• Create Constructive Cultures and Impact the World

    Over 30 years of research across thousands of organizations using the Organizational Culture Inventory® has shown positive relationships between Constructive cultural norms (that is, expectations for members to behave constructively in order to “fit in”) and motivation, engagement, teamwork, quality, external adaptability and, ultimately, profitability.

  • ‘Unbossed Culture’ Takes Performance To New Heights

    Leaders now hold each other accountable. Their vulnerability has promoted inclusiveness, built trust and showed commitment to employees. Employees are engaged, their ideas are flowing and they’re taking ownership.

  • Leadership Glue Delivers Speed, Agility, & Aligned Action

    Hanes’ approach to developing their leaders is distinct in that their leaders are required to experience LSI three times before moving forward to the next level development program.

  • How Quantitative and Qualitative Results Lead to Real-Time Change

    The leaders at ERDMAN saw an opportunity for the senior leadership team to set the tone and expectations for the entire company and help drive needed business results. While never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly and ERDMAN has already begun to see the results…

  • Quantifying and Aligning Workplace Culture Post-Merger

    While it’s never an overnight change, culture transformation is a vital part of an organization’s success when done correctly. With 12 years of experience and the assessment tools that provided quantitative data showing where we are, where we want to go, and how we need to get there – Inclusa’s culture journey seemed attainable.

  • Johnsonville Sausage: Ensuring a Culture for Growth

    Members and leaders of Wisconsin-based Johnsonville Sausage have a bold vision to “be the best company on earth.” This requires that the leading national sausage brand be culturally prepared and poised for aggressive innovation on its way to growing and becoming a $1 billion company. An important step was determining whether the company’s Research and…

  • Culture Shift + Leadership Development = Sustainable Results for Advocate Health Care

    As the largest health system in Illinois, Advocate’s challenge was to increase and stabilize engagement, focus on culture change, and strengthen relations within a high-profile, semi-autonomous unit that struggled with negative team dynamics, unproductive work relations, and entrenched passive-aggressive behavior.

  • Culture Change at HKS: Resilient and Responsive

    Dallas, Texas-based architectural firm HKS Architects creates places that enhance the human experience, like the US Bank Stadium, home of the 2018 Super Bowl. After collecting employee satisfaction data for 10 consecutive years, leadership sought to better understand the current culture and the roadblocks that were inhibiting employees from taking the most successful actions.

  • Ultimate Culture Webinar – What are your Blind Spots? with Jim Haudan and Rich Berens

    Root Inc Chairman, Jim Haudan, and CEO and Chief Client Fanatic, Rich Berens, reveal the five most common blind spots that thwart leaders and their organizations from attaining higher levels of member engagement and creating real and meaningful strategic and culture change. They outline how to create a thriving organization by focusing on purpose over…

  • The Missing C in C-Suite = Culture

    Marti Wronski, General Counsel and SVP with the Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Club, shares: “Successful transformation happens when the majority of people in the company have aligned beliefs and when proper leadership mindsets fuel consistent action.”

  • A Historic Shift in Expecting Leaders to Understand and Evolve Culture

    We are experiencing a historic shift in how people view the importance of culture and culture change. As a result, most CEOs and other top leaders will be expected to understand and deal with culture challenges proactively, or they will be considered both financially and morally negligent. Yes, financially and morally negligent. We are seeing top…

  • In Conversation with Edgar Schein: Answering Three Common Questions about Culture

    Culture can often be like a wet bar of soap—too slippery to grasp. To harness its force, we first need to understand its nature and dynamics. And there’s no better person to help us get a handle on organizational and team culture than Edgar Schein, one of the world’s most well-known culture pioneers.

  • Post #200 on CultureU – 7 Essential Insights Normally Missed in Culture Change Efforts

    This milestone post is a salute to passionate and experienced culture and performance change agents. You understand the power of culture in organizations and the challenge, frustration, restlessness, and exhilaration inevitably linked to intentional culture-related action. We’re living in the absolute best time in history to be involved in meaningful culture change. Culture is finally…

  • Closing the Massive Gaps Between Culture Awareness, Education, and Action

    It’s time to turn the culture world upside down and explode many incorrect notions that are preventing meaningful culture change for organizations and society. We’ve reached a critical point where most leaders are aware culture is important, but they range from being confused to intentionally uninformed about what culture change is all about. This culture…

  • 8 Culture Change Secrets Most Leaders Don’t Understand

    I spent 15 years learning and applying culture insights as a senior executive and consultant across multiple organizations before I started to proactively reach out to top culture pioneers and experts to learn about their culture facts and fundamentals. We can’t learn much about culture from the popular press and most social media is dominated…

