Many struggle to understand what culture is. And they find it even harder to understand how to change it. You’ll have seen many models of how to deconstruct culture. They tell you to change your culture symbols, the organization’s beliefs, rituals, stories and other, forgive me, hokum. Your HR department will have given you a lengthy PowerPoint presentation about what culture is (using those same models) but you’re still struggling to get your hands around what it is, why it’s important and what to do about it (if you haven’t been induced into a PowerPoint coma before giving up any motivation to look further or the will to live).
Here’s the bottom-line: your organization’s culture will either enable you to achieve your strategic goals or get in the way of it. That’s it. It is the key determinant of whether your organization has the ability to deliver results.
And I can prove it. Try this 8-minute test…
Gather around you a bunch of people who you trust will be candid with you and are willing to speak truth to power:
- Draw two columns. In one column write words that describe the positive features of your culture; in the other column write words that describe the negative features of your culture
- Now look across all your negative words and describe the impact they have on performance
- Look at all the negative words – the words you used to describe the negative features of the culture and the words you used to describe impact on performance. And now write down what you would do about it. If you were in charge, if you had carte blanche, if you could do anything, what would you do to get rid of the negative features of the culture and their negatives impacts on performance
Did your answers in step 2 include things like “it slows us down”, “it detracts from our service levels”, “it costs us money”, “it creates duplication of effort”?
If yes, you’ve proved the point: those things will impede your ability to perform and reach your goals. The positives will work in your favour, but they do not net out the negatives – you’ll have positives and negatives going on at the same time. Meaning you’re driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake.
Having formed this conclusion you can no longer tolerate a view that culture is a ‘soft’ subject. Don’t treat it like it is. For example, a common trap I see organizations fall into is to give culture change to HR to sort out – “they know about people… they can do it.” At the point at which you do that, you’ve lost before you’ve really started. You’ve told the organization that you’re not serious about this because you’re giving it to a team of people who, by definition, ‘support’ the business rather than lead it. Culture change must be lead by the Executive Team. Actively. Not in that way we so often see, where the program sponsor puts their name to a program and then seemingly develops amnesia about the existence of the project.
And let’s look at your answers to question 3. Did you say things like, review our organization structure, simplify our processes, have clarity around roles and responsibilities, develop our leadership skills?
If yes, you’ve come to a critical point about culture: culture = behaviour + infrastructure.
Culture isn’t just about behaviour, it’s also about the processes, procedures and protocols that either enable or prevent people from behaving in this way. I worked with an organization a little while ago that needed their call centre agents to behave in a more empowered way. I.e. being able to resolve customers’ issues quickly and without having to escalate for a decision. So they sent several hundred call centre agents (over the course of a year) on a one-day training course called “You’re Empowered!!” (Apparently two exclamation marks means “yeah, we really mean it!” They all had a lovely time on the course drinking free coffee and eating choc chip cookies while thinking “this is much better than having to spend the day dealing with angry customers.” And the next day they got back to their desks, plugged-in their headsets and within about 2.5 seconds bumped into rules that wouldn’t let them make the decisions they wanted to make and systems that didn’t allow them to do the thing the customer wanted.
You’ve got to change the infrastructure to enable behavioural performance. Is this now starting to sound like a bigger body of work than you first envisaged? Good. That means you get it. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.
But you’ve also got to tackle the behaviours. You can have the shiniest, most stream-lined processes in the world, but they’re only as good as the people operating them. Define and then decree the behavioural standards you need. For example: willing and able to make empowered decisions vs. escalating for decisions and slowing things up; continuously looking for faster, better, cheaper ways of doing things vs. walking past litter (that’s broken/messy but it’s someone else’s job to do something about it). You’ll notice these examples aren’t generic leadership behaviours – they have to be specific to your organization at this point in time given what you’re trying to achieve. You can’t go to the culture machine and spin the dials – culture is the aggregate of everyone’s behaviours. Ensure you have the right behaviours in your leaders and give them best infrastructure to operate in.
That’s why culture changes everything. It will speed up and increase the quality of your decision making, it will ensure that you’re joining dots across the organization to maximize outputs, it will ensure that you’re identifying and acting on opportunities and it will help harness the full horsepower of the organization to drive or respond to disruption.
Sadly, many culture change programmes deliver very little because they don’t start from the right place. They might start from a place of “let’s define our values and stick them on posters on the walls and lanyards – with no real action to deliver culture change”; they might start from a place of thinking that culture is a tick-box exercise; or they think it’s about building a happy, engaged workforce.
If you start from a place of “culture will drive performance and change everything,” you’ve built yourself a very solid foundation for the work you need to do.
Written by Andrew Saffron.
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