Assessment demonstrator - Step 1

This self-assessment focuses on 5 aspects which will indicate whether your improvement project is likely to succeed. This is Step 1.

Step 1. Identify your dominant management culture

By identifying an organisation’s management culture and style, we can tell quite a lot about how successful it will be in implementing change and what kind of barriers will prevent full realisation of the benefits. Pick the management culture/s that you think most closely describe/s your organisation:

Management Culture	Description
1. Pragmatic/ Anarchic	In your organisation, it’s the results that count. Management is arms-length and rewards success, so individual members of the team are left to do more or less what they like, as long as they achieve results. There are some laid-down procedures, but people only follow them or take up a new initiative if they see benefits for themselves in doing so.
2. Structuralist	Rules and procedures govern how your organisation works. This may have allowed the organisation to become over-bureaucratic, with ‘silo working’ hindering the sharing of ideas and knowledge across the organisation - sometimes this even extends to Board level. Change is slow and decisions are often passed down, with formal but inadequate consultation.
3. Dialectic	The culture in your organisation puts value on sharing knowledge, as opposed to having (and protecting) knowledge. Managers and staff are encouraged to network and exchange ideas and information and, as a result, silo working is not a significant barrier to change, which is undertaken consultatively.
4. Aligned	As a result of strong leadership and a good level of dialogue between people, the values and aspirations of the staff in your organisation are in line with its policies and strategic direction. People feel valued and understand how they fit into the scheme of things, so are more motivated to accept change that will benefit the organisation, even if it doesn’t reduce their workload.
5. Pragmatic/ Aligned	Managers in your organisation trust their staff to act in the best interests of the organisation, so decisions are made close to the customer, quickly and effectively.
6. Empiricist	Information about the ‘real world’ is important to your organisation and flows across departments as well as up and down the management hierarchy. Because it does not suffer delays or distortion from passing through departmental silos, the information is timely and accurate, which means that management decisions are well-informed and effective.
7. Imaginist	Because your organisation is working well, senior managers are not focused on short-term fire-fighting and intervention, allowing them the time to concentrate on longer-term planning and more important issues. They are operating with timely and accurate information, which means they can make intuitive, high quality and far-reaching decisions - and that means the organisation is able to cope well with change.
8. Systemist	Your CEO makes him/herself visible and available, and is vocal in championing changes and issues that are critical to the organisation’s success, but his/her leadership style is to steer from behind and build longer-term change, rather than intervening in operational issues. This works because the organisation has a strong and effective Board and an aligned and empowered workforce.
9. Pragmatic/ Empowered	You are working in an organisation that has set itself the challenge of being the best in class. You are fully empowered to plan and manage your own workload, within a supportive management culture. This includes working collaboratively in teams and leading and participating in change projects, to continually improve the effectiveness of the organisation to meet its customers’ needs.

We used a 9-step spiral model to develop our profiles - to find out more about how this works, have a look at our Management Culture model slide presentation.

Having identified your dominant management culture, its time to look at process capability in Step 2.