This is the ninth in a series on Association culture, its role, how it is shaped, and how it can be changed.

Changing Your Association Management Changes Your Culture

 As you likely know, the concept of “management as a system” is not commonly talked about even among experienced Association leaders and academics. However, if you understand that a process is a collection of activities that target a specific output, and that a system is a collection of processes that target a larger aggregated output, then buying the concept of a management system isn’t much of a leap.

Why does this matter?

When we understand that management itself is in fact a collection of specific processes, it allows us to apply process thinking and tools to the work of management. So, like any other process, the management process can be understood, assessed, measured, and improved.

It took a long time for me to understand the connection between an Association’s  management system and its culture. In fact, I learn something new about that relationship almost every day as I interact with customers and discover things I had not seen.

What is clear is that as an Association moves from an informal management system to an intentional and effective one, such as the Now Management System®, the leaders start to actually gain control over their results. This happens because process improvement is all about transparency (seeing where things are breaking down), accountability (measuring results and making it clear who has the responsibility to fix problems), problem solving (ensuring that process owners know how to fix processes), and the elimination of fear (which creates the safety to risk taking action on the problems).

NOW Management System

While the Now Management System systematically creates clarity, it shifts culture by establishing clear norms of accountability, new routines for transparency, and standard disciplines for solving problems. Our system achieves its maximum return on investment by shifting culture at the heart of these dimensions.

Changing Your Association Management Changes Your Culture

John M. Bernard, Founder & Chairman, Mass Ingenuity

Culture is all about patterns, roles, routines, language, and expected behaviors. A good management system addresses every one of those dimensions of organizational functioning. As an example, one of our clients recently held their Quarterly Target Review and reported improvement in 46% of their processes measures quarter over quarter.  This organization has dramatically shifted its culture to one of transparency, accountability, problem solving, and shared success.

All in all, I have never seen anything change culture as effectively and as positively as changing an Association’s management system.

Next week, the final post on this 10-part series on Association culture.

This is the sixth in a series on organizational culture, its role, how it is shaped, and how it can be changed.

 What’s Culture’s Affect on Association Change?

As a leader setting out to sponsor change, it is important to understand what that change will bump into in the Association’s culture. The more conscious the potential collisions are made, the more they can be avoided.

Professor Edgar Schein, a former MIT professor, identified 10 factors that transmit and embed culture. They are:

Formal statements of organizational philosophy (mission, values, imperatives, goals, etc.).

Design for physical spaces.

Deliberate role modeling, teaching, and coaching by leaders.

Explicit reward and status system, and promotion criteria.

Stories, legends, myths and parables about key people and events.

What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control.

Leader reactions to critical incidents or organizational crisis.

Organization design and structure.

Organizational systems and procedures (such as its management system).

Criteria used for recruitment, selection, and promotion.

Association Leaders

As a leader, this checklist is useful in assessing the gap between where the Association is, how it got there, and where it wants to go. By walking through these potential collisions, an Association leader can significantly improve the odds of success.What’s important in these assessments and subsequent communications about them is to not cast judgment on the past. The past just is what it is – we can never understand the motives of people nor fully appreciate the circumstance in which things happened. If we offer criticism we set a judgmental tone – even condemnation. That approach does nothing to increase the sense that the coming change will be safe to embrace and that related struggles will not be subject to the same criticism.

What’s culture’s affect on Association change?

As we work with customers on the Now Management System® we directly and overtly address items 1, 3, 6, and 9. But we encourage, advise and support addressing every single item in order to ensure their culture change sticks and that it delivers the business results that led to the desired change in the first place.

What are the attributes that allow an Association to make changes quickly? I’ll share some thoughts on that next week.