How to achieve Cultural Transformation

Companies often need to transform their culture for a number of reasons. Sometimes this happens on the back of a digital transformation. At other times, they embark on a new strategy which places greater demands on new skillsets or enhanced collaboration. And almost always, their culture has stagnated or worse, become toxic and everything from customer engagement to innovation is impacted as a result. Yet, done right, culture change initiatives can deliver handsome returns, as studies have shown.[i]

This post is a walk through of what companies absolutely must do if they want ensure their cultural transformation is a success. It unites the key system aspects of HR – which are often overlooked or ignored – with the goals senior leaders have set for the change they need to see.

1.?????? Discovery

First, a full and comprehensive discovery needs to be undertaken of where the culture is at, to give an accurate starting point and a destination. For example:

·?????? Where do we need our company's culture to be?

·?????? What behaviours are currently holding us back from us achieving our goals?

·?????? What are the root causes of those behaviours?

·?????? What are the measures of success and milestones to know we are making real progress towards them?

The discovery phase needs to include not only senior stakeholder interviews, but also results from employee engagement surveys, exit interview results and verbatims, Glassdoor feedback, and any 360° feedback findings. The purpose of this is to achieve a clear, honest and comprehensive snapshot of where your company is at.

This then gives you a Baseline and a Bar with the gap in between. The Baseline is an accurate ‘foot of the mountain’, while the Bar is the ‘summit’ of the journey ahead. This approach is exactly the approach many sports teams use in order to achieve their own performance shifts. So we can see below:

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Important to note here Often overlooked at this stage is a robust and rigorous identification of where the Baseline is at. Having helped a number of organisations through transformation and change programmes, one thing that consistently tends to happen is that they do not set their Baseline accurately – with it being almost always too high. The result of this is that they then tend to miss more basic shifts that need to happen, which dooms the Transformation from the start. They almost always overrate the true status of their culture.

2.?????? Align your People Systems to support your Transformation

Next, existing people systems (Employee Engagement, Leadership Development, Talent Management and Organisational Performance / KPIs) need to be aligned to the Culture Transformation.

This is critical. These can either be culture transformation enablers or disablers. It’s futile to try to achieve cultural transformation if you’re still using systems from the 1960s like classic Performance Management and Talent Management. These will kill your Transformation before it even starts – because you’ve maintained the script for employees and leaders to act in exactly the same way they always have. Systems will always defeat any new solution – this is why you need to be aware of these systems and the significant impact they have, and ensure they are designed in a way that supports your Transformation.

So we now see the next phase of our graphic:

3.?????? Bring your values to life via behaviour shifts starting with the CEO and SLT.

In a previous post we saw how the challenge of behaviour change is seriously underestimated by companies . There’s an attitude that just agreeing the change and throwing out some comms is sufficient to do the trick. Nothing is further from the truth. This is why you need a practitioner who can make that push happen so the desired change then sticks, as there is a lot of psychology and effective practices behind change.

We also saw how the ceiling/barrier to any leadership behaviours is set from the very top . Put simply, your employees’ leadership behaviours will never surpass that of their leader, and so on all the way up the chain of command. So if the Senior Leadership Team can’t get their act together – all bets are off.

How to do that then?

This is where having meaningful values in place, and more importantly for these to come alive via actual and measurable shifts in behaviour from the top down. (I usually use a ‘28 Day Later’ format to achieve this).

At the same time, the practitioner needs to help the SLT evaluate and improve on an ongoing basis. A great way of doing this is using the COM-B behaviour change frame and where leaders then listen to what is needed of them from their followers, then deliver on those needs. It's actually surprisingly easy once the process gets going.

4.?????? Move the Baseline higher

Finally, gradually move the baseline higher.

‘Why the Baseline and not the Bar?’ You may well ask.

The baseline is the minimum bad behaviour the company will tolerate – it’s the brake and baggage holding the company back from achieving its desired change.

So what would you do first if you’re piloting this change, apply more accelerator or take your foot off the brake?

This is why the system tools (like Talent Management) absolutely need to be aligned to the values representing the desired change. It’s also why Employee Engagement needs to be effectively operationalised so that managers are empowered to own their areas of it, and held to account. Then we need to shift the culture to identifying and no longer tolerating its worst behaviours – thus moving its baseline upwards.

Yet what sometimes happens here in practice is that senior leaders either use pressure tactics on the Bar, or they try to raise the Bar without addressing the Baseline, or they lose discipline and ‘move the goalposts’ by introducing new goals.

See why it’s so critical to get an honest and real Baseline?

To raise the Baseline then, companies need to operationalise their values on both Team and Individual levels, moving this up via feedback and using the company’s Talent Management System to, if necessary, address the most toxic or negative elements holding it back.

Summary

So if you are trying to accomplish that Culture Shift, it is critical to measure and manage the Bar and Baseline (and especially the Baseline) with senior leaders living the values and constantly listening to feedback from their Direct Reports and adopting the best ideas for improvement. Do this, and your company's Transformation is well on its way!

[i] Boyce et al 2015 - Which comes first, organizational culture or performance? A longitudinal study of causal priority with automobile dealerships