4 Qs - Four Dimensions of Culture

Quintessential Thought

In last week’s newsletter, we started exploring culture - a key factor for success in organizations and teams. But understanding culture is particularly challenging.

While there are many models available to consider underlying cultural dynamics, the Competing Values Framework (aka CVF) has consistently proven to be a valuable tool for its researched basis and its ease of use.

Cameron and Quinn developed CVF, and it has been used throughout many organizations for years. CVF explores four key dimensions of company values on two axes: Focus and Orientation.

The Focus axis represents flexibility on one end, while the other end represents focus on stability. 

• Flexibility-focused organizations are adaptable, have a lot of innovation, and frequently change in order to accomplish this. 

• Stability-focused organizations have more formal structure or hierarchy, value efficiency, and have strong process and systems.

The Orientation axis represents internal and present orientation on one end, while the other end represents external and future orientation.

• Internally-oriented organizations emphasize things that affect the current state of the organization, like continual process improvement, employees, and personal growth.

• Externally-oriented organizations emphasize things that will affect the value of their products in the future, like marketplace changes, customer needs, and competitor actions.

In our next newsletter, we’ll use these four dimensions to explore the 4 cultural types of CVF: Collaborate, Control, Create, and Compete.

Few organizations or teams are purely at one or the other end of these axes. And remember that none of these are inherently good or bad. They are situational - some elements are better for certain circumstances than others. As we continue to explore culture, consider your current cultural conditions and how well they suit the situation your team and organization is in.

Quotes

“True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.” — Tom Robbins

“This is not about fuzzy, holding hands around a campfire, kumbaya stuff. That’s not what values and culture and mission is about. This is about building an organization for success. This is about winning. This is about doing the tactical things to make sure your organization and your people are aligned around the same thing.” — Justin Moore

“You can have all the right strategies in the world; if you don't have the right culture, you're dead.” — Patrick Whitesell

Quick Step

Consider where you see your team or organization on the two axes: Flexible vs Stable …and… Internal vs External.

Question

How could you explore what others’ perceptions of these two axes?

Want to chat? Reach out to [email protected] so we can help you get Unstuck!

Also, subscribe to our YouTube channel or connect with us on LinkedIn, where we’re posting even more content than we have in this newsletter!