Not only the air you breathe in a board meeting, organizational culture is ultimately what makes or breaks company results, market success and its impact on society, at large. Often ignored as too soft, or dismissed as too intangible and hard to grasp, the truth is that culture is the indispensable linchpin that makes your organization achieve performance results. It is ever more perceived as critically important to business success around the world, as testified by a number of reputable surveys [key highlights here from Strategy& global survey, Deloitte and E&Y reports].
Culture is your competitive edge, what differentiates your organization, the only thing your peers cannot steal from you, and the one reason your clients will return for to you. It determines your success, as making your business targets a reality, at the end of the day, is dependent on behaviors, willingness and ability to embed the desired change from the past results. Although many agree about the importance of culture, about a half recognizes it is not effectively managed. What is widely ignored is that culture is more emotional than rational and requires special tactics to bring it to life. Understanding the nature of culture is first step to harness its power and drive change.
Multidimensional and slow, rather than change it can evolve and unleash powerful energy. Culture in its essence is about relationships, the way people interact and respond to change. It is the shared product of individual values, beliefs, emotions, consciousness and behaviors, which ingrain the organization DNA. In fact, what people feel, think, and believe is reflected in, and shaped by, their daily behaviors, and generate what companies often referred to as “the way we do things here”. By nature multifaceted, dynamic, and invisible, culture often puzzles executives, who see it too vast to address just rationally, and make them walk away and focus elsewhere. The truth is that it contains emotional energy that can accelerate or trump change all across the board. Its power can energize and mobilize organizations around a shared purpose, making them thrive, or it can hold them back, swamp their efforts, getting in the way and eating up strategies – no matter how sophisticatedly designed. The issue is that it is slow, sticky and resistant to rapid major change, however it can evolve and drive transformational change if you flow with your cultural energy rather than push against it.
Working culture in your favor requires taking both a practical and a deep work approach. Whereas the first allows for sustainable change, the latter makes it stick inside and expand outside.
SHORT TERM – BE PRACTICAL
Culture is evasive; let a pragmatic change strategy pave the way in the short run: focus on existing strengths, key behaviors and emotional intelligence at the top, middle and bottom.
1. Know Thyself and grow where you are strong. Acknowledge and embrace your cultural situation, rather than be tempted to replace it altogether; develop your culture thumbprint, by taking stock of your values, history and future, so to leverage already existing strengths and possibly turn challenges into opportunities. Be clear what you wish for, clarify your desired aspirations and align everyone around few culture priorities.
2. Make it practical, target behaviors first, mindset & beliefs take longer and will follow. Neuroscience tells us that it is easier “to act your way into a new mindset” than it is “to think your way into a new set of actions”. Begin working on behaviors, as they are the most visible determinant of real change; what you actually do will matter more than what you say or believe. And “mindsets tend to follow behaviors that deliver results”.
3. Focus on few behaviors; be selective and granular in what needs to change. Pick a handful of cornerstone behaviors, few repetitive habits that are visible, actionable and measurable against your objectives. Concentrate on those, which are mutually reinforcing, capable of hitting two birds (i.e. habits) with one stone. To make it really tangible and concrete, translate into what each critical behavior means for people, by deriving behavioral change expectations per each group (e.g. for management, supervisors, shop floor, customers, suppliers, etc.).
4. Tap into the informal and emotional intelligence to spread behavior change. Behavior change is not about poster campaigns and training – it runs under the radar and down informal channels of influence. Co-create and make the change viral by mobilizing emotional leaders, informal influencers with “no title”, across all levels, geographies, functions: they intuitively, know how to walk the talk, make it personal, and resonate to hearts and minds, by liberating existing emotional energy. Engage the group in the agile design of concrete enabling change initiatives that will help people embed and live up new rituals and behaviors, by mixing left-brain and right brain with informal and formal change levers that build emotional commitment and reinforce change and alignment, both bottom-up, and top down.
Finally do it in small steps, try and test locally, so you can learn and adjust strategy along the way.
Remember, change does not happen overnight and easy. Actively managing your cultural evolution will require continuous dedication, practice, and courage to break out of comfort zones. That is really the big shift. Without working on deeper motivations that sit underneath behaviors, you leave a backdoor open for old habits to sneak straight back and undermine change. Here, it is where practices like transformational leadership and coaching can make a difference in making the cultural shift sink in, come from within, and expand inside out to deliver a sustainable individual and organizational change.
So, as you continue, take a transformational lens, drop a layer below the change program surface, and check where hearts and minds truly are, to lay the foundations for a deeper change.
