Culture: Its not what you do, its the way that you do it 6 th - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Exploring Organisational Culture: It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

6th October 2020

Culture – a framing

Alastair Mitchell-Baker Tricordant

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What is culture?

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A paen of haed baic ampion ha a learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to peceie hink and feel in elaion o hoe poblem Ed Schein The way that we do things around here What happens when no one is looking The environment in which people work and the influence it has on how they think, act, and experience work

Going Deeper

what we see what we say what we believe

Exploring culture: the beginning

• f change

What? Who? How?

Do they really want to know? Is it safe to say what I really think? Is anything going to change? Which voices are we not hearing?

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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6 September 2020

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

Nigel Terrington

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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• The NAO’s strategic review
• Why we considered organisational culture
• How we approached our work on culture
• The outcomes and alignment with our strategy and OD
• Top tips / issues to frame discussion

What I will cover

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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The NAO’s strategic review (1)

Why we carried out a wide-ranging review

• Big changes in our external operating context
• Hadn’t reviewed our strategy since 2013
• New Comptroller and Auditor General (10-year term)

Principles we worked to

• Collective ownership and accountability – Take collective responsibility and ownership as an Executive Team and Board to make the

strategy process a success, and hold each other to account for doing so

• Participatory and inclusive – Run a participatory and inclusive process that takes suggestions from internal and external stakeholders

seriously, and ensures they feel fully included in the strategy process

• Diversity and openness – Encourage diversity of voices in the strategy process and give each other and colleagues space to debate

and disagree

• Transparency – Communicate transparently throughout about progress, as well as decisions that have been made
• Sufficiently resourced – Provide the right support and resources to make the strategy process a success
• Implementable and simple – Test throughout if we can live with consequences of strategic decisions, and if aspirations and changes

are realistic and simple, including for our resource bids, our culture, or speed of required change

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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The NAO’s strategic review (2)

What we did

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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Why we considered organisational culture

• Learning lessons of how we approached organisational change previously
• Understood we have some quite dominant cultural tendencies, but also sub-

cultures in parts of the organisation – and we needed a consensus on what these were; how they help; how they obstruct

• Driven by our principle of being participatory and inclusive – we wanted to

understand how it really felt for people to work at the NAO

• Knew we needed advice: we worked proportionately with Tricordant to equip
• urselves to do this

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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How we approached our work on culture

• Combination of plan and iteration
• Started with an Executive Team session
• Broadened out over a period of weeks to fuller participation
• Workshops for all staff who wanted to contribute
• Led by more junior staff so people felt they could speak openly
• Communications feedback loop: iterated our thinking on the

strategy and OD plan

• Applied the same framework and structure for our culture

sessions:

• Introductory
• Diagnostic
• Schein / iceberg model to get to core assumptions

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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The outcomes and alignment with our strategy

Our work on culture had the following benefits in terms of developing our strategy:

• Emphasis to all our staff that strategy will not succeed without commitment to adapting how we work

and behave

• Provided a shared consensus on the diagnosis
• Enabled us to provide a statement of our future intended direction
• New expression of values used as reference point in home-working

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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Top tips / issues to frame discussion

• Tone from the top: genuine senior leadership support is critical
• Alignment and full integration of organisational culture work with

strategy development

• Lead the work internally (and in non-hierarchical way) to enhance
• wnership – proportionate use of consultants
• Consult and engage as far and wide as possible
• Use the strengths in your organisational culture – e.g. intellectual

curiosity and challenge

• Be prepared to hear difficult and uncomfortable feedback – and

don’t be defensive about that

Understanding and developing our organisational culture

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Thank you

All reports are available at www.nao.org.u k Follow the NAO on Twitter @NAOorguk View our blog www.nao.org.uk /naoblog If you are interested in the NAO’s work and support for Parliament please contact: parliament@nao.org.uk Follow the NAO

• n LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com/ company/naoorgu k Contact: Nigel Terrington 020 7798 5479 nigel.terrington@nao.org.u k Subscribe to notifications with NAO preference centre

Thank you for your time

Book a slot with one of our team to explore your

• wn challenges and get specific help and advice

https://www.tricordant.com/free-45-minute- consultation/

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