Question of the Week
How Do You Measure Something as Vague as “Culture"?
Q: How do you evaluate your organization’s culture and decide if it’s a so-called Level 2 culture, or a Level 3 culture, or somewhere in between? If we want it to be more Level 3, how would we know if we’re making progress or not? It strikes me as a good concept to strive for, but subjective and hard to measure.
A: (From Executive Director Jim Berlucchi) At the Spitzer Center, our primary measurement tool is called the Organizational Culture Inventory, also known as the Circumplex, which we license from an organization called Human Synergistics. The Circumplex is a very well-known tool that’s been used by thousands of companies around the world. It’s a very reliable way to measure an organization’s culture, or the sorts of behaviors people believe they’re expected to conform to. It takes about 20 minutes to complete.
The Circumplex has been around for more than 30 years, so it predates the Four Levels of Happiness™ model that Fr. Spitzer built his curriculum around, but there’s a lot of overlap between the two systems.
The Circumplex evaluates 12 styles of behavior in two broad categories. There are four “constructive” styles and eight “defensive” styles (four of which are “aggressive-defensive” and four “passive-defensive” – see the diagram). We find that constructive styles align pretty closely with typical Level 3 behaviors, while defensive styles reflect Level 2 behaviors. It’s not a one-to-one correspondence, but there’s a strong general correlation, which makes the Circumplex very useful for us.
In fact, before we even discuss our curriculum with clients, we recommend they do a benchmark survey with this tool. It’s hard to know how much value our curriculum might offer you until you see the survey results. You may already have a thriving Level 3 culture with very few Level 2 behaviors.
We actually do two surveys. We do one with the organization to uncover what behaviors people believe the workplace culture expects from them. Culture is like an invisible force that people try to adapt to, and the Circumplex makes that force visible and breaks it down it down into very tangible patterns.
In addition to that general survey, we’ll also ask a smaller group – typically the leadership team – to describe their ideal culture using the same survey. We ask them to answer the questions the way they believe they should be answered. The leaders can look at both sets of results and say, “Here’s what our employees say we look like, and here’s our ideal.” You can see whatever gaps there might be, large or small. You can easily see the color-coded differences between each Circumplex (see the examples at the bottom of the page).
If you decide the Spitzer Center curriculum is the right tool for closing the gaps, we’ll go back a year to 18 months after you’ve implemented the curriculum and do the same measurements again. That allows you to see how much the “green” (passive-aggressive) and “red” (aggressive-defensive) behaviors have been reduced, and the “blue,” constructive, Level 3 behaviors have increased.
There’s one last important point. The Circumplex doesn’t measure who you are, it measures where you’re at. That’s a very important distinction. If you’re stuck in a place you don’t want to be, you can choose a different cultural identity. We’ve seen many organizations successfully choose to become less defensive and more constructive – less Level 2 and more Level 3. And there’s a lot of research showing that more constructive, Level 3 organizations perform better in terms of revenue, profit, talent retention, and other concrete measurements of success.
| Two examples of Circumplex output. The one on the left depicts feedback on an ideal culture, while the one on the right shows employee feedback on the actual culture. |
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