Organizational Culture, Comfort Zones, Support, Trust, Norms, and Change

Organizational culture contains norms of accepted behavior, comfort zones, and processes to find support and to develop trust.  There is an Organizational Performance Change Curve (slide 9) that shows how organizations move through a process of change.

Some organizations have created habits of looking internally for support--a kind of "inside the box" thinking.  As organizations grow and mature, some learn to look outside the box and outside the organization for appropriate support.  It is difficult for people enmeshed in the culture of an organization to seek outside support unless it is endorsed and encouraged by the culture.

In many small to mid-sized entrepreneurial businesses, all employees turn to the business owner for support.  This can create problems for the entrepreneur.  He or she can get bogged down by the number of daily challenges and problems brought to him or her for decisions and advice.  Instead of putting his or her energy toward the improvement of business processes and in growing the business, he or she is invested in putting out innumerable small-fire-problems brought by the employees.

Often the entrepreneur can seek outside support for the business owner, the business, and the employees.  By finding a trusted advisor outside the business, he or she can suggest that employees take many of their small-fire-problems to the consultant who is not going to have his or her support for the business interrupted by dealing with the problems and the employees.  When entrepreneurs can use these consultants more effectively, they can choose a few employees to be the "go-to" people within the organization and the outside consultant can coach those people to be effective in helping employees with small-fire-problems and in improving their own ability to make daily decisions and to put-out the "small-fires" themselves.