Full Spectrum Culture
“Culture is the Next Frontier of Competitive Advantage”
Senior leaders will often ask, why haven’t our change programs had more impact? Why haven’t the dollars we’ve invested in training people returned a greater pay-off? What do we need to do to weather and prosper through the next business crisis? More importantly, what will help the organization leap to higher levels of performance, resilience and service to all stakeholders?
The answer to these questions can be found in a place least expected – the business culture. Bottom line “hard” results have everything to do with the “soft” side. Culture not only matters – it matters in a big way. Culture sustains sales growth, profits, market share, shareholder value, talent attraction and retention. Culture needs to be seen as a strategic lever for success.
Assuming a viable business strategy and competitive products and services, what distinguishes “winning organizations” is their consistent, high performance execution, continuous improvement, and resilience which rests upon the foundation of a full spectrum culture.
The culture of an organization is an organic composite of beliefs, values and traditions. It acts as a conditioning behavioral field, prompting and shaping day to day interactions among and between people and groups, within and outside the organization. The culture persists because prescribed behaviors are rewarded formally and informally by leadership example. Cultures can be changed and transformed by that very same leadership.
Intangibles such as culture have traditionally been hard to define and to measure. In 1997, Richard Barrett developed a completely new and innovative set of Cultural Transformation Tools to map the values of individuals and organizations. The Tools are based on seven levels of personal and organizational consciousness, or potential. The models and tools described in his books Liberating the Corporate Soul and Building a Values-Driven Organization have been translated into 17 languages and are used by more than 700 companies and organizations worldwide.
The seven levels model is an expansion and extension of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The model substitutes levels of consciousness or potential for the hierarchy of needs and gives more definition and depth to the spiritual levels of motivation that Maslow refers to as self-actualization and beyond. What is true for an individual can by analogy be extended to an organization – see the Full Spectrum Organization model on the fly-out below.