Culture Change and Family Firms: Think about your Culture ...

I am going to be speaking at the Family Firm Institute in Brussels in October, 2012, and during my preparation work, I have really seen so many situations where family firms must take stock of their culture. They need to begin to see how to modify their ways of doing business so that they can sustain growth in changing times.

One CEO of a family firm shared with me her Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) that she had taken for a workshop I had given on culture change.

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What is an OCAI? ?The OCAI is designed to help companies diagnose their current corporate culture and determine where they would prefer it to be in the future. The ?now? and the ?preferred? areas that you see above.

It is not easy for you to capture the beauty of this if you have little knowledge of the OCAI. But just think about the CEO?s numbers on the right chart. She would prefer to be more collaborative and ?clan? like with more cooperation and team work. She would like her company to be less of an Adhocracy?the nemesis of all entrepreneurs who fight structure and systems and love to ?make it up as it goes.? She clearly needs more focus on results and more structure. But not too much to kill the spirit of the company ? one that was built by entrepreneurs who saw problems and created solutions that are highly respected and very much needed today.

A Family Firm Story to Share.?But here is her story. Her family firm has been well-established for over 40 years in an industry that is growing. She and her brother are now the senior management team. Her company designs and engineers air pollution control equipment for industrial plants. They take it from A to Z. They build customized designs for pollution control equipment that tie into the specific processes at the plant level. They outsource the metal, but they go right into a plant to supervise the assembly of the equipment and the installation.

They have quadrupled in size over the past four years. Needless to say, the growth has been both glorious and painful. It is a company built on an entrepreneurial spirit where each client?s project needs a unique, creative solution. That was the foundation of the culture of the company and you can certainly see the pink graph lines in the ?adhocracy? area which is all about innovation.

A transition from a slow growth family business to a more professional, efficient organization is never easy. The speed of growth put an enormous amount of pressure on all of the systems. The top pressure was particularly in the area of culture. You add this new work force to an existing entrepreneurial one and wires certainly will cross. One group has a ?quick to respond-old way of doing things? approach, while new employees want to know what the processes are from start to finish.

How do you train new staffers to be entrepreneurs ? and to think the way the founders do? The OCAI shows so clearly that the CEO realizes that they have to change their culture. But how do you recognize that, particularly in a family firm where the roles are complex and the passion for who the company is and what it does often transcends the reality of running a growing business with new hires that are neither family nor entrepreneurs.

Interesting challenges? I will share with you more about how they are changing in another blog. There a a number of very cool stories to share on culture change and family firms. My thanks to the family firms that are speaking with us about their cultures and the challenges of change.

Try the OCAI for yourself.?The OCAI was done on www.ocai-online.com, if you are interested in taking a cultural assessment for your own organization. If you take one there is no charge for the assessment.

Source: http://simonassociates.net/2012/09/culture-change-and-family-firms-think-about-your-culture/

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