Culture Will Always Be the Differentiator – 9 Steps to Creating Your Culture of Accountability

By Craig D. Nelson and, The 9 Wholes Group

Culture is the most discussed talent issue on earnings calls, with mentions growing 12% annually since 2010, according to a recent Gartner report.   Sage CEOs have known that culture has always been the key differentiator among top-performing companies. IBM's Lou Gerstner perhaps said it best, "I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't just one aspect of the game; it is the game."

Although the mandate to have a culture that creates performance accountability is clear to many leaders, most leaders say they don't have a good grasp on how actually to get their culture to perform. Working with thousands of leaders and employees, we have identified what differentiates leaders who outperform their peers to create employee experiences that transform their customers' experiences and produce stellar financial results. Three dynamics are at the core of leading cultural transformation:

1.      Understanding that culture defines an organization's collective capacity to create value.

2.      Understanding that while leadership and behavioral modeling are essential, embedding cultural attributes in operating systems, processes, and reward structures is critical.   

3.      Helping employees to move beyond strategy to understand what it is they should stop doing, start doing and continue doing in how they execute day-to-day.

Investors, boards, and employees expect leaders to shape their corporate cultures. Still, to create real cultural transformation, it requires the courage of leaders and employees to look beyond how things are done today and to envision and realize the culture of accountability of tomorrow. What follows is an outline of the 9 Wholes approach and best practices to building your culture strategy and taking your transformation journey:

Whole 1 - Create your transformation story for your culture change journey – People want to understand:

a.      What is the gain we are hoping to realize?

b.      What process and behaviors need to change to achieve a transformation?

c.      How will the destination culture feel when we behave differently?

Whole 2 - Clarify the outcomes of your change journey – Help people understand:

a.      The priority of the change.

b.      What authority do people have to make changes?

c.      How does the transformation align with the business strategy?

Whole 3 - Extend your story to create a communications campaign – Communicate often and consistently:

a.      What will be the impact on stakeholders at every level of the organization?

b.      Layout a plan for communicating and be authentic and personal in your messaging.

c.      Create a forum for addressing questions, discovering barriers, and resolving employee concerns.

Whole 4 - Assess the gap between your current culture and your envisioned target culture - Understand the distance and terrain that your change strategy will traverse:

a.      Define your current culture and embrace it for all it is; the good and the bad.

b.      Define target outcomes, behaviors, traits, and business performance results to be realized.

c.      Determine how you will measure stakeholder engagement, adoption, and milestone achievements.

Whole 5 - Identify examples of target culture traits that already exist within your organization - Continue developing your transformation story:

a.      Recognize and "Shout Out" elements of your current culture that align with your target culture.

b.      Consider how current processes, policies, financial reporting practices, and recognition and reward practices impact how people behave.

c.      Document and include in your communications campaign great stories of positive and negative outcomes.

Whole 6 - Evaluate budgets, and work processes, then modify and imbed new processes while listening intently to employees - Transform daily work, recognition, and reward practices:

a.      Begin building the systems, tools, and processes that align with your target culture.

b.      Focus attention simultaneously on knowledge needs, role clarity, and behavioral changes to multiply alignment with your target culture traits and performance outcomes.

c.      Assess the current intrinsic reward structure and budgets that perpetuates the contemporary culture, ask employees, they know what drives the current culture.

Whole 7 - Check for leadership alignment - To understand the direct correlation between leadership alignment and effectiveness:

a.      Engage leaders in design thinking workshops to discover if beliefs, assumptions, and patterns of behavior are at odds with the transformation strategy.

b.      Challenge misalignment and confront controlling, autocratic, overly ambitious, and critical behaviors that stifle team play.

c.      Target a few critical cultural attributes and coach leaders on how they are impacting those attributes, either positively or negatively.

Whole 8 - Develop your transformation capacity and competency – To drive enterprise cultural transformation, you will need to:

a.      Identify the training needs of stakeholders across the organization and identify on-the-job opportunities for teams to take risks and to fail forward.

b.      Address the fear inherent in any transformational change by enabling leaders, employees, and customers to embrace anxiety, to nurture, sustain, and encourage the target behavioral patterns.

c.      Engage change agents to model and coach others on the patterns and collective observable behaviors that should become routine in the target culture.

Whole 9 - Measure adoption using Culture Pulse Checks – Transformation is a healing process that requires time and measurement:

a.      Check for understanding of the mission, values, vision, and outcomes.

b.      Measure the adoption of new cultural norms by observing if new processes are being adopted or if there is backsliding.

c.      Continue to evaluate new behavioral choices that are working or not working and make adjustments continuously.

Our experience working with numerous clients seeking to evolve and thrive in their rapidly changing markets demonstrates that senior leaders at the vast majority of organizations communicate the importance of culture. Of these leaders, fewer behave in a way aligned with the cultural transformation they seek to achieve. Even fewer encourage their people to adopt business processes, reward strategies, and aligned values toward their desired culture. If you, as a leader, are serious about cultivating the rewards of operational transformation in this digital and disruptive age, then it is time to form your strategy and execute it with intent and vigilance. 

Learn More: The 9 Wholes Group is an organization of former business executives who have traversed the landscape of business. We know the terrain, and we understand the pressure for profits. We have demonstrated that principles improve profits, that core values provide navigational direction, and that high integrity decision making is critical to creating enduring value. Without assessing what is going on in your company, you may react in ways that cause problems for yourself, your organization, and your customers.

Our mission is to help you to execute your vision to improve organizational operating results by defining the very nature of how you do business. We are the creators of “The 9 Wholes for Shaping Corporate Cultures”, and, we have demonstrated the 9 Wholes approaches to be the seminal processes for assessing, shaping, and redirecting corporate cultures, improving operating performance, and protecting your reputation and brand image.

The 9Wholes Group - [email protected]