How do you know if your organization is healthy? Health doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone, so it is tough to just look at the surface. Consider runners – marathon runners look very different from sprinters, but they are both healthy frames for the purpose at hand.
A highly entreprenurial market, a young company, a utility service, a product company, a service provider, all of these dimentions affect what health will look like for your organization.
There are some good tools on the market to understand culture, including the Denison model, the competing values framework from Cameron and Quinn, and Lencioni’s Four Discipline’s of organizational health. First, tho, we recommend you do the following:
- Understand the cultural dimensions of your strategic plan
- Use assessment techniques that will measure what’s important to you
- Assess progress locally as well as enterprise wide – some sub-cultures will evolve more or less quickly, and may have very different needs.