Katherine Newcombe

Culture is the DNA of your business.  It can make you or break you.  Culture change is possible. Start by understanding the culture you have.

Culture is an important buzzword in today’s business landscape. Being a consultant requires the ability to rapidly analyse and adapt to a variety of social situations, both between and within companies. While the study of culture is a broad and deep discipline, a quick and useful definition is:

The language(s), values, attitudes, and rituals that characterize the collective behaviours of a specific group.

Think of this in the context of your day to day life: how many cultures do you participate in each day? Without realizing it, you probably speak many different languages, hold different beliefs and values, express different attitudes, and engage in different rituals, all within the course of a few hours.

Once you begin to consciously analyse your surroundings and actions in these ways, you will find you become more astute to the subtle nuances that characterise each particular group you work with. This knowledge will, in turn, help you learn to adapt more readily while maintaining the distance required for a good consulting guard.

Check back next month to dive deeper into the consultant’s cultural toolkit!

Find out more about Culture Change here: www.cmg-change.com/how-can-we-help/culture-people/