Organizational culture change: What went wrong?...
While many businesses today sincerely struggle and try to incorporate a healthy workplace that engenders teamwork, solid leadership, effective management, and employee wellbeing, it seems that few are able to really sustain this vision or truly reap the (implied and hoped for) rewards.
New programs (or rehashed old ones) seem to rise up every season, making huge visionary promises based on ethical and desirable practices of human resource training, management and effectiveness.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent by well intended, hopeful CEO's, hoping to improve employee satisfaction, productivity and performance skills ...and thus creating a more efficient bottom line as well.
In most cases it seems, these programs fail ...and the illustrious new wave crashes to shore and fizzles with the froth and foam of the (often) demoralizing and unexpected fallout of "a hope gone bad", and adding further insult to injury.
I know there are exceptions (thank goodness!)
Still...Having spent the last 23 years as an independent corporate consultant providing clients with market analysis and metrics of productivity and performance, I have experienced first hand this well-intended/poor outcome roller coaster ride - and it's eventual "apathy producing" impacts on the organizational culture.
Why do these programs ultimately fail or fall far short of their vision? I believe it is due primarily to three key reasons that are in part both functional and philosophical in nature:
1) Accountability: These programs are rarely tied to directly useful measures of accountability and responsibility and integrated from the top down;
2) Sustained Commitment: These programs are not often given the level of sustained commitment required over a period of years in order to effect and realize measureable positive change; and
3) The Revolutionary Alchemy of Transformation: To date, and until OAM (Organizational Alchemy Management) no model that I know of has been designed that deeply understands or utilizes the key dimensions of human transformation of consciousness and the revolutionary commitment to mind/body/spirit quality of presence and social responsibility that such radical and lasting positive change both effects and requires.
It gets more compelling...
I imagine, if you're like me, you've reflected upon this: While we tend to think of our homes and families as the place we experience the most significant qualities of relationship, fact is, most working people in the US spend the greatest amount of their non-sleeping hours directly engaging in their business life - and the relationships they have within their places of work.
How we interact with our co-workers and customers on the job is one of our primary experiences of human relationship!
These experiences we gather and contribute to in the workplace become what we bring back into our homes and our communities - be it exhaustion, dis-empowerment, and frazzled stress from relations empty of true relatedness...or the enthusiastic sense of pride, creative solution building, and depth of heart that naturally comes in true relationships of seeing and being seen.
True culture change?..
I have found that in business (as in oneself) there are no shortcuts to real and lasting change. Real transformation (be it in the heart of the individual or the heart of the corporation) takes a radical commitment to the revolutionary responsibility of soul.
We can look at and understand the possibility of an effective model of organizational development and culture change, when we really look at and deeply understand the path of individual human growth and wholeness.
The path of soulfulness is free of any dogma and denomination or religious belief system, although it remains universally modelled by the world's great spiritual saints, sages and sacred texts. It is powerfully expressed in our cultural archetypes, ancient and contemporary mythic stories, in mystical poetry, and in the countless unknown lives of those who have been called into the Mysteries of radical and alchemical transformation and conscious presence of being.
There are universal elements of commonality on the mythic "rite of passage" to wholeness and soulful presence of living. These elements are true of the individual passage to conscious living (independent of religious affiliation) ...and they are equally true of the organizational emergence to conscious business.
It's an inner to outer revolution... In the case of evolving business consciousness, just as with individual awakening, there is both slow and radical leaps of inner revolutionary change that takes place as the barriers of externally-projected fear and self-protective modes of operation and relatedness are dissolved into innerly-responsible, soulfully-communal modes of cooperation and creative relationship within "embodied organization".
As in the human organism, every aspect of the corporation is effected and brought into harmony - from the cells, to the tissues, the organs, and the entity as a whole. There is a natural synthesis that occurs in the organism as mind/body/spirit realize their interdependence and how to move together as a symphony of being and master artistry.
...When a corporation of responsible, inner-directed, relationally-empowered individuals, business units, and divisions synchronize into this kind of unified movement, then bottom line effectiveness, radical innovation, strategic advantage, and quality of work culture, home life, and personal health are the natural by-product.
Such a revolution starts with practices in:
- perception awareness (freeing of dogma and externalized projection),
- active listening (inner, other and symbolic),
- responsible honoring action (the art of consciousness placed on all actions), and
- valued dedication to a healthy environment and lifestyle (mind/body/spirit integration of wellbeing and clarity).
These same cornerstones are applied within the revolutionary organization - one that is committed to a bottom line that's got soul.
Call to action...
Business, like humanity as a whole, is at a crossroads.
Evolutionarily speaking, the externalized view of reality that projects cause and effect "out there" is no longer a sustainable system. It is being replaced by a deeper perception of reality. We as individuals and working within organizational systems are increasingly called to "wake up" to a quantum leap of faith that pulls back the curtain of projection to reveal a deep inner responsibility of action and cooperative communion.
...This is the next frontier in humanity and in all of its related systems of enterprise.
Where this can be facilitated to evolve holistically within the organization, the much needed infusion of energetic vision, synchronicity, and inspired surprise, commingles with the best of disciplined practices, policies and procedures to create an unstoppable organizational culture and workforce that embodies soulful integrity, meaningful purpose, and the natural rewards of excellence.
It is my life vocation and great honor to assist and facilitate those individuals in business (whether privately or organizationally) who are already vitally present and inspired to be a part of the next generation: the revolutionary organization, where the responsibility to the fiscal bottom line and the healthy soulfulness of the organization and its people are in active communion and inspired action.
Ronda LaRue, M.S., President & Founder
InfoVision Systems
Ronda LaRue, is the founder and president of InfoVision Systems, an organizational development and research/evaluation consulting practice established in 1986. Ms. LaRue has been working with companies in the U.S. for over 23 years in areas of market research, branding and positioning; customer satisfaction; employee productivity; team-building evaluation; and productivity/bottom line performance metrics.
Ronda LaRue's current "next generation" counsel, incorporates her extensive real-world expertise ...and amps it up with a creative visionary model for fluidly facilitating and integrating soulfulness and organizational alchemy in a process that she calls: "A bottom line that's got soul" combining organizational consciousness raising practices training with the science and art of performance tracking metrics of accountability.
Her Organizational Alchemy Management (OAM) model, integrates human resource individual and group training and conscious relationship and team building with procedural tracking and accountable metrics of performance outcomes.
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