to be like everyone else, find out what it is about your culture that can be strengthened so you become the envy of others.