Foundation leaders who think of their organization’s culture as an aside, something unconnected to the team’s daily work and unworthy of attention when schedules are jam packed, may be surprised to learn that culture has been shown to have a direct impact on success.   

"Culture is almost like air – it’s everywhere yet invisible. When harnessed correctly, corporate culture can turn into a tailwind of progress instead of a headwind of obstruction,” said Shivaram Rajgopal, professor, Columbia Business School, following the 2015 release of a study on company culture conducted by Columbia Business School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Interviews with nearly 2,000 CEOs and CFOs revealed that corporate culture can drive profitability, acquisition decisions and even affect whether employees behave ethically.

• 78 percent said culture is among the top five things that make their company valuable.

• More than 50 percent of executives said corporate culture influences productivity, creativity, profitability, firm value and growth rates.

• 92 percent said they believed improving their firm’s corporate culture would improve the value of the company.

What about company culture in the nonprofit world? Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ (GEO) work around culture over the last 15 years shows that “grantmakers who cultivate cultures based on collaboration and partnership; diversity, equity and inclusion; respect and humility; responsiveness; transparency and trust; and curiosity and learning are better able to adopt the smarter grantmaking practices that matter most to nonprofits.”

Their research has shown that a productive internal culture aligned with a foundation’s mission and goals is essential to support nonprofit resilience and success. GEO recently released a new resource guide to assist grantmakers in identifying, discussing and improving organizational culture. The guide outlines how the work of shaping culture can be broken into four primary phases:

• Understand: Consider the ingrained behaviors, assumptions and values that drive our daily work and our interactions with nonprofits and other partners.

• Assess: Explore how our current culture affects our ability to accelerate impact and support nonprofits to be successful

• Shift: Engage board and staff to take action to create a culture that will make our organization and nonprofits more successful.

• Tend: Keep a sustained focus on strengthening culture so we can achieve our mission and goals, continually aligning strategy, operations, talent and culture in that direction.

GEO provides a set of questions that foundation staff can ask themselves, as well as a set of articles and readings on culture work.

At CMF, we have been focused on our organizational culture for several years with tactics in our annual plan of work specifically targeted at our continued growth of the culture we desire. We have used a variety of resources to support this growth. To help employees understand their own workplace priorities and preferences better, as well as the priorities and preferences of their colleagues, all staff complete a DiSC assessment and engage in conversation about the results with Lucille Chrisman, Certified Executive Coach and Intercultural Development Inventory Facilitator, a member of the CMF Consulting Services Network.

All CMF staff are also engaged in deep work individually and together around diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) principles. We established a norm where all employees individually complete the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a cross-cultural assessment of intercultural competence, then discuss the results individually with our coach and also discuss the organizational IDI score as a team to consider how we can continue to grow our cross-cultural capacity. In addition, as part of this year’s plan of work, staff participated in a Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation healing circle. Seven staff were trained to facilitate healing circles and we participated in an all-staff, multi-part series on understanding oppression. Additional activities are planned for the rest of the year.

Improving the health of organizational culture is a journey. In addition to the GEO resources, CMF staff are happy to share their work and learnings.

Want more?

Access the GEO Culture Resource Guide.

Learn more about the Columbia University and Duke University culture study with executives.

Explore the GEO articles and readings on culture.

Dive deeper into the DiSC profile tool.