10 Tips for Transforming Culture in a Crisis
By Bernard Chanliau, Wednesday 25 March, 2009
Outperforming by Out-behaving by Lorna McDowell, Organisation Analyst
1. Look at your business strategy - what kind of culture is needed to deliver it? Score your readiness to achieve it on a scale of one to ten and ask ten other people across the organisation what they think.
2. Connect with others that do it well - stimulate your senses by visiting some great companies who do it well. Talk to their staff, their customers, customers and suppliers - what do they do that makes them stand out?
3. Build a vision - Think through what great culture could do for your company. What could be possible that isn't now? Paint that vision and make it real for your staff ... get their taste buds salivating, excite them enough to want to make it happen. If you can't articulate it, you can't achieve it.
4. Integrate change from the start. Don't keep the cultural initiative in a secret off-site think-tank, bring it into the heart of the organisation. List all the things you want to work on from the smallest to the biggest and involve everyone in giving an opinion.
5. Don't lean on LEAN alone. There's a difference between business process reengineering and culture transformation. One involves processes and work people do, the other involves human beings and how they relate. Research states that 70% of business process initiatives fail because of inattention to people culture. Integrate BOTH programmes together and get consultants talking to one another.
6. Time for change but actually MAKE the time - it's a long term commitment to continuous change learning, not a stop-start event. To move from being a reactive immature leadership culture focused on managing the present, to a visionary culture stimulating the future, whilst managing the core - takes anything from 12 months to 2 years to effect with constant follow through and mentoring. Don't kid yourself with 2 day or 1 week training courses on leadership. There's a lot more to make learning your own, beyond the theory.
7. If you want to play in the premier league, get a team of premier league coach mentors to raise your game - don't bodge a DIY job. You need outside help to develop and see team and leadership behaviours and help you through the transformation period. This team should follow your working days, shadow teams and conduct reflective action learning interventions on-site with a constant feedback loop to the organisation on emerging behavioural themes. You need your coaches close at hand and with commitment to the long term, the costs are reasonable, not to mention the money you will make and save by having more effective people..
8. Invest in a personal effectiveness programme for employees which mixes action learning with personal role reflection - helps all employees find make and take a role in making a difference, whether they're on the factory floor or a manager. For example, check out Personal Effectiveness in the Workplace, aligned to Fetac Module 2.
9. Prepare for an emotional journey, don't avoid it, embrace it, but keep you'll need to be physically and emotionally fit. Just like giving birth change involves pain, don't try and skip around it, or bury it. It's best expressed and shared so that all can learn. Have you made some mistakes, felt the growing pains and given birth to something new? If not you're still at cognitive learning level. Have you been coached for over 20 hours on how you will apply your learning?
Read more about behavioural differentiation and culture strategy on our website.
Contact Lorna McDowell for advice on your cultural transformation programme.
