Cultural Assessment and Alignment

Culture is the organizational context for how behaviors can be assessed and evaluated as well as an environmental code that guides people to behave a certain way to “fit in” with each other and perform productively together.  This context enables the members to successfully operate and navigate through the organization’s processes and activities as a correct way to think, feel and act in relation to the challenges faced.

When individual organizations evolve through separate and distinction histories and are then brought together as a result of business transactions, their underlying cultures often clash and create unnecessary tension and dysfunction. This misalignment can dramatically affect the achievement of the business case value which ultimately drove rationale to combine the entities and stifle the company’s ability to be both flexible and resilient in time of rapid change.  Two specific efforts are commonly employed to address these challenges.

• Cultural Assessment Activities – geared to understanding the underlying elements of the individual cultures, define the key elements of the target culture and understand the gaps
• Cultural Alignment Activities – targeted at closing the gap for critical cultural elements and setting the longer-term path aligning the less critical but important elements over time