Internal culture

Describe the organization's culture. This might be difficult if you're very familiar with it, so ask people. Beware that they will probably try to give a good impression, even at the expense of giving honest answers.

You can't presume that it's the same as the formal structure that people write on paper. (For example, some PAs have major control over decisions because they are so good at restricting access to their bosses. An accountant can have more financial control than the manager.)

Some questions to start:

  1. Motivation
    1. Does the organization have a clear sense of purpose? How widespread is it?
    2. Is it striving to do better? Exactly who is striving to do better? How do they define "better"?
    3. Are they highly motivated to do a good job?
    4. Do they welcome new ideas?
    5. Do people like working here? How do you know? Is there a high staff turnover?
    6. Why do they work here? What motivates them?
    7. How do the values and beliefs of workers and stakeholders influence the organization's defined purpose and philosophy?
    8. Are there latent frustrations?
    9. Sum up: How good is the general morale?
  2. Communication
    1. Are there effective feedback systems? From employees to managers? From managers to employees?
    2. How good is the communication within the organization? Do people feel they are informed of anything important? Do people feel listened to?
  3. Teamwork
    1. Do they work together well as teams?
    2. Do the differences between team members compliment each other well?
    3. Do people contribute their strengths or their weaknesses?
    4. Is the organization unified or is it fractious? Or is it a conglomerate of semi-independent entities?
    5. Do leaders take the lead, or are they managers just going through the motions?
    6. Do you have the right people, or have you accumulated passengers and misfits?
  4. Decision making
    1. How does the decision-making work? How does the politics and informal ower structures of the organization work?
    2. Who are the gatekeepers for deciding what can get discussed and done?
    3. Does the decision-making system work well for the kind of structure?

Another aspect of your organization's culture is its stage in its life-cycle. In case you didn't know, organizations (and divisions of organizations) go though a life cycle:

  1. New. Willing to experiment, still struggling.
  2. Growing. Young and visionary, enough experience to do well.
  3. Plateaued. Well-organized and well-capitalized but stagnating.
  4. Tired and in decline. The old guard discourages new ideas because "experience" is a list of things you can't do.
  5. Facing death if it doesn't make radical changes.

The lifecycle doesn't spell out your fate. But it does determine the kind of people an organization likes to hire and the way they need to be managed to reframe and redirect it.

Questions

  1. What stage is your organization at?
  2. How does it affect what you do?
  3. Do you need to refresh or change its lifecycle stage culture?

New organizations
Stages in lifespan

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