How Can You Make Your Culture Conscious?

You make your culture conscious by measuring it. This involves carrying out a baseline cultural diagnostic (a cultural values assessment), including data cuts for each business unit, department, and team, as well as data cuts for demographic categories such as gender and age. The results of the values assessment will allow you to identify the cultural health of the organization and the cultural health of the subcultures that exist in different business units, locations, departments, and teams. It will also tell you precisely what you need to change to create a highperformance organization.

One of the best ways to assess cultural values is to use the Barrett Values Centre’s Cultural Transformation Tools.¹ These tools are based on the seven levels of consciousness model (figure AC-1), which in turn builds on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The seven levels model shifts the focus of Maslow’s hierarchy from needs to consciousness and gives greater definition to the concept of self-actualization. The model can map the values of individuals, leaders, organizations, communities, and nations (figure AC-1).

Source: Richard Barrett, “Building a High-Performance Culture,” Barrett Values Centre, Manchester, UK, April 2017, www.valuescentre.com/sites/default/files/uploads/article_building_a_highperformance_culture.pdf.

The Seven Levels of Organizational Consciousness

The focus of the first three levels of organizational consciousness is on the basic needs of business—financial stability and profitability, employee and customer satisfaction, and high-performance systems and processes.²

The focus of the fourth level of consciousness is on adaptability—continuous renewal and transformation—a shift from fear-based, rigid, authoritarian hierarchies or silos, to more open, inclusive, adaptive, and democratic systems of governance that empower employees to operate with responsible freedom (accountability).

The focus of the upper three levels of consciousness is on organizational cohesion, building mutually beneficial alliances and partnerships, and safeguarding the well-being of human society.

Organizations that focus exclusively on the satisfaction of their basic needs are not usually market leaders. They can be successful in their specific niche, but in general, they are too internally focused and self-absorbed, or too rigid and bureaucratic to become innovators in their fields. They are slow to adapt to changes in market conditions and do not empower their employees. There is little enthusiasm among the workforce and innovation and creativity get suppressed. Levels of staff engagement are relatively low. Such organizations are run by authoritarian leaders who operate by creating a culture of fear. They are not emotionally healthy places to work. Employees feel frustrated or disempowered and may complain about stress.

Organizations that focus exclusively on the satisfaction of the higher needs lack the basic business skills necessary to operate effectively and profitably. They are ineffectual and impractical when it comes to financial matters, they are not customer oriented, and they lack the systems and processes necessary for high performance. They are simply not grounded in the reality of business. We often find such organizations in the not-for-profit sector.

The most successful organizations are those that develop Full Spectrum Consciousness—the ability to master the needs associated with every level of organizational consciousness: they are able to respond and adapt appropriately to all the challenges that the marketplace throws at them or, in the case of a public sector organization, all the challenges the institutional and political environment throws at them. The actions and developmental tasks associated with each level of consciousness are shown in table AC-1.

Mapping Values

At the core of the Cultural Transformation Tools is the concept that all values and behaviors are motivated by specific needs, and every need is aligned with one of the seven levels of consciousness. Thus by asking employees what their values are, you can find out what levels of consciousness they are operating from. By asking what values employees see in the organization, you can identify what levels of consciousness the organization is operating from (current culture), and by asking employees what values they would like to see in the organization, you can measure the desired culture. Here are some examples of how a cultural values assessment can help us:

• The number of matching personal and current culture values tells the leadership team the extent to which employees can bring their full selves to work—the level of employee commitment and engagement.
• The number of matching current and desired culture values tells the leadership team the extent to which employees think the organization is on the right track—to what extent the organization is meeting its full potential.
• The matching personal and desired culture values that are not part of the current culture tell the leadership team which of the most immediate values it needs to work on. Table AC-2 (in a later section), which shows the gap between what an organization values in its present culture and what it values in the desired culture, also suggests which values should be given a higher priority.
• The level of cultural disharmony, or cultural entropy, in the organization tells the leadership team the extent to which the culture is driven by the fears of the managers, supervisors, and other leaders. Cultural entropy measures the degree of dysfunction in an organization that is generated by the self-serving, fear-based actions of the leaders, managers, and supervisors. As cultural entropy increases, the level of trust, internal cohesion, and well-being decreases. Cultural entropy is inversely correlated with employee engagement. Low entropy leads to high engagement. High entropy leads to low engagement.
• The assessment can also measure the extent to which the espoused values are lived and desired.

