Shaping organisational culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”

Organisational culture describes the shared explicit and implicit assumptions with regard to cooperation as well as the do’s and don’ts that shape the behaviour and, in particular, the interaction of different stakeholder groups in an organisation. This is why shaping organisational culture is a central management task and plays an influential role, especially in the face of change.

Organisations and teams need agreements and regulations on how services and products are provided for customers and how cooperation is organised – in other words, a conscious design of the core elements of the organisational culture. In traditional forms of organisation, the hierarchy provides the framework for this and a common, transparent (operating) system improves the way the organisation works. In organisations with a high degree of self-organisation, a binding common working culture that is defined for everyone in a transparent (operating) system is essential. This applies all the more to large organisations where the entire organisation does not work according to a uniform system.

Participants practise adopting a systems perspective in their leadership role and relating their actions to the entire system of the organisation (structures and processes, roles and responsibilities, employees, customers and market/competitive environment, role of corporate culture, etc.) or system-related aspects of the company. They learn to take a future-oriented view in order to act strategically and be effective within the scope of their organisational scope.