Cultribute analysis: measuring culture and organisational capability

The analysis measures capabilities of the organisation, not of individuals. It distinguishes three levels. Capabilities are core organisational abilities in the form of complex problem-solving patterns that have been learned over many years and have proven themselves in creating products and delivering services. They are independent of individuals, offer customers a benefit and are usually not easy to copy.

Cultributes, an invented word combining culture and tribute, are enablers of strategy implementation: existing knowledge, selected abilities, lived behaviours and cultural characteristics that can either promote or paralyse the implementation of a strategy. Competencies, finally, are the knowledge, motivation and skills of individual managers.

The instrument comprises 95 individual elements in 20 clusters. The clusters are assigned to eight dimensions: strategic accuracy and clarity, strategy implementation, innovation and change management, attracting, retaining and motivating talented employees, developing and using a performance culture, profitability management and value creation, developing future leaders, and governance. Like competencies, the items are described in behavioural terms, only at the level of the organisation.

Behind them are four core questions, each asked for today and for tomorrow: How do we handle our strategy work? How do we observe our relevant environments? How flexible is the company internally and externally? And how do we ensure that high-performing people and groups emerge and stay with the company?

transformis describes performance as the interplay of people and systems. On the people side are competencies, potential, performance capacity, attitude, values and personal disposition. On the systems side are processes, routines, programmes, observation and assessment frameworks, and procedures. Strategy and cultributes form the framework for both sides. A capability of the company can therefore not be attributed to a single manager.

The analysis helps to align the operational system with the strategy, to match the strategy with the organisation's capabilities, to create a success profile for managers, to assess the culture and to examine the feasibility of mergers and acquisitions.

The method rests on a few principles: an organisation's form follows its function. Every organisation is a bundle of capabilities, and which ones it needs depends on its strategy. Culture develops around strategy and design and, as the organisation succeeds, becomes stronger and more resistant to change.

The assessment takes place in a workshop with managers and key players. It starts with the current business situation, the strategy and the success factors and challenges worked out beforehand. Small groups of three to four people then rate all 95 items twice.

The current-state assessment asks how strongly a capability is developed today. The scale has five levels, from a serious issue through weakness, average and strength to towering strength. The target assessment asks how important the capability is for the strategy, also on five levels from “not important” to “mission critical or essential”. Each assessment is followed by a relative assessment in which the groups sort the items against one another. The group results are evaluated electronically and condensed into a current profile and a target profile.

The evaluation compares the average target value, the average current value and the difference for each cluster and dimension. A second chart arranges the dimensions by importance between mission critical and not important. The results are presented and interpreted together. On this basis, an action plan is drawn up to close the gaps between the current and the target state.

The results chart of the Cultribute analysis shows three layers. The green line marks the maximum possible level, the red line the company-specific target value and the grey area the current value identified. The red line is called the ‘smart line’.

The name captures the core of the method. Not every capability has to be developed to the maximum. The target assessment determines for each item how much of it the company's strategy needs. The need for action is therefore defined by the distance between the grey area and the red line, not by the distance to the maximum.

This leads to a second reading. Where the current value lies above the smart line, the evaluation shows a positive result. In the 2009 project, significant items with a need for action were therefore set against equally significant items with a positive result.

In 2009, a group of municipal utilities with several subsidiaries used the Cultribute analysis as the starting point for a group-wide strategy process. A design and steering team managed the project. Three surveys were carried out in the holding company and in each subsidiary: the Cultribute analysis, individual interviews and an organisational diagnosis.

Interviews using the Value Finder complemented them and grouped the expected benefits of change into themes such as working climate, learning culture, productivity, speed and efficiency. The results were evaluated separately for the group and for each company.

Typical fields of action were strategy implementation and the clarification of roles between the holding company and the subsidiaries, an organisational design that fits the strategy, management instruments, systems for retaining and developing talent, key figures for steering strategy implementation, and communication and transparency. In addition, there were observation and assessment frameworks for cultural change: working on one's own responsibility, a shared sense of belonging across the group and cooperation across the companies.

The organisational diagnosis showed that the companies had different cultures. This led to a distinction between the what and the how. The what, meaning strategic thinking, is developed jointly and in coordination. The how has to suit the character of each company.

According to this finding, cultural change only succeeds with respect for the differences between the cultures. The strategy process was to be designed so that it does not put the organisation's basic patterns under stress, clarifies roles at group level and involves the traditional areas of responsibility such as the works councils.

In 2010, a business unit of an international industrial group used the English version of the method as an Organizational Effectiveness Analysis. The definition was the same: a combination of selected organisational capabilities, leadership competencies and cultural attributes that either support or oppose the implementation of the strategy. Organisational capabilities embody the knowledge and skills of the organisation, in other words the things a company does well or not so well.

One day was scheduled for the workshop. It began with the business situation and the success factors and challenges from the previous meeting of the management team. This was followed by the current and target assessments and the presentation of the results. From these, the most important fields of action for the following two years were defined. The participants then agreed on ten strategic and twelve functional leadership competencies and drew up job profiles for job families.

The three value disciplines according to Treacy and Wiersema (1995) served as a frame of reference. Each requires a different culture. Operational excellence relies on disciplined teamwork, a focus on processes and uniformity. Product leadership thrives on a future-driven outlook, experimentation and the will to win. Customer intimacy needs a culture driven by the client and the field that allows for variation. This mapping makes it possible to check whether the lived culture fits the chosen strategy.

The results feed in three directions: into strategy, into leadership and into learning.

In the group of municipal utilities, the design and steering team used the findings to formulate core questions for the further development of the company and a brief for the strategy workshop. The workshop was to identify the key needs for action, work out the strategic core questions and develop a vision of the future supported jointly by the owners, managing directors and key players.

Group and company objectives were to follow from this vision, together with the next steps and structures for the further strategy process. Our article on the strategy process describes how such a process is structured.

For leadership, the recommendations for leadership competencies differ depending on which cultributes are rated as mission critical. The chain runs from the strategy review, which reveals new organisational challenges, via the Cultribute analysis to strategic and functional competencies, to job profiles for job families and to the greatest strengths and development opportunities of the key players. The recommendations provide a basis for an organisation's own competency model. In the group of municipal utilities, work on a group-wide competency model began afterwards.

For learning, the interviews provided pointers for the learning architecture of leadership development. Short formats of up to one day were to take place in-house, two- to three-day formats off-site. Individual training needs were to be taken into account, and seminars were not to be held together with the direct superior. Transfer into practice was a topic in its own right, and the combination of specialist and leadership knowledge was in demand.

A culture survey describes how employees experience their organisational culture today and how it should be in the future. A transformis questionnaire does this in four blocks: the character of the company, what holds the organisation together, how employees are treated and how success is understood. Answers are given on a five-point scale. See the page Analysing corporate culture.

The Cultribute analysis starts at a different point. It does not ask which culture is desired, but which capabilities and cultural prerequisites the strategy needs and to what extent they exist today. In this way it links culture with strategy implementation and leadership competencies. In the 2009 project, it ran alongside individual interviews and an organisational diagnosis describing the patterns and tendencies of the organisation. See the page Organisational diagnostics.

The analysis follows the understanding of consulting set out in the paper Our consulting DNA: leadership is an organisational capability, and learning at the individual level is deliberately linked with structural change. How transformis offers the analysis today is described on the service page for the Cultribute analysis.