Culture change
Why do so many culture change programmes fail to deliver? We believe there a number of fundamental truths about culture change that are ignored at your peril (and expense):
We’ve come across countless organisations who believe that investing in t-shirts and posters will change individuals’ behaviours. Apart from costing a lot of time and money, this erroneous belief often results in generating more negativity amongst staff than if nothing had been done in the first place;
The only reason you should bother to tackle your organisation’s culture is to ensure that it will help you – rather than hinder you – in achieving your strategic goals.
Too many organisations go into a culture change programme with a badly thought-through plan to, for example, improve employee opinion survey scores, rather than having a substantial plan to align the corporate culture with the organisation’s strategic goals. It might well have the side-effect of making life better for your staff, but this should be a desired outcome not a purpose;
If you don’t measure people on the new behaviours you want them to use, they probably won’t use them.
It sounds obvious, but very few organisations are brave enough to bite this bullet. If you don’t measure individuals’ use of the behaviours and link it to their career progression, staff will know that you’re not serious.
Try this eight minute tool to analyse your organisation’s culture:
| Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle and label one column ‘positive’ and the other column ‘negative’. |
| Take about 3 minutes to list words that describe the positive and negative features of your current culture. |
| Now look down the negative column and list a few more words to describe the impact of those negative features (taken as a whole) on the performance of the organisation. Do the same for the positive column. This step should only take another few minutes. |
| Now think of one of your organisation’s strategic goals and describe how the impacts of each column will either help or hinder you in achieving that strategic goal. |
| Lastly, off the top of your head, list the few key things you would do to change the negative features of the culture. |
You can draw some critical conclusions from this very rapid analysis:
1. Culture is not a ‘soft’ subject. You may have used words like ‘hierarchical’, ‘bureaucratic’, ‘silo-based’ to describe your current culture. You might then have described the impact of these things as ‘slow’, ‘damages quality/service’, etc. These are serious issues that impact your organisation’s economic performance.
2. You probably spotted some mission-critical obstacles when you compared the cultural impacts to your strategic goals. For example, does your silo-based organisation prevent you from delivering what your customers want? Does your bureaucracy prevent the kind of empowerment that would allow you to be more fleet-of-foot and to be more innovative? Would you tolerate these features if this were a privately owned organisation and you were the owner?
3. When you listed the things you’d do to fix the problems, you probably described process and structural issues as well as behavioural things. That’s why we believe that:
culture change = behaviour change + infrastructure change
If you try to tackle behaviour on its own, you’ll probably fail because your infrastructure will encourage the very behaviours that you’re trying to change. For example, telling people to be more empowering or empowered isn’t going to do it. You need also to tackle the processes and policies that prevent people from being empowering/empowered.
4. In your list of things you’d do to fix the culture, you probably didn’t list putting posters of the values on every wall.
Our approach to culture change recognises all these issues. It brings a robust but sensitive approach to changing corporate culture.
