Culture Change? Time to Get Dramatic

You’ve been through months of employee surveys, consultants and leadership brainstorming and you finally have a set of values that you are confident will shape your culture and drive your business to success.?

Now though, comes the hard part. How do you instill those values in the company culture? How do you shift longstanding patterns of behaviour, thought processes and ways of working??

Techniques to manage culture change and instilling your new values include role modeling behaviour, senior leadership and team training, all employee workshops, assigning values champions, focus groups, instilling 2-way communication channels, providing a clear vision of what the values look like and more. This warrants an article of its own, but here I wanted to focus on a less utilized strategy: the power of a dramatic, highly visible action or symbol.?

This is something that a leader does that marks the change in a unique, interesting and memorable way. It sends a message to the organisation that things around here are going to be different. Let’s look at an example.?

A division manager wanted to shift the culture from a highly formal, bureaucratic environment to one that was more open, flexible and creative. At the start of a three-day meeting, he invited everyone to the beach where he burned a pile of agendas, handouts and evaluation forms. This signified the end of the old way of doing things with excessive paper and approvals and the start of something new with less focus on process and more focus on people.?

Having a clear visual image of the change is powerful, it sticks in people's minds and clearly marks the transition. These dramatic acts will, if impactful, become part of the company folklore and be told many years after the event.?

Richard Branson is probably the master of this, engaging in many a dramatic action, that can be seen as part PR move and part enhancing the fun and informal culture at his Virgin companies. Whether he’s jumping off buildings, dressing in drag or putting his face in ice, no one does it quite like him.??

But fear not, you don’t need to dress in drag to get attention. When Satya Nadella was promoted to CEO of Microsoft, he bought one book for all the senior leadership team – Non-violent communication (highly recommended!!). This signaled that the old way of communicating was out and a more open, compassionate way of communicating was in.?

In another example, a CEO destroyed some low-quality versions of the company product that had previously been sold as ‘seconds.’ This widely publicised action demonstrated commitment to only producing and selling high quality products.?

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos wanted to emphasise the importance of keeping the customer in mind. In his meetings he would leave an empty chair to represent the customer. This is a powerful reminder that infuses the culture of the organisation.?

Have you seen dramatic symbolic actions used in this way? What could you do to instill your company values in an impactful way??

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