What does the internal culture do with the organization?
The internal corporate culture is the invisible glue that holds an organization together for better or worse. It includes things like norms, purpose, values, approach – things that are hard to codify, difficult to assess, and certainly difficult to measure and therefore manage.
This “invisibility” leads to many new recruit’s top executives fall short when they come to a new organization.
Ever wondered what it really means? Well, it is a perfect example, Nokia Mobile Phones. They were the world’s leading and dominating the mobile market. They were unable to renew itself and failing to move from traditional mobile phones to smartphones and into the digital media landscape how smartphones today plays an important role.
It is a very powerful example of what happens when culture holds back a company from making necessary changes. Many who worked in Nokia have probably tried to implement changes, only to see himself beaten by unspoken rules and time-honoured traditions.
Corporate culture is a balanced mix of human psychology, attitudes, actions and attitudes that combine to create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively controls the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of security and accountability rather than navigating their days through large extensive bureaucracy of procedures of procedures guilt. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better economic growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking to achieve new levels of innovation. If a company has remained stable of a 50 million dollars in revenue over a period of 20 years without developing noteworthy, it is a high probability that the company will stagnate and disappear shortly. Looking at trends over the last 20 years the 5o million dollars in turnover today is considerably less than 20 years ago, ergo it has already started to stagnates and runs a safe liquidation if one fails to change the corporate culture.
Misunderstood and misruled
Culture, as a brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feeling part the of business belonging to HR. A corporate culture is not intangible or floating values, it’s not a vibe or something solid you can touch and feel. It is one of the key drivers that must be changed and adjusted in order to create long-term sustainable development in the long term. That’s not good enough just to have a great product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success depends on a culture that is nurtured and vibrant. Corporate culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death.
Think of it as a caring habit of success. Culture cannot be manufactured. It must be genuinely nurtured top leader and even down in the organizations. Here the top manager and middle managers made significantly more responsibility than what we see today. A larger Norwegian organization changed 11 CEOs in ten years, statistics cannot all chief executives be useless. It has much more to-do about conditions for corporate governance within the organization. New research shows that the middle management often play a key role if the changes becomes a success or not. Often middle management play their own agendas, they sabotage the change process, they do not do what one has agreed to etc. Top leader’s responsibility is with the middle managers and replacing the middle managers who will not. A vibrant culture is organically and develops.
If there is any doubt about the value of investing time in culture, there are significant benefits that come from a vibrant and living culture:
Focus: Adjusts the entire company to achieve its vision, mission and goals.
Motivation: Building employee motivation and loyalty.
Relationships: Builds solidarity across and among the company’s various departments and divisions.
Accountability Building: Consistency, accountability and coordinated governance of the company.
Glow: Create an internal glow that allow an organization to become more efficient and vibrant.
Corporate culture is a hot topic among businesses who want to attract the best talent, translate their values into their products and services, and show customers what they are about.
Lean is a good way to change and build a solid corporate culture for future sustainable development overtime. Although Lean also has its weaknesses so puts the focus on continuous change within the organization.