Upscaling Culture as a part of your Organisational Design
In order to do justice to the consumer behaviour of today and the future, and to be more innovative along the way, we want to be more agile in the business world and we want to apply new approaches to finding solutions.
Building the Right Environment
We need human environments that enable us to be collaborative and thus help us find creative, customer-centric approaches. At the same time, we must not lose sight of business value and delivery quality. For the digital future, we need skilled employees who work in adaptive environments. But we also have to have the courage to leave things simply as they are, where necessary. The space where interactions between “old” and “new” take place needs a common understanding.
As fast as consumer behaviour changes, our organisations grow faster – and every increment brings with it a change in our culture. So upscaling is not just about processes and tools: culture, behaviours, and attitudes are all the more important the more we talk about self-organisation, agility, and autonomy in fast growing team-environments.
Working with organisations in my role as a strategic coach, we realise that simply “getting bigger” can not be the goal. The question is how we can put the practices, guard-rails and cultural elements that work on a small scale into the right direction, even in a perpetually growing organisation – in the process, we have to consider not only quite diverse departments with differing break-downs of the overall company goal, but also production locations, among other things.
Make room for the Culture Ambassador
I think many of us need a role that understands the cultural needs of different locations and drives the creation of common structures and processes for non-technical issues. Aa active “ambassador” of Culture, Values and Principles, and a promoter of collaboration across locations and units.
It is important to find the right balance: the “cultural ambassador” must not only be the “feel-good manager”. In addition to the very important “non-technical” issues, he has to develop and implement very clear and specific action plans, be a leader and co-creator of the digital transformation, and provide flexible allocation of resources, competencies and knowledge sharing. Through new approaches to upscaling collaboration, we also want to achieve delivery improvements and thus an increase in business value.
Come get the straight dope on this and more
In many of my talks, I go into more detail on how these topics are dealt with, and why organisations who are quite serious about their business should consider a role which explicitly takes care of Organisational & Cultural Development.
Let’s talk about that…
