What is Culture and why is Culture Change Important?

What are some indicators of cultural strength?

• High levels of openness and transparency
• Excellent communication
• Great collaboration
• Genuine trust and respect between people

What is the benefit of good corporate strength?

• People enjoy their work
• Employees feel safe to express themselves
• Employees behave according to their values and feel committed to the organisation's purpose

Investing in well-being and inspiring people to show these qualities would obviously help performance. This is referred to as inner organisational health.

What are some examples of outer health?

• Client loyalty
• The ability to successfully market new products and services
• Regard for market ethics and corporate culture
• Having a strong corporate identity

So if inner health impacts outer health (and vice versa), then the case for focusing on developing a positive culture is unquestionable.

What is culture and how do we influence it?

Culture is aligned to and supporting our business objectives. It’s also important to understand that culture is socially constructed so it is - literally - created by the people who are in it.

Seeing culture as a complex system helps to explain why organisations find it so challenging to manage it. Relationships within these networks are not predictable, and you cannot understand them by breaking them down into individual bits. A good example of a complex system in our industry is the financial markets themselves. Characterised by their unpredictability, they are constantly in flux.

Organisational cultures defy our attempts to understand or engineer them and continue to evolve as a result of their contact with and adaptation to their environment. We need to think of culture as a complex system involving a massive number of interconnections and multiple dependencies, which lead to unpredictability and instability.