1847: Culture as the Gatekeeper To Success: Realize, Reorganize, Run With It (19509)

Culture can be seen as a gatekeeper to driving success in organizations of various types and demographic profiles. Organizational conditions shape members’ understanding of the expected ways to behave at work, thus creating the overall culture. The resulting shared expected behaviors govern effectiveness criteria, such as creating fruitful policy, formulating purpose, and overall effectiveness, including innovation. The challenge for change agents and managers is discovering how to uncover and manage the change process, given members’ different identities, values, and ethnic backgrounds. To address this challenge, panelists will discuss their experience with various organizational environments, specifically a not-for-profit in the process of succession planning, a police department under pressure to rebuild trust in the community, an organization expanding globally, and organizational culture measurement and application, specifically the Organizational Culture Inventory® (OCI®). The panelists will take part in a formal, moderated, interactive discussion of (1) the importance of culture in driving outcomes within organizations; (2) the panelists’ personal research experience that demonstrates culture being a barrier or potential enabler to action; (3) the relationship between culture and the mission; and (4) how each variable is interconnected with the others, particularly in how organizational factors contribute to a desirable organizational culture. They will do this by discussing how they became aware that culture needed to be addressed (Realize), how they accepted the realities and determined interventions (Reorganize), and the actions that took place (Run With It).