Why Your Staff Is Not Listening!

Start With Your Culture

It may be argued by many CEOs that we are in a new digital era where all business operations must be transformed through technology to radically increase revenues and the efficiency of value delivery. If we should ask the organizational leaders involved in these transformation activities, they would share the many proven and established tools and frameworks they are using to create the new business process, optimize value and deploy technology. These frameworks and tools may include: Lean, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Agile Project Management, PROSCI change management, ISO 9001, Balanced Scorecard, OKRs, and many more. When these frameworks and tools are not producing the anticipated results, the leadership team often decides to hire a consultant to deploy these frameworks and tools on their behalf.?Though?deployment may occur, the realized results were not sustainable. This is because they have missed one key component to achieving these new and radical results, that is, “culture ”.

In July 2019, Deloitte released an article with statistics from the International Data Corporation stating that, by the year the year 2022, organizations are projected to spend $2 trillion on digital transformation through fear of being disrupted by tech-enabled competitors. This may force many organizations to adopt new technologies into their daily operations without fully considering the business process updates and the people involvement required. Additionally, in the same article, Carey Oven, partner with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory at Deloitte & Touche LLP, was quoted saying

“Technology is definitely a part of digital transformation, but unless leaders can ‘win hearts and minds’ throughout the process, efforts can stall or be less successful than they could be”.

A very true statement that leaders must examine and thereby determine how to impact the culture of the organization to facilitate the digital transformation activities.

The point above brings us to the stark reality that the culture of an organization sits at the base of every initiative being successful. Since an organization’s culture is built on experiences and beliefs of those involved, it can be viewed as a melded soup of ingredients, such as experiences, beliefs, core values, activities, etc., which work together to achieve some kind of performance, whether good or bad. Considering this, a framework or tool becomes useless if not incorporated into the culture of the organization, and by definition, the people involved. The big question then becomes, “can the current culture facilitate a leap in corporate-wide performance?” In their book,?Change the Culture, Change the Game, Roger Connors and Tom Smith show the impact of culture on new, game changing results using the?Results Pyramid.

The Results Pyramid underscores the principles that the experiences and beliefs of the people of an organization (culture) will dictate their ability to participate in delivering new and improved results. At the base of the pyramid is the experiences had by the employees. Some of these experiences are, being vindicated, being constantly overlooked, feeling pressured and exhausted, feeling loved, feeling appreciated,?and being motivated. These experiences, if not done deliberately and strategically, can result in unnecessary roadblocks in creating the beliefs required to foster the motivation for creating new actions for greater results. The beliefs triggered by the experiences are often the factors that allow employees to say “it’s not in my JD” or to get their union involved to argue on their behalf that the organization is trying to misuse them to throw them out of the company. These beliefs must be deliberately planted, like a good farmer who has invested in having the best crop of the year.

Having deliberately created the environment for having good, long-lasting experiences to drive the belief of the employees, it becomes easier to create the necessary actions for revolutionary results. The employees now believe that they can make an impact in a meaningful, value-adding way, thereby effectively and sustainably achieving new results.

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