Here is the longer version of an article I wrote recently published in Mainebiz. To see the shorter version go to:
http://www.mainebiz.biz/article/20161114/CURRENTEDITION/161119972
The Four D’s of Determining Your Organization’s Health
Organizations with healthy cultures live long and prosper. If you and the majority of employees at your business can answer yes to all of the following questions, then there’s a good chance you work for an organization that works well for everyone.
The Hope
- Do you work where you feel valued and respected, are given a voice, have influence, can use your full range of skills, and develop to your full professional potential?
- Do the leaders support an open, inclusive, creative organizational culture based on core values and supporting behaviors?
- Is your work life the way you want it to be?
- Do you feel interested, excited, and challenged by the work you do?
- Does your organization regularly assess the health status of its culture.
The Dilemma
Many organizations do not make cultural health a priority. Some do, but often don’t ask the types of questions that will uncover the more complex issues and dynamics employees experience on a regular basis. Too often a troubling level of employee dissatisfaction persists. Employees simply will not speak up about the quality of their lives at work. It doesn’t seem worth the risk. Leaders who don’t know the truth then assume everything is okay in the culture.
One highly effective method for assessing the health of an organization’s culture, is called the Four D’s. With the help of an experienced and skilled independent advisor taking your organization through the Four D’s process, priorities can be determined for moving forward.
This practical and intentional process of discovery, discernment, diagnosis, and delivery, provides organizations a way to determine their health status and a path for making cultural improvements.
Assessing Reality: The Four D’s
- In the discovery phase, methods of gathering information such as surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews can highlight specific issues and broad themes, and begin to identify the norms and patterns of behavior that determine what type of culture an organization has built. The discovery phase works best when asking specific questions in a safe and open ended manner. While businesses can choose to accept or reject the feedback, smart organizations absorb the information and make plans to improve their culture. Too often organizations ask too broad or non-controversial questions and cannot really discover anything new or meaningful.
- The discernment phase involves taking all of the data and input gathered through discovery to determine:
how all the pieces of data fit together
what patterns of behavior seem to exist in the culture
how do the various strengths and challenges impact each other
how safe people feel to express themselves when they have an issue
how supportive the performance management process seems to everyone
and any other issues that seem to jump out of the employee input - With relevant and actionable feedback, plus a skillful analysis of the data, making an accurate diagnosis is now possible. The best, clearest, and most useful diagnosis usually comes from having a diverse cross-section of the organization looking together at the discovery input and the discernment connections to then formulate an overall diagnosis of the organization’s culture and health.
Take Action
The delivery phase includes naming the actions, goals, timeframes, and responsible people to meet the identified challenges. For these actions to be effective and have a lasting impact, everyone in the organization will play a part to varying degrees, starting with the most senior level of leadership. The action plan will include steps that might look similar throughout the whole organization, and some steps that will differ depending upon the team, unit, or division’s particular needs in relation to the overall diagnosis.
A Way Forward
In the healthiest organizations, senior leaders demonstrate a clear understanding of the issues, set overall priorities, determine timely goals, and seek to build a culture based on core values and behaviors that make it possible for everyone to perform at their best.
For the first step ask yourself what elements of the culture do you want and need to know more about before making important decisions concerning people, processes, structure, and strategy. Going through Four D’s process of discovery, discernment, diagnosis, and delivery provides any leader or organization the opportunity to become smart and healthy.
It’s a matter of will, commitment, good choices, and believing in your employees!
