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All executive teams are running two businesses – the one they have now and the one they want in future.

Organisational culture could stand in the way of or enable their progress because it affects everything a business does. For this reason, all the current talk about safety culture or security culture or asset management culture or any other type of domain or discipline specific culture is misleading. You can’t create a good safety culture inside a poor organisational culture, but you can shape an organisational culture that makes people safer. Success, whatever it means, either doesn’t happen or cannot be sustained if the culture of a business isn’t conducive to it.

Where organisational culture is concerned, terms and definitions make all the difference. A lack of clarity in the way organisational culture and culture goals are defined is common and explains why many so-called culture change initiatives fizzle out.

Clarity starts at the top. Executives either shape a culture that supports the business or they suffer the consequences. To shape it they need to be able to describe what they’ve got and what they want in ways that make the differences obvious. If they don’t do this, or their efforts to are cloaked in academic or management speak, the odds on them convincing others to stop, listen and take action are not good.

Sometimes it takes a catastrophic accident or loss, or a new owner, an angry customer or a hacked off regulator to get the executive serious about reshaping the culture. Clients for CAS culture surveys have come to us in all these situations, sometimes brought to us by one of their clients who is concerned about a worsening trend.

Modern executives don’t tend to stick around for long, they have points to score and career moves to make. Shaping organisational culture does not sit well with this agenda. It takes time, it takes resolution, it takes consistency.

CAS is focused on improving the quality and impact of compulsory training and licensing programmes. Our long history of organisational culture assessment means our approach is evidential and risk based. It means we know what a difference it makes when these promote positive attitudes and generate appropriate behaviors and we know the problems that arise when they don’t.

Contact us for a confidential initial discussion of your needs.