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Corporate Cultures – Common Cultural Evaluation Misperceptions
In identifying organizationally shared values and beliefs, there are several common misperceptions that result in an invalid understanding of the actual corporate culture. These misinterpretations should be guarded against as cultural understanding serves as a foundation for many of management’s decisions.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
While many organizations publish value statements, they tend to be rather general and lofty, indistinguishable for those of most other organizations. Other organizations have no values statement at all. Either circumstance makes it difficult for cultural analysts to divine where on the each value’s spectrum the organization resides and to ascertain the alignment between individual organizational groups to the values because of this lack of definition specificity.
Interpretation of cultural surveys requires application of strong statistical analysis methods and knowledge-based results aggregation. Drawing overall conclusions can be counterintuitive; requiring a fundamental understanding of how surveys extract data about the collective nature of an organization’s culture and how to interpret that data in light of the collective nature of the organization’s culture.
But culture can’t be static, and CEOs and other executives can’t be static either. Knowing what you and your company stand for and being completely unyielding and inflexible are different things. The world of business is in constant transformation mode, so an adaptable company culture isn’t just nice to have, it’s necessary.
John Mattone is an authority on leadership, talent, and culture. An acclaimed speaker and executive coach, he advises Fortune 1000 senior leaders on how to create cultures that drive superior operating results. He is the author of seven books including 
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, and 
. John is the creator of numerous business assessments, including the Mattone Leadership Enneagram Inventory. For more information, please visit 
The dream organization, then, is also the high-performing organization.
and 
, both published by Harvard Business Review Press.
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