LONG TERM – GO THE EXTRA MILE, GO DEEP
Successful journeys complement in the end change strategy with “deep work”: dedicated work that fosters leaders’ vertical development – going beyond expanding capabilities and skills, to focus on accelerating a paradigm shift in self, team and organization’s consciousness.
In the middle of culture journeys, we often tend to live the change outside of ourselves, immersed in the “doing”. But the real transformation comes from connecting deep within ourselves with the “being”, reflecting on the new message, change carries for us, and how we want to respond.
Along with the culture evolution, make sure individuals also evolve: build space and routine for self-checkup and plan, insightful team conversations, commitment & accountability.
1. Turn focus inward, towards your journey, and grow your mindset inside out. Mastering self, first, is always a prerequisite to leading teams and organizations through change. Look deep inside and practice self-checkup to see how you are doing, recognize how close or far you are from living and walking your talk, and call you back to the culture essence (e.g. “What am I being called forth right now as a leader in this culture journey? What limiting beliefs are still preventing me, from fully living the key behaviors and creating the desired results?”). Self-reflection moments allows centering, checking our relationship with the culture journey, and developing more sophisticated ways of thinking, and feeling, while intentionally practicing new behaviors. Reflecting on habits can help shift mindset, replacing old beliefs with new beliefs, enable positive behaviors, and expand awareness around the potential culture holds for us. From there, commit to create a new story on what you choose to be and do, going forward.
2. Build your own individual plan to accelerate your culture transition. Adapting to a new culture context is an intellectual and emotional journey. Continue driving results while successfully navigating the emotional and cultural challenges of the transition. As you adapt to your new leadership environment and serve your culture’s purpose, self-directed guides offer ways of focusing your efforts, managing your energy and building a tangible plan to sustain change (e.g. “How will I define and measure culture success for myself? How will I embody the behaviours critical to success? What is the most important function of my role, as a leader?”). Based on your self-check-up insights, consciously develop a 100-day plan that helps to stay culture focused, map both near-term and longer-term goals and actions, and balance the “To-Do’s” and “To-Be’s” in your evolution journey. Use it to manage the natural emotional responses that occur as you and your teams adjust to change.
3. Listen & empower your team to make sense of culture perspectives and find own meaning. Leadership in culture journeys is less about telling and more about listening, evoking transformation, holding everyone naturally creative, resourceful and whole. Holding intentional conversations as a core-meaning process creates trust for others’ worldviews to shift, and expands collective intelligence and organizational consciousness needed for culture evolution. Engaging in leadership touchpoints, deep and structured coaching conversations around culture, may unearth values and beliefs that drive people’s behaviors, but are difficult to articulate explicitly, and enables finding personal ways to embrace culture day-to-day, that resonate most to individuals and fully integrate new habits and patterns of behaviors.
4. Build ownership and accountability. Following through on our own commitments is tough, especially when busyness is the default state. External follow up and accountability conversations can renew internal commitment, holding leaders accountable to their own intentions, and providing measurement mechanisms to follow through and build momentum. Fostering active questions and feed-forward coaching can lay the foundations to focus on positive change and put responsibility for culture evolution into the hands of each and every one. Active, rather than passive, self-questioning can do a big deal in growing people’s ownership and engagement; for example, just replacing sentences like “Do I have…” (e.g. clear culture goals) with “Did I do my best to…” (e.g. set clear goals) instead, invites to have a look at the person in the mirror and take responsibility for oneself.
Culture ultimately reflects your company’s consciousness and contribution in society.
Leadership is the glue that holds, aligns and elevates culture, strategy, and the operating model towards a higher sense of purpose and impact. In the end, evolving culture implies synchronizing leaders’ horizontal and vertical dimensions, and connecting the outer layer of strategy with the inner layer of consciousness, and upgrading the organizational wisdom to follow. As culture evolves and leaders advance vertically, the way they think, feel and act expands, and more consistent becomes their capacity to move into action and generate personal, organizational and societal transformations for the greater good. As always, what you focus on grows, so be mindful of the culture you want to grow.
Paolo Morley-Fletcher is a Strategy Advisor and Executive Coach. He advises leaders and organisations internationally, around Leadership strategy, Culture evolution and organisational Change.
Founder of AtmanWay.org (independent boutique consulting practice blending Strategy, Wisdom and Action to facilitate growth & change); Global Leader for the The Katzenbach Center (PwC’s think-tank on organisational culture and leadership), and Senior Executive Advisor of STRATEGY& (formerly Booz & Company).
Link to article initially published
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