Strong leadership and the right mindset are core to lasting organisational culture change. Strategies should have employees and stakeholders at the front and centre to achieve sustainable transformation.
Organisational culture plays a vital for business performance, bolstering engagement, your brand, and performance. It is little wonder that embedding a strong organisational culture is top-of-mind for many business leaders and executives.
However, crafting and anchoring your desired organisational culture is about more than decisiveness; for one, you may need to create a mindset shift among employees. Without an incentive for them to embrace new organisational goals and values, new initiatives are almost bound to fail. ?
The details of how to steer your company through culture change could fill a phone book. On our website, you can find several articles that cover some of those details.
The following checklist of topics to cover is a good place to start and can serve as inspiration for business leaders and executives in effectively initiating and managing lasting organisational culture change.
- A compelling vision: Craft a vision that lays out the challenges and opportunities of the desired change. Be sure to resonate with stakeholders. Consider an employee-focused approach involving them in developing the vision and associated goals.
- Clear communication: Promote and support transparent communication. Share information about the why, what, and how of ongoing and coming changes. Communication is a two-way process, so encourage stakeholders and employees to provide input and feedback.
- The speed of change: Change should happen at a pace that matches your organisational context and capacity. You are a bit like the organisation’s personal trainer, tasked with ensuring that its fitness level is matched with a suitable training regimen, which develops as the organisation gets ‘stronger’ – i.e., ready to embrace more change.
- Commitment: Resistance and challenges are inevitable aspects of change. Maintain a steadfast focus, modifying strategies where necessary. Demonstrating a resilient commitment to the vision helps foster trust and convince stakeholders of the need for the proposed changes. Building a shared, compelling mission will prove invaluable in this context.
- Mindset shifts and change ownership: A shared vision for change and an embedded, shared mindset of supporting change are key to lasting organisational culture changes. If you build teams of individuals who embody the vision, have a change-positive mindset, and feel ownership of the changes, you have a potent combination of factors to drive organisational transformation.
