Culture Is The Outcome – Changing Begins With Experiences

I was recently asked by a senior leadership team if I could help them shape aspects of their company’s culture. This particular company had a legacy of strong cultural norms, such as high-performance expectations, committed, hard-working employees, solid foundational core values, and a history of good business performance.

The leadership team felt they had room to improve and genuinely wanted to be great, not simply good. They had a strong belief that better collaboration across the organization would create greater alignment among their portfolio of business units. Leading up to this declaration was the leadership team’s acknowledgement that most of their organization-wide initiatives had fallen short of potential, namely two major undertakings:

• A new and expensive technology platform didn’t yield the results it could have.
• A major acquisition that would have nearly doubled the size of the organization fell through once they realized the integration of the two companies was not going to materialize.

As I started to assess the current state of the existing culture, it became clear that the company had “We/They” issues and turf conflicts between corporate staff and the business units, including conflict among the different business units themselves. They Ire playing a game of win/lose instead of win/win within their own organization.

It didn’t take long to realize that the issues centered largely on the behaviors of the senior leadership team. They Ire not fully aligned or mutually supportive, and this negative shadow was cast over their teams and ultimately enveloped the entire organization. As an example, leaders Ire “generally nice” to each other and non-confrontational during executive team meetings but would not support the decisions and initiatives after the meetings.

As I dug deeper, I found that many of the same behaviors existed at the second level of leaders who reported directly to senior team members. When I asked people at lower levels in the organization why they didn’t collaborate better, this comment reflected how most felt …

“Why should I? Our bosses don’t.” This belief was driven by the experiences they had with other leaders.

Leaders casting a shadow that others observe and follow is without question a heavy burden for those who care, have a vision, and intend to bear that burden. Leaders On Purpose understand the nature of the role, accept it, and revel in the opportunity to shape the direction of their organization and positively influence others.

Organizations talk about wanting to shape, redefine, or transform their culture. Too often, this means initiating a “culture changing activity” that often fails to lead to any sustainable change.

Culture is an outcome – not an initiative.

Any culture change initiative must focus on the following:

1. Experiences employees have on a daily basis
2. Creating beliefs that anchor culture drivers
3. Defining what is and isn’t acceptable behavior
4. Identifying inhibitors and removing them
5. Aligning rewards for those demonstrating desired behaviors
6. Clearly stating and following through on the consequences for behaving in ways that do not align with cultural beliefs?
7. Inspiring every employee to write themselves in to the company story
8. Shaping how leaders are going to “show up” each and every day

How organizations bring these elements to life creates the culture – the outcome of what is and is not rewarded and tolerated within an organization.

To create a change in how people act and ultimately build a constructive culture, leaders need to know that the experiences they create influence beliefs and drive the behaviors that lead to sustainable business results.

Results We are Seeing

LAK Group has been working with a number of organizations as they work to shape a constructive culture that helps them become an employer of choice. Some of the results we are seeing in these organizations include the following:

• 8% increase in employee engagement
• 17% greater productivity
• 4% higher profitability
• 10% reduction in voluntary turnover
• 7% decrease in recordable safety incidents

Contact LAK Group to learn more about our Culture Shaping resources.