Developing Organizational Personality

Like individuals, organizations are evolving, adaptive, strategic, and rule-based cultures which act on and respond to changing internal and external environments (a mouthful, to be sure). The past 15-years have seen significant advancements in new technology and marketing strategies. These strategies have [respectively] decreased costs and increased revenues across industries and sectors. Yet, there is one predictor of organizational success which is often under-emphasized or overlooked in the march toward market pre-eminence. This critical component is organizational culture or personality. For the purpose of this article, the terms culture and personality are interchangeable.

Defining Organizational Personality:

An organization's personality is the hierarchically predominant lens through which information is collected, filtered, and acted upon. It is a gestalt of all people, processes, and customs in an organization, and which cannot be simply understood by distilling them down to individual personalities without losing something in the translation (though some personalities have greater impacts than others). Yet, it is even more than this. The organizational personality is the manifestation of how an organization senses, perceives, interprets, assesses, evaluates, and acts upon business opportunities and threats in the environment.

Most successful organizations have a strong outward competitive focus as well as an inward nurturing focus. Imbalance or misalignment in these two key organizational components creates medium to long-term challenges - sometimes insurmountable. Forward-thinking, high performing organizations recognize the importance of balancing these two key strategies and the value of spending significant time and resources to build and strengthen their inner cores to create a sound, aligned organizational personality.

Personality and Strategy:

A few companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are able to balance a strong outward-looking strategy with a sound inward-looking strategy. The casual, corporate, ambience within these organizations signify well-developed organizational personalities, which have been leveraged to capture market share based on employee creativity, innovation. Combine this internal strategy with superior marketing and business strategies; profit sharing; and steadily increasing stock values and you have a recipe for long-term internal and external success. Everyone likes a winner.

These companies take calculated risks based on empirical data and marry it with proven "gut instincts". This approach creates successful outcomes and engenders confidence, which builds on itself and is leveraged to continue capturing, retaining, and growing market share. Despite the appearance of their corporate-casual cultures, make no mistake, these organizations are outwardly aggressive and highly competitive (just ask their competitors). Their "laid back" appearance belies their savvy, strong, well-developed understanding of who they are, where they are going, where they fit in, and what success in their respective industries looks like. These companies consistently demonstrate not only sound strategic thinking, but how important it is to have a good organizational personality. A summary of common internal strategies which lead to sound organizational personalities are as follows:

- A strong, clear, well-defined, growth-oriented vision
- A pervasive, consistently reinforced cultural ambience which fosters creativity, autonomy, innovativeness, and "best practices"
- Clear internal rules and operating requirements
- Internal solidarity through an "us vs. them" paradigm (which can be highly effective in a competitive business environment)
- Exemplary financial and psychological income and reward systems
- A high degree of carefully calculated risk taking
- Fearless action in the face of changing in business environments
- Confident in leading change and an unwavering belief in "right strategy"
- Strong internal locus of control, i.e., self-directed, autonomous, and independence of thought and action
- A laser-like focus on vision and goals throughout the entire execution process
- Ability to generate and maintain interest and enthusiasm in employees and customers
- Driven to respond to consumers needs, wants, and desires, i.e., a strong marketing focus which creates a "buzz" when launching a new product or service

Improving Performance through Personality:

Senior managers tasked with improving or managing organizational performance need to begin by asking the critical questions of what their organization's personality is and how it can be improved or changed to create both internal and external effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability. If the organization's personality does not foster a sense of growth, opportunity, and stability internally for its employees, then chances are its employees don't like it much either. Eventually, your value chain [including your services/products] will begin to reflect your organization's personality.

If your organizational personality requires changing, it is useful to begin by identifying each element along the organizational personality continuum. The eleven components of the continuum are listed below. For each item below, ask the five "why" questions in order to drill down to first principles. Once first principles and their magnitude have been unbundled and ascertained, and you have a good idea of why your organization is the way it is, you can begin to take action.

1. Risk Behaviour: risk averse v. risk-taking
2. Locus of Control: internal v. external driven
3. Personalization: emotionalized v. pragmatic and impersonal
4. Confidence: high vs. low strength
5. Attention/focus: focused v. fragmented/fleeting
6. Assertiveness: push v. pull
7. Competitiveness: competitive vs. cooperative
8. Consciousness: self-awareness vs. lack of awareness or apathy (don't care)
9. Philosophical Strength: ideological vs. contextually driven
10. Arousal: high vs. low and degree (e.g., anger/distrust vs. contentment/satisfaction)
11. Enthusiasm: interest vs. apathy

When you have assessed your internal environment using these continuums, you will be able to predict what change management process will work best. No change process works without some turmoil, but if you want to minimize turmoil, you will need to employ a strategic approach to understand the personality of your organization.

As a final note, it is complex (but not impossible) to undertake an assessment of the personality of a multinational or global firm with geographically interspersed strategic business units (SBUs). The organization often operates with diverse ethnic, social, and cultural environments and expectations. Nevertheless, the exercise of determining organizational personality is useful, and in this instance, it will be useful to reduce your analysis down to the SBU level. Once you have determined the personality of each SBU, it will be easier to find integration points and subsequent linking strategies to synergize cultural differences across multiple sites.

Remember, strategy without execution is like a canoe without a paddle.