Developing Organizational Personality

Like individuals, organizations are evolving, adaptive, strategic, and rule-based cultures which act on and respond to changing internal and external environments (a mouthful, to be sure). The past 15-years have seen significant advancements in new technology and marketing strategies. These strategies have [respectively] decreased costs and increased revenues across industries and sectors. Yet, there is one predictor of organizational success which is often under-emphasized or overlooked in the march toward market pre-eminence. This critical component is organizational culture or personality. For the purpose of this article, the terms culture and personality are interchangeable.

Defining Organizational Personality:

An organization's personality is the hierarchically predominant lens through which information is collected, filtered, and acted upon. It is a gestalt of all people, processes, and customs in an organization, and which cannot be simply understood by distilling them down to individual personalities without losing something in the translation (though some personalities have greater impacts than others). Yet, it is even more than this. The organizational personality is the manifestation of how an organization senses, perceives, interprets, assesses, evaluates, and acts upon business opportunities and threats in the environment.

Most successful organizations have a strong outward competitive focus as well as an inward nurturing focus. Imbalance or misalignment in these two key organizational components creates medium to long-term challenges - sometimes insurmountable. Forward-thinking, high performing organizations recognize the importance of balancing these two key strategies and the value of spending significant time and resources to build and strengthen their inner cores to create a sound, aligned organizational personality.

Personality and Strategy: