Organizational Culture

          Every business has a culture - whether or not it is intentional.  Savvy companies know their culture, and actively manage it.  Quantifying or identifying a culture can be difficult.  Often, the culture implied in the mission or values statement is not what is perceived by customers and employees.
          Just as there are many, many personality tests and ways to categorize people's response, there are many different culture types.  A lot of research exists in an attempt to simplify the mechanism of culture.  One elegant tool is the Competing Values Framework.

          The Framework provides a structure to identify the various harmonies and tensions within a company.  It also provides terminology and values to develop the overall company strategy and to identify leadership types.  While there are four culture types identified, they are actually a result of two different continuum.  The first is a line from flexibility / adaptability to stability / control.  The second is a line from efficient internal processes to competitive external positioning.
          These concepts should sound familiar:  internal vs. external and stable vs. flexible are concepts that frequently come up in personality and behavior tests.  What's intriguing is not the framework, or the specifics of each culture, it is the application of the framework.  In a business, there are layers of functions, and not each one has the same culture or behavior.  These layers are the company as a whole, individual departments (or teams), functions within the departments, and leaders.
          Take a consulting business, for example.  In general, the consulting business should be externally focused.  The business can range somewhere along the line from stable to flexible, depending on their business platform.  Within the consulting business is the Accounting Department, which should be internally focused and stable, with specific procedures followed.  The CFO should balance between and external focus and a flexible approach to solutions, and the Accounting Clerk should be pretty internal with a stable approach.  The Sales Department may have the opposite culture, one that is highly flexible with an external focus.  Innately, the Accounting Clerk's role is going to have conflict with the Sales Representative's role.
          The business imperatives for each layer may shift to support the appropriate framework identified.  Each one will support the layer above, in such a way as to provide a structure for the company to operate and refer to during decision-making events.  The Framework can also provide terminology to use when defining culture, and broaden the understanding of multiple cultures within a company.  Finally, the Framework is a way for companies to understand and manage the innate friction that arises between cultures.