Tuesday, August 13, 2024
Thank you to all who attended and contributed to this engaging panel discussion, “Culture as the Gatekeeper To Success: Realize, Reorganize, Run With It”!
Culture can be seen as a gatekeeper to driving success in organizations of various types and demographic profiles. Organizational conditions shape members’ understanding of the expected ways to behave at work, thus creating the overall culture. The resulting shared expected behaviors govern effectiveness criteria, such as creating fruitful policy, formulating purpose, and overall effectiveness, including innovation. The challenge for change agents and managers is discovering how to uncover and manage the change process, given members’ different identities, values, and ethnic backgrounds.
To address this challenge, panelists discussed their experience with various organizational environments, specifically a not-for-profit in the process of succession planning, a police department under pressure to rebuild trust in the community, an organization expanding globally, and organizational culture measurement and application, specifically the Organizational Culture Inventory® (OCI®).
The panelists took part in a formal, moderated, interactive discussion of (1) the importance of culture in driving outcomes within organizations; (2) the panelists’ personal research experience that demonstrated culture being a barrier or potential enabler to action; (3) the relationship between culture and the mission; and (4) how each variable was interconnected with the others, particularly in how organizational factors contributed to a desirable organizational culture. They did this by discussing how they became aware that culture needed to be addressed (Realize), how they accepted the realities and determined interventions (Reorganize), and the actions that took place (Run With It).
Robert A. Cooke, Ph.D., CEO of Human Synergistics International and Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was one of four panelists on this discussion. A renowned expert in organizational development, he has developed widely-used surveys for individual, group, and organizational assessment, including the Organizational Culture Inventory® and Leadership/Impact®. Dr. Cooke’s nationally-supported research on management and organizational change has been broadly published and recognized with multiple awards. Drawing from his experiences at educational institutions and with corporate clientele, Dr. Cooke continues to influence our understanding of organizational culture and leadership effectiveness. In July 2024, he presented “Using AI for Culture Transformation” to discuss the application of artificial intelligence in helping leaders and teams make informed decisions about cultural change.
