Recommended for

Middle to senior managers with change management responsibility. HR and OD practitioners who need to gain a better understanding of organisational culture. Research professionals and consultants who wish to learn state-of-the-art culture diagnosis techniques to plan and effect culture change.

Course Overview

One of the most fundamental questions an organisation can ask is ‘Does our current culture accelerate or hinder the achievement of our strategy? It is rare that the answer to this question is unequivocally positive. However embarking on culture change is one of the most difficult and least likely to be successful exercises an organisation can undertake largely because organisations rarely understand how to effect radical behavioural change.

This course shows how effective culture change can be achieved through analysing an organisation’s culture at a fundamental level, identifying the key levers that will affect real change and developing a route map to the desired state.

Course Benefits

By the end of this course you would be able to:

• Understand the psychological nature of organisational culture.

• Apply a range of diagnostic techniques for defining and assessing different cultures.

• Understand the link between culture and employee engagement and how this influences morale and productivity.

• Represent an organisation’s culture diagrammatically and pictorially.

• Manage culture change as an ongoing process.

• Identify which change factors will have the biggest impact.

• Develop a route map to guide the change process.

• Engage stakeholders in achieving the change.

Course Content

Day 1

What does cognitive and social psychology tell us about organisational culture?

Defining culture: theories, perspectives and metaphors.

The role of sub-cultures.

Real-world case studies.

Culture as a complex multilevel phenomenon.

• Social frameworks.

• The ‘dark’ side.

• Social learning theory and environmental control.

• The role of values, beliefs, behaviours and assumptions.

• How culture links to organisational performance.

Deciphering culture:

• Quantitative vs. qualitative assessment.

• Standard instruments.

• Knowledge elicitation techniques.

• Methods and tools - Which is the right one for the task?

Day 2

Cultural modelling:

• Role of soft systems.

• Diagrams and pictorial representations of culture.

Case studies of successful culture change.

Developing the culture change plan:

• Aligning culture strategy and values.

• Helps/hinders – which levers to pull.

• Defining and implementing the change process.

• Key success factors.

• Gaining buy-in from key stakeholders.

• Ongoing monitoring and measurement.

Role of communication:

• Linguistic.

• ‘Emotional capital’.