Culture Quadrants: naming tensions in your culture

Your culture

Every organization has a culture, ways that people do things, expectations about how people are supposed to conduct themselves, values of what is important and what is not. Sometimes the culture is defined, and sometimes it is unintentional and morphs over time.

When there are conflicts or tensions in an organization, sometimes it is because of culture.

The Culture Quadrants

The Culture Quadrants model is a way to look at your organization and how people in align or don’t align with your culture.

The Culture Quadrants construct is based on a model called the Competing Values Framework (CVF) but is adjusted/revised so that everyday lay people like you and me don’t need a PhD to understand it. Seriously, there is so much good stuff on CVF, including books and in-depth articles. I could go down a rabbit hole and never emerge because it is truly fascinating!

But we are trying to avoid bunny trails, so here is a simplified framework to explain how internal competition, misunderstanding, and missed expectations can create conflict and disagreement in the organization.

The premise of the Culture Quadrants is that there are spectrums of characteristics that exist in organizational culture. Two primary dimensions emerge in studies of effective organizations, and there are opposites on either end.

On the vertical axis, one side is flexibility and the other side is stability.

• Flexible organizations are good at adjusting and changing directions, and they believe you can’t control everything, so they adapt.

• Stable organizations operate on the assumption that they can control circumstances, so they double down on creating a consistent, stable base for operating.

The horizontal axis has the opposite ends of internal cohesion and external competition.

• Organizations with internal cohesion focus on their people. They practice ways of working with the people in the organization to get the work done.

• Structures with external competition are more interested in their customers or constituents and making sure what they are doing is meeting the demand or opportunities.

Now let’s look at the four types of cultures when these axes intersect.

The first is the Control organization, which is usually a hierarchy. Hierarchies are one of the oldest types of organizations in the business word in the modern era. In Control organizations, it’s about doing things right. Leaders want the people to have consistency, stability, and efficiency. The is high value in making sure everything is operating smoothly.

The next kind of organization to come along was the Compete organization, when organizations turned outward and began targeting changing market dynamics. The Competing Values Framework calls this the “Market” organization, but that term is not too helpful in the church or non-profit world, so it is easier to think of as a competitive, goal-oriented type of organization.

In other words, this type of organization is about trying to reach constituents or audience first and overcoming other potential competition or rivals. This organization likes to move fast.

Now let’s go to the upper left quadrant. This is a clan-type of culture. It likes to collaborate and have people work together. Cohesion and harmony is important. Teamwork, empowerment, and engagement are important principles.

The next one is the Create culture. This is a very nimble culture that quickly adjusts, experiments, and innovates. There is an entrepreneurial spirit, and this organization thinks up new ways of solving problems or providing products or services.

The reality is that all organizations have some aspect of all of these axes. However, you m ay find that there is one primary quadrant within which your organization sits.

Now for the Individual

Here comes the interesting part! (This is not part of the formal Competing Values Framework, but is something I have observed as individuals have grappled with the culture in their organization.)

What happens if you and your organization do not line up?

Angst!

Your organization may be a hierarchical culture that is big into control, formality, processes and systems. But you are a clan kind of person. You want your organization to be one big happy family where everyone is happily working together.

In my blog about the Mission Funnel of organizational alignment, I noted that many times conflict happens in an organization because of philosophical differences that are based on values.

If you value relationships but your organization values processes and control, it will cause internal dissonance and tension. There is a misalignment of your values and preferred culture with what the reality is.

Another tension happens when the culture has been in one quadrant but due to external circumstances or new leadership or new strategic directions, the organization must shift to another culture.

This causes angst also because people are used to one culture but things change. Once again, it causes internal philosophical dissonance because the people in the organization value doing things one way but things are shifting another way.

If your organizational culture is moving diagonally, it’s even more painful. You’re changing from a stable internal cohesion culture to a flexible external competition way of operating. It can feel like mental and emotional whiplash.

Assessing these characteristics are helpful to name what it is you are experiencing and feeling in your organization. Just naming these things can be useful to normalize your feelings and know that these feelings and tensions are common in individuals that operate within an organization.

It happened to us too

When COVID-19 hit, our organization was in the lower left “do things right” quadrant. Unfortunately, no one knows what to do when a global pandemic hits. It’s kind of hard to “do things right” when you don’t know what to do!

Our strategy had to shift to “do the next best thing,” which is much more flexible and caused us to do many new things. It has been very taxing and stressful for our team, which was built on stability and predictability. Yet even in the midst, I applaud so many who have met the challenge, pivoted, and created innovative solutions to sustain us to face the new future.

As I talk to leaders, many organizations have had to make these kind of shifts. It is no wonder that uncertainty, anxiety, and stress are so high. These kind of cultural shifts are not easy. Yet they are needed to navigate the unpredictable future.

Please comment below on some of the tensions that you observe in your organization. I’d love to hear from you!

——————-

Find this helpful? Subscribe for more articles!