A Blueprint for Culture Change

You don't get a choice about having an organizational culture. The only choice you get is whether or not you are intentional about its design.

You know the importance culture has on the performance of your business, but it’s often treated as a challenging “nice to have.” It tends to be a stated priority but its not widely understood as something that can be addressed in an operational way.

A big reason has to do with how you think about culture.

When we ask leaders to define culture, we often hear statements like these:

• “It’s the way things get done around here”
• “It’s our system of beliefs and principles”
• “It’s the personality of our company”
• “It’s our values"
• "It's our environment”

And while these are all parts of what we mean by culture, they can sound “fluffy.” It’s hard to build a system around the “personality of your company.”

A New Way to Think About Culture

An organization's culture is manifested in the way people behave every day.

We like to think of culture as the set of actions that define how your people operate every day — with your customers, with each other, and with your stakeholders. These behaviors didn’t simply evolve in the background of your organization. They were taught.

Yes, culture is shared and is built through mutual experience, but it is largely taught through patterned practices and observed behaviors.

Every organization on this planet has its own set of patterned practices and behaviors, which we call a "core curriculum." We call it a core curriculum because it is constantly teaching people in your organization how to operate on a daily basis. It is responsible for roughly 80% of the experiences that reinforce your organization’s prevailing mindsets and behaviors.

The problem: This core curriculum is hidden in most organizations. Further, most leaders don't know what their core curriculum is or who is teaching it. As a consequence leaders either don’t know what to do to affect their culture, or do things with little impact, which wastes valuable time, resources, and leadership credibility.

The solution: Making your core curriculum visible and actively managing it is the key to managing your culture without having to change every aspect of your entire organizational culture to do it.

This starts with two simple but critical steps:

1. You need to clearly define the core behaviors that drive success in your organization.
2. You need to codify your core curriculum to systematically teach those behaviors so they become internalized across your organization.

Focusing on your core curriculum will help you pinpoint and prioritize the most effective actions everyone can take everyday to reinforce the shared culture that will grow your business and your people.

Articulate Behaviors Not Concepts

Only 10% of organizations have taken the step to operationalize their values into teachable and observable behaviors that are used to train their employees and hold people accountable.- Dare to Lead

When the topic of culture comes up, most leaders tend to think about their mission, vision, and values. While necessary, most leaders stop here because they think these are sufficient drivers of culture. They are not.

Why not? Let’s look at values for a moment. More often than not, company values tend to be conceptual and abstract. Consider the following values:

• Accountability
• Respect
• Teamwork

If I asked one hundred different people in your organization what integrity means, there is a good chance I’ll hear one hundred different explanations. Why? The challenge with beliefs such as integrity, creativity, innovation, inclusion, or accountability is that they are concepts, and concepts mean different things to different people. We already come into our workplace with our own interpretations of what these concepts mean and how important they are to us. This makes it difficult to teach and build adoption around a common way of operating.

We think in order to operationalize these beliefs you need to shift to an action-based approach that clearly defines the core behaviors that drive success in your organization. These set of behaviors are the foundation of your core curriculum. Consider the following core behaviors:

• Learn By Doing because the fastest way to grow is to be in action. We make our goals and progress visible for all to see. We share and show our plans of action, our obstacles, and what we learned to help us improve.
• Practice Blameless Problem-Solving by focusing on the process, not the person. We clarify what we expected to happen, what actually happened and what we learned. We apply what we learned to make the process better.

Values or behaviors, which do you think would be easier to teach? Defining culture in terms of a set of behaviors like this brings your core curriculum into focus and helps you operationalize your culture far more easily.

Tip: You can start this process by asking two simple questions:

1. What behaviors will help us achieve our goals (do our best work; create a healthy team)?
2. What behaviors will undermine or derail us from achieving our goals?

Manage Your Core Curriculum

Only 19% of leaders consistently manage business processes based on the desired culture.- Gartner Workplace Survey

As we noted, very few organizations have articulated the core behaviors that drive success for their business. But even fewer have created a structured and systematic way to teach those behaviors with enough consistency to create real impact. And the larger an organization grows, the more ingrained default mindsets and actions become, making it harder to align your culture with your business outcomes. This is a major gap in many organizations and is often the root cause of performance limitations.

The remedy is to manage your core curriculum to intentionally teach the behaviors that are core to driving success in your business. A core curriculum is a set of practices that are incorporated into the daily work of leaders used to teach, model and coach your core behaviors. These are not “add ons” to your operations, but are “part of” your daily work experience.

One organization we worked with adopted “Learn by Doing” as one of their core behaviors. To manage their core curriculum they made small changes to their daily team huddle. They decided to spend five minutes during the huddle to make their weekly goals visible, make known obstacles visible, and make ideas and experiments to test during the week visible. The leader explicitly thanked team members for raising obstacles and always asked, “What did we learn?” from experiments.

Another part of their core curriculum included what they called “Mistake Monday.” Every Monday at their all-hands meeting they took five minutes at the end of the meeting for team members to share one mistake they made during the week and what they learned from it. They end the meeting by voting on the “best fail” and celebrate (a fail-abration) that person and their courage for sharing, learning, and teaching others by their example.

Examples like these were embedded throughout the workday. These small deliberate practices, done repeatedly and consistently helped them drive a culture of “learning and accountability” across their organization. Could you imagine how difficult it would have been for them to build a consistent learning culture without having defined their core behaviors or a core curriculum?

Anytime we want to be good at something like speaking a new language, playing the piano, or riding a bike it takes a lot of practice and repetition. But who likes to practice? Almost no one.

However, when your practice becomes a part of what you do every day, it becomes a habit and is no longer difficult to do.

Your core curriculum is the foundation that allows the repetition to keep going, and the repetition is what’s necessary to internalize the learning.

Once established, your core curriculum becomes a core business process that can be taught and improved.

Final Thoughts

Good companies have good cultures by chance, but world-class companies have world-class cultures by design.- David Friedman

While most of us have systems for our finances, operations, sales, and almost every other critical function, it seems very few have a coherent framework or system for culture. And the thought of working on a system for your culture may sound ambiguous, overwhelming and time consuming. We don’t think it has to!

We know that managing your core curriculum is the key to managing your culture.

Your core curriculum IS your culture operating system.

Managing it creates focus and structure for your leaders to be intentional about the core culture that is essential to drive your organization’s success without having to manage every aspect of your entire culture.

Having led numerous culture change efforts and engaged in extensive research with hundreds of leaders in almost every industry imaginable, we’ve come to appreciate the passion that most good leaders have for culture. They instinctively “get it,” and so they naturally do many of the right things. They mostly hire people who are a good fit for their culture, they treat them well, and they work to create a shared vision for their organization that everyone can embrace. The result is a pretty good culture.

But world-class organizations are different than that. World-class organizations understand just how important their culture is to success, and so they’re incredibly intentional, purposeful, and systematic about how they create and drive their culture into every aspect of their business. None of it is left to chance. It’s just too important for that.

The most effective way to be more systematic about your culture is to create a core curriculum for it.

CTA: Share this article with someone in your network that you think could use help improving their culture. Reach out to me if you'd like to learn how Intentional Futures can help your organization define and implement your core behaviors & core curriculum!