Difficult but Achievable
The challenge to adopt a new cultural norm across your organization is difficult but not impossible. In fact, it occurs frequently in multi-national companies when they stumble across gaps in culture due to vastly different communication and working styles from one country to another.
When these gaps are identified and threaten ongoing business, companies work hard to bridge the cultural miscommunications and misunderstandings. It takes a concerted effort and commitment on both sides of the divide to solve the problem, but better collaboration can be achieved.
Understanding Culture
We define corporate culture as how things truly get done in an organization. It includes the known and unspoken values and assumptions that drive key business practices and behaviors.  Workplace culture can be measured by understanding the way people think, behave and work. While often invisible, each organizational culture has its own cultural norms, the standards that employees follow to blend into the workplace.
Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance. How leaders define and shape their corporate culture has become a critical variable in defining the success and failure of their strategies. And we know that company cultures, regardless of their strength, progress and change over time.
Sometimes a previously accepted norm becomes a factor that inhibits, rather than promotes, strategy execution. What can and should leaders do to adopt a more success-oriented cultural norm?
5 Steps to Better Adopt a New Cultural Norm Across a Company
The Bottom Line
Organizational culture is often set in large part by its leaders. If you determine your culture needs to shift in order to be better aligned with your strategy, get to work on adopting the new cultural norm by following the tips above.
To learn more about how to better live your desired workplace culture, download 3 Research-Backed Levels of Culture to Get Culture Change Right
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