Corporate Culture is an interesting, important, influential, but hard to capture topic. Dave Gray did a great job at the Dare Conference 2013 – with the presentation now available here – talking about Culture and Change and introducing his Corporate Culture Map tool.
What I find especially intriguing and interesting is the reversed top-down approach – well you might call it bottom-up. But it starts with the Values, which almost every company has outlined in some form and which are normally delivered top-down, although in the corporate culture map they are actually somewhere at the bottom. The exercise is to take these Values and work your way up to the Evidence. This can happen in two forms: (1) looking at real world evidence that support the Values, but more interestingly (2) to define “Evidence”, i.e. behaviors that you would expect to support the Values and which would also be rewarded in the organisation.
Turning Values, that tend to be rather generic, into better defined actions, will help in any attempt to promote or change a specific corporate culture.