Changing your culture using the Denison Culture Survey

Dr. Susan Cain, and Vincent Peluso, The Corporate Learning Institute

 

The Denison Culture Survey is a useful tool for organizations to understand their cultural strengths and weaknesses. What is culture? Culture is the “code” that signals the behavior of people in your organization. It is those unseen forces that guide behavior.

In all organizations, there are both problems and opportunities to optimize the organization’s culture. Problems felt by employees include “I don’t feel comfortable speaking up” or “what I do doesn’t matter around here,” or “I get in trouble for doing the right thing.”  Point to a need to fully understand and organization’s culture. But improving culture is difficult if there is no way to assess it.

The Denison Culture Survey was created by Dr. Daniel Denison to help organizations understand the link between culture and performance. Dr. Denison conducts on-going research to help determine the cultural links to organizational performance. Research that he conducted in 2009 on 1,076 organizations found that high performing organizations have similar cultural strengths. These strengths can be separated into four performance quadrants critical to the success of any organizations.

The quadrants include:

• Clarity and ability to execute a mission and purpose.
• Consistency in indentifying values and agreements to action.
• Optimizing employee involvement and development.
• Adaptability to meet customer needs and future organizational learning needs.

In the book Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, James C. Collins notes that visionary companies must lead with a vision and be adaptive. The Denison Culture Survey captures tension within an organization as it attempts to meet its vision and yet remain adaptable.  The survey, when taken by employees, allows for difficult conversations to occur between key people about their beliefs and assumptions regarding the organization.  The survey results help key individuals understand what needs to be done about issues that are impacting business performance.

Tim Kuppler, President of Denison Consulting, states “the survey is really critical and is a very simple tool with common language that people seem to get, whether it is top executive, a production line worker, or a volunteer.”

Kuppler was a recent guest on CLI’S blog Talk Radio show, which can be heard at If you would like to listen to the show, click here:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/corplearning/2011/09/15/the-denison-culture-survey .