A Personal View on Culture Change

You've got to accentuate the positive

Eliminate the negative

And latch on to the affirmative

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

You've got to spread joy up to the maximum

Bring gloom down to the minimum

Have faith or pandemonium's

Liable to walk upon the scene

Johnny Mercer 1944

Recently I have frequently found myself discussing cultural change. While this is not totally surprising given a couple of callouts I have made for help with the subject, I think it also reflects a growing interest in people I interact with.

I will not claim to be "qualified" in any way other than experience and a continuing appetite for enquiry, but having talked this out a number of times I thought it useful to try and capture the essence of my current understanding.

As a quick summary here are my views. Successful culture change:-

• Can be inspired, not demanded or mandated.
• Is an emergent journey, not a transition between two fixed conditions
• Is fragile, at least at the start, and needs effective protection AND reinforcement
• The first steps need not be hard, but often require courage
• Is NOT mechanistic!
• Needs time to gestate and embed

I am sure we could add to that list, but it will do for now. I will explore the elements further, but first I want to give some tips about what to do.

• Lead from the top and front
• Tell the story and share the vision, again and again
• Identify your ambassadors and support them
• Be brave and don't be complacent
• Exaggerate for effect
• Take your timing from people you are leading

Interestingly the two lists are almost entirely as they came out of my head, yet they do seem to largely fit together so maybe they will make sense to the reader too.

Let me expand on some of these points. Looking at the first two about inspiring change and leading from the front, these reflect the fact that it is very hard to drive cultural change let alone try and do it from the middle levels. Talking to many who have tried the message has been to put your best change leaders on culture and not to leave it to last when yoou are setting your team. It is also clear and natural that when faced with change your teams will look to you to see how you are embracing it and they will take their lead from you. Because of this point alone it is imperative that you not only talk the change, but you live it and show the way.

Moving on, when I started looking at cultural change I found that there seem to be two schools of thought. The first, which I see as more traditional, is that you can analyse, document and detail both the culture you have now and the one you wish to create. Armed with this the thinking is that you can identify and plan a set of tasks that move you from one plateau or steady state to another plateau or steady state. The other view is that there are no steady states, but instead the change is a journey that sets of aiming at a recognisable vision and requires continual review and adpatation; indeed it may never reach a steady state. This latter thinking seems to look at by changeing discrete behaviours one can create an outcome that is a new culture.

One of the arguments I found in favour of the latter approach is the work that sets up just three rules that if adopted, will make a group of flying beings act like a flock of geese. More importantly to me is that the steady state to steady state approach seems to be way off the world I live in at work these days. It may be that 50 years ago culture persisted unchanged, but that is not the case now with the increased pace of change all around.

My last comment on this point comes both from advice and real personal experience and that is t he importance of story telling as opposed and creating real dialogue from top to bottom of the organisation. Boring staid emails, Powerpoints, deskdrops, town halls and general corporate communications just don't help the cultural agenda. I have created posters, heard of books being written, tea parties arranged and other ideas. Be creative in your attempts to portray and convey your vision.

Another recommendation is to spread the load and embrace help wherever it is found. The most obvious is to look for "ambassadors", people who while not officially part of the change team can and will take the message and support it throughtout the community you are trying to affect. They do so not because they are told to, but because they understand, believe and can communicate.

In a similar vein one needs to be prepared to exaggerate the reponse to both positive and negative signs of change if one is to accelerate and establish developments. Spotlighting and rewarding positives are essential, but ten time more important is picking up on negative behaviours and addressing them. Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State said the following when speaking on London on leadership. He said that no one spots poor performance (or behaviour) better than a person's peers, and when they do spot it they watch to see how the leader deals with it. From this response they assess the acceptability of the that performance (or behaviour) and adpat their own standards accordingly.

Cultural change is fragile and need special nurturing and extra effort. It is not a science, despite what some may wish. You will make mistakes and it takes a certain bravery at times, but one thing I can be sure and that is if you do nothing then any change will be by chance and unlikely to be in the direction you wish.

The last aspect I will address here is timing. In this I make not apologies for emphasising that cultural change is about people and their reactions are not precisely predictable. Also they do not change instantaneously, but take time to digest and adjust; indeed we each do handle it differently and at a different pace. The significance of this is that you cannot drive change to a military timetable. Instead it is more important to work with the rhythm and pace of the groups you are changing, pushing when then are ready, slowing when they are not ready, adapting when you need to adapt. This is more about instinct that courage than process and ticking boxes.

I hope some of this resonates and if you wish to contribute please feel free to comment. I added the song lyrics at the start as they seemed to capture the spirit and intent of this, though they were written over 50 years ago. Interesting eh?