Changing Company Culture requires action.

When I was working in Coca-Cola HBC I had on the back of my laptop-screen a stick with a quote by Gandhi: “we should be the change we want to see”.

It was the time we started our shift from a pretty hierarchical culture to a more #agile environment, in order to operate at the speed required by an increasingly competitive marketplace.

A long history of undisputed success had slowed-down our ability to innovate and to listen carefully to our customers. Fine-tuning the established, successful model for many years provided higher immediate rewards at low risk, but over time it came at the cost of lower growth.

We had an urgent need to increase our speed and to connect back to the market, where things happen.

One of the simpler and therefore most effective actions we took was to invite HQ employees, Line Managers and Executives to spend time on the market. We asked everyone to work side by side with one Sales Rep at least one day a month.

Walking into customers’ outlets, seeing how our Sales Reps operated daily and listening to the customers’ voice directly changed dramatically our perspective on the things we needed to act on for our customers and employees.

It was clear the urgent need we had to transform ourselves, to empower teams, hold people accountable and focus on building a culture of shared information, shared purpose and shared responsibility for change.

#Culture is a tangible set of attributes and behaviours that can be clearly recognised by employees and people outside the company. It describes more than “the way we work around here”, it tells others “who we are”.

While articulating a mission and changing company structures are important, it is a far more successful approach to show people the change you want to see.

All the Leadership Team was heavily engaged in an ongoing dialogue about cultural enablers and barriers to execution. We spent far less time in meetings and far more time in engaging the organisation, surfacing barriers, communicating direction and showing new expected leadership behaviours.

We invested time in roadshows around the country sharing business updates with employees at all levels in the organisation, listening to them, their concerns, critics and suggestions.

We brought out of our plants some #Kaizen principles and invited all employees to share in a structured way their ideas on how we could further improve our ability to serve customers. We wanted improvement being designed and implemented by everyone, every day, everywhere in the organisation.

The new culture we were shaping demanded new behaviours from leaders. We created our next generation of leaders by building new skills on existing ones and, more importantly, by doing targeted talent acquisitions and promotions.

No matter what the corporate purpose, mission statement or values may say, it all comes down to who the company hires, promotes and rewards because he/she is a role model.

We learnt that if you are leading culture, not everyone will follow and we learnt to accept and manage that.

Over 50% of companies are currently attempting to change their culture in response to shifting #talent markets and increased competition (source Global Human Capital Trends 2016 by Deloitte University Press)

That is becoming even more business critical, since we live in an era where Corporate Culture is transparent and open to the entire world through social media platforms like #Glassdoor and #LinkedIn.

But culture change is not a one-off action. Culture change is a journey that never ends because the world we live changes continuously.

And #CultureChange only happens when people take action as they feel a deep desire, even a responsibility, to change.

We should be the change we want to see.