Bob Sadler introduced Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) to a group of managers at Juniper. As he explained the concept, it dawned on me. This is the EQ for a team, or a company.
There are many ways to measure a company’s IQ, or its operational effectiveness. Most typically we have financial performance numbers, usually expressed as acronyms: ROE, EPS, CCC, DSO, EBIT, etc. Then we have measurements such as employee satisfaction, customer loyalty, new product successes, talent metrics, diversification in various ways, leadership quality, etc. Executives in modern corporation are obsessed with those metrics. In fact, some argued that senior management’s main job is to select the metrics and design the corresponding rewards. The cadre of managers will automatically deliver the rest.
Except when the company tries to change — a must-do every decade or so until it dominates an industry. Even then, companies perished when resting on their laurels too long. This is when EQ, defined as the ability to change, matters more.
OCI surveys a company and measures if the company is constructive or defensive. It further measure if the company is aggressively or passively defensive. A constructive company is humanistic, affiliative, achievement-oriented, and self-actualizing. An aggressively defensive company opposes changes; is competitive internally; over uses power; and is made of perfectionists that are overly concerned with deadlines and details. A passively defensive company hides behind approval processes, sticks to conventions, creates complicated dependencies, and in general avoids changes.
Bob said that he can pretty much predict if the change process will be successful or not by their OCI. He, over the 35-year consulting career, has collected tools for different kinds of companies.
Unlike IQ, people can change their EQ, so can a company if its employees choose to. There are books teaching people to get better at EQ. I wonder how would a company changes its OCI.
Would changing an OCI require a high OCI to begin with? Hmm…