Leading Culture Change

A few months ago Strategy + Business magazine featured an article by Jon Katzenback and DeAnne Aquirre entitled 'Culture and the Chief Executive' in which the authors considered how CEOs are stepping up to a new role as leaders of their company's thinking and behaviour
It is striking to see how many chief executives see their most important responsibility as being the leader of the company’s culture. According to Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, “Culture is your company’s number one asset.” Her counterpart at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has said, “Everything I do is a reinforcement or not of what we want to have happen culturally.” In another typical remark from the C-suite, Starbucks Corporation CEO Howard Schultz has written that “so much of what Starbucks achieved was because of [its employees] and the culture they fostered.”
Researchers such as former Harvard Business School professors John Kotter and James Heskett have also found consistent correlation between robust, engaged cultures and high-performance business results (as described in their book, Corporate Culture and Performance [Free Press, 1992]). But most business leaders don’t need that evidence; they’ve seen plenty of correlation in their own workplace every day.
To help people capitalise on the best aspects of your culture, you have to focus attention on the critical few behaviors that you believe matter most. These are a few positive sources of energy, pride, and interactions that, when nurtured and spread to scale, will improve company performance significantly. As simple as it sounds, this approach will not only accelerate the behaviour change that matters most, but also evolve and align your culture more effectively than forcing a major and potentially disruptive culture change effort on a broadly diverse global organisation.
This focus on impacting the mindsets and behaviour of employees throughout an organisation to enable culture change is one FranklinCovey also recognises as it is often something which we are asked to support with. What's striking, though, is the comment that 'as simple as it sounds' (to focus attention on the critical few behaviours) as in our experience, when Chief Executives try to do this (with 100, 1000, 10000 people) they typically find it anything but simple for these key behaviour changes to reach and sustain themselves at the front line. As a result, many revert to 'stroke of the pen' activities to enable change ie the signing off of new systems, processes or the resourcing of new initiatives, which they can point to as playing their part.

To change the thinking and behaviours of 100s or 1000s of people within an organisation takes significant energy and focus and is anything but simple. It requires an understanding of how messages get communicated down through the levels of a business, how to overcome embedded behaviours, how to distinguish between giving people clear guidance on 'what' is important for them to achieve and leaving scope for them to define (with support) the 'how' for themselves and for how to help people achieve this change in the midst of the day job they are still being asked to focus on. Yet, for those Chief Executives who recognise the power of successfully achieving this change right down to the front line, the impact for their business can be transformational and the energy and focus they invest can be paid back many times over.

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