Define and Capture your Culture VI

Gaining on your culture goals can take time and certainly will need a strong dose of patience when the going gets tough.  But focusing on the right goals can make things begin to feel better right away (and in this case feelings really are facts).  So, tracking your progress is paramount if you are going to stay committed to the task and it helps recognize incremental improvements.  Having good measurements will make the difference between success and failure.  You must track the progress toward the culture goals but also how the culture change is affecting the business performance goals.  Culture is not a replacement for having the right people and the right strategy but it is the environment that energizes the strategy and the right people.  If you are not clear up front on what you want to improve in your business it will be hard to determine if a culture change is doing any good.  For instance, if the strategic vision for your team or your company includes the creation of more innovative products and or processes then you must have a benchmark you are competing against, that is measurable.  Something that might look like this:  during the last three years your team has been successful creating six new products at a cost of X, that has netted revenues and profits of X and so on, then any sustainable (as in not just one year) improvement of these numbers means something has changed.  For some it might be real easy, like a cycle time reduction when cycle time has been stagnant for years.  For others it might be more difficult because it is harder to quantify, like customer satisfaction, but in either case there must be efforts to measure business and cultural progress toward a clearly defined goal.  
    This might be the hardest single part of the goal since we are all so busy and usually so easily distracted, but don't let this part slip away!!  Include it in your financial spread sheet as a line item and give it a rating system so that you can translate ratings to dollars and begin to think of it in financial terms as well as culture.

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