  • 20 Organizational Culture Change Insights from Edgar Schein

    Grâce cette publication, vous pourrez accélérer le changement de votre culture organisationnelle. Chaque leader comprendra ici les bénéfices des réflexions critiques sur la culture ainsi que la résolution de problèmes, le changement, l’engagement, la stratégie, le recrutement et le consulting avec Edgar Schein, Professeur Émérite au MIT Sloan School of Management et personnalité la plus…

  • The Common Ground of Qualitative and Quantitative Culture Development Approaches (Part Two)

    This is the second post from a discussion between Professor Edgar Schein, arguably the #1 workplace culture expert in the world and a strong critic of culture surveys, and Dr. Robert A. Cooke, creator of the most widely used organizational culture assessment in the world. The discussion resulted in 12 key areas of common ground…

  • The Common Ground of Qualitative and Quantitative Culture Development Approaches (Part One)

    What happens when you have a discussion with Professor Edgar Schein, arguably the #1 workplace culture expert in the world and a strong critic of culture surveys, and Dr. Robert A. Cooke, creator of the most widely used organizational culture assessment in the world? It was exciting to see this discussion unfold to a point…

  • Workplace Culture vs. Climate – why most focus on climate and may suffer for it

    Culture is a hot topic. It was the Merriam-Webster “word of the year” for 2014. Leaders and experts across the world are talking about how to develop an agile culture, implement a lean culture, overcome the culture clash in acquisitions, and many other areas of culture change. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of these…

  • The Four Roots of Employee Engagement

    Haven’t we talked about employee engagement enough? Nope! Because despite the amount of time, energy and effort that organizations around the globe are investing in helping engage people in work, things aren’t improving much. Weekly pizza socials, guest speakers and telecommuting options are certainly appealing. I like pizza as much as the next guy. And,…

  • The first principle of successful culture shaping – The Shadow of the Leader

    I wrote about the four reasons culture-shaping efforts fail in my previous post (Organizational culture has reached a tipping point, yet many culture change initiatives fail for four key reasons). But what makes them succeed? What makes some culture-change efforts successful where others become simply another ‘flavor of the week’ training session that never translates…

  • The National Institute of Corrections Focuses on Constructive Organizational Culture as a Means to Enhancing the Effectiveness of Correctional Facilities in New Book

    A new publication from The National Institute of Corrections, Building a Culture Strategically: A Team Approach for Corrections, features a discussion of how to incorporate HSI’s Organizational Culture Inventory® into an organizational culture change initiative in a corrections setting.

  • Four Essentials of Culture Change

    Donna Brighton, Owner of Brighton Leadership Group, presents at Human Synergistics’ 1st Annual Ultimate Culture Conference.

  • Winning with Transglobal Leadership

    Join Dr. Linda Sharkey’s keynote to hear about the Transglobal Leadership research results, learn about the behaviors that make a leader truly global, and gain insights critical to finding and developing top global talent.

  • Our Attention Deficit Work Culture

    In San Francisco, a private high school challenged its Seniors to go without their digital devices for a week. Phones were collected and off the students went into their own private purgatories. How long could they last? The Principal thought it would not be long. He saw their humanity slipping away into digital space.

  • The Synchronous Leader: How Social Synchrony Impacts Teams

    Speed and urgency, although necessary attributes of leadership, are not sufficient to successfully lead a team. In fact, our research suggests that leaders who can tether an obsession with deadlines and time to an ability to sense the work and energy flow of their colleagues will have the most success.

  • Teaching Leaders to Dance

    In an earlier post, we gave a very brief account of a major arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s School of Business, designed to create new behaviors in a group of senior project managers in the oil and gas exploration industry. The aim was to create a new culture of ‘open-mindedness’: the ability to…

  • Zen and the Art of Culture Change

    I recently attended Human Synergistics’ 2nd Annual Ultimate Culture Conference in San Francisco. The presenters were professors, HR leaders, OD consultants, as well as CEOs and operating leaders. Corporate culture was presented and discussed from all angles: What it is, how to measure it, how to change it, how to keep it aligned, whether you…

  • How to Use Language to Support a Responsible Culture

    As people across the world watch the 2016 United States presidential campaign, they witness the division and ultimately a culture change evolving in our nation. We have more choices to express our opinions, but less tolerance for the opinions of others. We have more passion, but less compassion. We have more speed, but less self-control.…

  • Culture Diagnosis by Pulse or MRI?

    Last month I had the privilege of attending the 2nd Annual Ultimate Culture Conference in San Francisco, hosted by Human Synergistics. One of many reasons for me to take the 12-hour flight from Switzerland was to be in the company of thought leaders in workplace culture, such as Dr. Edgar Schein. Among the many insights…

  • Why Your Organization’s Purpose is Important to Your Culture

    Purpose. It’s a trending topic for businesses today. A quick Google search of the phrase “company + purpose” produces a whopping 1,030,000,000 hits. Harvard Business Review has published literally dozens of articles on the subject in the past 12 months alone. And leaders across the country – and the world – are paying attention; working…