Culture Alignment & Transformation

Culture is the pattern of behaviors an organization promotes, discourages, and is willing to accept. It is created by the organization’s structure, processes and systems, and by the spoken and unspoken messages employees receive about what the organization values. That means culture is more than a mood or a set of stated values. It is the accumulated result of decisions the organization has made about what it rewards, who it promotes, and what it tolerates. It matters because culture is your organization’s operating system. Organizations that align their business processes and talent practices to their core values see six times greater organizational performance, and 72% higher employee engagement.

Culture change initiatives try to replace an existing culture with a new one, and roughly 70% fail. Culture alignment starts from a different premise: it is not the type of culture you have that determines success, it is whether that culture is aligned across the company. We measure the values your people hold today, define the values your strategy requires, and converge on four to six acting core values. From there we align how the organization prioritizes decisions, communicates, and recognizes and rewards behavior.

CLA uses multiple data sources to build an accurate picture of what a culture actually is: surveys that measure values and behavioral norms, focus groups that surface the lived experience of employees, structured interviews with leaders, and analysis of engagement and performance data. Our Connected Culture Model provides the analytical framework for integrating these data sources into a clear diagnostic, identifying where culture is strong, where it’s misaligned, and where the highest-leverage opportunities for improvement lie.

Most mergers and acquisitions fail to realize their intended value, and the most common reason is cultural misalignment between the combined organizations. CLA’s Culture Merge Map can be run before or after a transaction. We quantify the values of both organizations, identify the culture risks to mitigate and the commonalities to build on, and build an alignment plan that delivers a single culture and value set for the combined company.

Culture change requires commitment from an organization’s most senior leaders, and no outside firm can supply that. What we can do is help those leaders see the full set of factors that shape behavior: what the organization rewards, promotes, tolerates and measures, and how its compensation, performance and development practices either reinforce the culture they want or work against it. We then help them change those conditions, which is what makes the shift hold.

Most engagements open with a Connected Culture Audit, a brief review of your current values and culture health against the Connected Culture Model, which identifies strengths, gaps, and where investment will be most impactful. What we do next depends on what the audit uncovers. Our suite of offerings enables us to meet you where you are; the audit tells us which parts matter most for your organization.