Is the culture change bogeyman hiding under your bed?

For many sponsors and champions, the organizational change bogeyman is culture. They'll gladly take on other major changes: technology, process, leadership, or a good, old-fashioned restructuring. But changing culture, well, that's a years-long, bloody, thankless slog that doesn't fit neatly on a performance review.

How do you even measure it?

After all, culture is about values and tradition and people who don't even work at your company any longer. Culture is ethereal, mysterious, scary -- perfect for the shadows. The incantation to say at bedtime to dispel the culture bogeyman goes like this: Change stakeholders' values, then stakeholders' attitudes will come around, and the new attitudes, over time, will change behavior. Right?

If I believed this were the actual sequence to effectively change culture, I'd have nightmares, too.

Fortunately, we can reframe culture to a less frightening, even friendly, definition: Culture is the way we do things around here. And research shows the correct change management sequence (for any change) is actually the reverse: Change behavior > change attitudes > change values.

Behavior can be modeled, taught, measured, rewarded. It's as easy and difficult as that to shine light under your bed and make the bogeyman disappear.

Click here for practical ways to dispel the culture change bogeyman in my conversation with Jason Marsdale, Director of Strategy, Brown's Superstores, Inc.