What are the most effective ways to manage a team during a Culture Change project?

Having a solid base line is very important. Getting your seniors leaders to agree on the areas in the organisation’s culture that need to be improved- you can only get that from your people. Dont try your address every single thing. Pick the big themes, we had accountability, delivering for the customer quicker, having an open feedback environment to drive better understanding so delivery. Using the feedback at the beginning really helped us to pick the key themes that mattered the most. It really did work !

The analysis should be based on trust and offer everyone involved the opportunity to be open, honest and unsparing about what is dysfunctional and possibly even harmful about the current culture. This means that it must also be made clear again and again in terms of communication that criticism is welcome and a necessity in order to initiate improvements on this basis. This requires a good culture of trust. If this is not in place, methods in which employees can share their opinions anonymously deliver the best results. External support would also be desirable here.

Don’t call it training is my advice - it’s not a one time thing that you get a certificate for - it’s a way of working, it’s your behaviour to others and it starts with you! The more people model the culture in an authentic way the more it will spread and become “how we do things around here”.

How you show up, as a leader, is the most critical of all interventions when it comes to changing culture. Your team will follow your lead. If you act differently, and make different choices, they will too. Leaders get the outcomes they deserve. If you are not getting the culture you desire, look in the mirror first. Then call me!

Be authentic, do parrot fashion the culture concepts in your dialogue with the team - really understand what they mean to you, ask how you can adapt and live and breathe these concepts. An example could be taking accountability- really know what that means, how you can be that person and then do it. People follow people, and if you are authentic and live up to the culture so will your team. See feedback as a gift and encourage it at all levels, again be that person/ leader. It all starts with you!

Leading culture change is the ultimate test of the ability of the CEO and the team to demonstrate how much they understand of what is at stake, how well they comprehend the links between cause and effect and just how serious they are in making personal commitments to the vision. Being able to walk the talk in a sincere, convincing and ongoing manner that role models the behaviour of the desired culture is rare because it is that challenging to achieve. But it is fundamental to a successful outcome and the better this is done, the greater the favorable impact on the process, the results and this sustainability of this investment will be.

This is super important to do. When I was lucky to part of a culture programme roll out team, we surveyed colleagues a month after their first “unfreezing” session - unfreeze the old ways of working and freeze in the new. What we found was that colleague were able to feedback on what was working for them, what more support they may need and generally how their ways of working were improving. This feedback was then fed back to the senior leaders, into our communications strategy and helped the culture team build upon wider organisation pulse surveys. It was also a great way to make sure we were delivering on our original benefit statements- ROI

Key factors for the success of cultural change are the participation of as many people as possible and the time frame. A desired corporate culture cannot be prescribed top-down and simply implemented. The starting point and the question of how big the gap is between the current state and the target state are also crucial. Not every company can and must establish a corporate culture like that of a Silicon Valley start-up. Every corporate system is unique and can therefore only be developed individually. This process takes time.