Cultural values assessments make intangibles tangible. They enable the leadership team and the rest of the organization to have brand-new conversations on what is important for the growth and development of the organization.

The following provides an example of some of the more important outputs of a cultural values assessment. The values that employees are asked to pick from include positive values and potentially limiting values (values that lead to feardriven outcomes). For example, commitment is a positive value and blame is a potentially limiting one.

A Typical Organization with Low Cultural Health and High Cultural Entropy

Figure AC-2 plots the values of an eighty-person organization. Each dot on the diagram represents one of the top ten values. An (L) after a value indicates a potentially limiting value. Positive values are shown as shaded dots, and potentially limiting values are shown as white dots. Notice the significant misalignment in consciousness between the personal values (a focus at level 5), the current culture (a focus at levels 1 and 2), and the desired culture (a focus at levels 4 and 2). There are no matching personal and current culture values, and there is only one matching current and desired culture value: accountability. In a culturally healthy organization, we would expect to see two or three matching personal and current culture values, and five or six matching current and desired culture values.

In data plots like these, which we frequently find in low-cultural-health or high-cultural-entropy organizations, the desired culture values are typically concentrated at the transformation level. The values expressed at this level are the remedies to many of the issues (potentially limiting values) at levels 1, 2, and 3 in the current culture. Because of the difficulties the company portrayed in figure AC-2 is having, it has become internally focused—customer satisfaction is absent from the top ten values of the current culture but is the number two value in the desired culture.

Additionally, there are five positive relationship values in the desired culture (accountability, open communication, coaching/mentoring, teamwork, and employee recognition). These values act as a counterbalance to the four potentially limiting relationship values in the current culture (blame, demanding, lack of appreciation, and control).

Figure AC-3 shows the values distribution for the personal, current, and desired culture of this organization. This is the distribution of all the votes for all values. The level of cultural entropy is calculated by adding up the proportion of votes for potentially limiting values (the cultural health score is the inverse of the cultural entropy score). The level of cultural health is 52 percent, and the level of cultural entropy 48 percent (in the critical range). The cultural entropy, shown in the middle column by unshaded bars that represent limiting values, is relatively evenly spread across level 1 (18 percent), level 2 (16 percent), and level 3 (14 percent). What is disturbing about this result is the significant cultural entropy at levels 1 and 2 (it is more difficult to reduce entropy at levels 1 and 2 than at level 3).

Source: Modified from Richard Barrett, “Building a High-Performance Culture,” Barrett Values Centre, Manchester, UK, April 2017, www.valuescentre.com/sites/default/files/uploads/article_building_a_high-performance_culture.pdf, figure 1.

Table AC-2 shows the top value jumps. A value jump is necessary if an organization needs to value an element much more than the element is currently valued, that is, when the number of votes for a value in the current culture is less than those for the value in the desired culture. You can see from this table that the key issue for this company is the quality of leadership. The greatest differences between what an organization presently values and what its people want the organization to value include the areas of coaching and mentoring, employee recognition, open communication, information sharing, leadership development, and empowerment.

The Way Forward

The high level of cultural entropy in our example company and the seven potentially limiting values that show up in its top ten current culture values are a clear sign of poor performance: the leaders are letting their fears dictate their behaviors. Blame, demands, long hours, cost reduction, and control are all signs that the leadership group has lost its way. The organization is focused on profit, but not on customers. Nor is the company taking care of its people—lack of appreciation and job insecurity are potentially limiting values showing up in the current culture.

The desired culture values point the way to improving the quality of leadership: coaching and mentoring, leadership development, open communication, employee recognition, and information sharing are all desired culture values that do not appear in the top ten current culture values and would require great changes in values for the company. These are the values that the leadership team needs to focus on if it wants to turn this company around. The desired culture focuses strongly on the transformation level of consciousness—empowering employees to participate in decision making and giving them the autonomy to make decisions.

Managing the Organization’s Values

If leadership is to improve the culture, the key findings of the cultural values assessment must be shared with employees and acted on. Usually, it is best to focus on two or three important themes. For this organization, the results suggest the need to (a) focus on leadership development, (b) build trust in the leadership team, and (c) empower and appreciate employees. Accountability for progress lies with the leadership team. Twelve months on, the organization should reassess its cultural values to see how successful it has been in shifting the desired values into the current culture. Success will show up as reduced cultural entropy.