How to make changes stick

When change initiatives end successfully, companies have an incredible opportunity to?learn from what went well and adapt?their way of working/thinking/behaving across the whole organization.

In reality,?this doesn’t happen most of the time. Organizations, despite the success of the change initiative, go often back to their “old” norms and behaviors, so they treat the change as an ad-hoc and standalone project.

There is a good reason for that.

Organizations have their own culture and don’t like to change it unless leaders appreciate the company culture is not a fit anymore for what they want to achieve in the future.

Culture change is a top-down initiative.?Without clear direction, full commitment, and involvement from the leaders, cultures don’t change.

However, executing successful change initiatives gives a terrific opportunity to organizations to see things from a different perspective and embrace new ways of work for the future.

Let’s take an example from my client's work.

Imagine you’re running a small change initiative to enter into a new market that requires a new positioning, new services, and/or products. It's still a testing project to make sure you're not rolling out these changes across the entire organization.

If you followed the right steps, you have:

• Built a new vision and new objectives for the project
• Anticipated internal resistance
• Communicated internally the vision and why that matters
• Built a cross-functional team to lead, build the new strategy and implement it

As the project goes on, the team decides?to build a new set of norms and rules to work together. It’s what I call “the rules of the game”. They decide?how they will communicate, what they won’t tolerate, how they will fight resistance, what risks and challenges they will experience during the journey, how they will deal with issues and conflicts, etc.

As they start executing the new strategy, they realize that they have to change other things to adapt to external forces. For example:

• The new positioning requires operating in a market that doesn't value your approach or your current mindset
• The marketing message must be different than what they used in the past
• The offerings must bring innovative solutions

In other words, the team is setting a new way of thinking and acting internally but that isn't enough. It does require adaption to the external world.

Imagine that worked. They got some great results. The test is now validated.

But…they have disrupted internal old norms and behaviors although on a smaller scale.

Their first thought is clear. How can they extend their learning, adopting the new behaviors and ways of working to the entire organization?

The new microculture created for the project has proven its effectiveness.

Here's the lesson...

Culture change is driven from the top but employees can show leaders that a new way of working is possible by bringing tangible results on a smaller-scale change initiative.

This doesn't guarantee the company leaders will embrace the new behaviors but I can guarantee they will be way more open to considering the change.

Changes drive culture. Culture drives changes.

P.S. If you are thinking to change your company culture, get in touch. By applying a proven methodology and approach, I help leaders to define the way they want their culture to be in their organizations and create a process that assures the highest levels of performance.

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