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Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

 June 6, 2023 |  Backstage Leadership, Behavioural Change, Change, Leadership and Society, culture and behaviours, Culture Change, General, Peer to peer infuence, Social Movements, Viral Change |  Get Daily Thoughts by Email |  Email This!
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I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have always overstated the time needed to create cultural change. This is simply because we have been using outdated toolkits and methods.

We have treated cultural change as ‘a project’ and applied the mechanics of project management. It looks like this: Dozens (if not hundreds) of consultants land on the corporate shores, workshops multiply like mushrooms and a tsunami of communication comes from the top: ‘change is good, this is what you must do, do you get it? Cascade down the message’. Kind of.  So it takes six months to figure out what to do, including a cultural assessment (of course), a couple more to present findings, another to launch and you start doing something at month 6. If you’re lucky. Then, you start with the top (of course) and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone. You don’t see initial results until, say, year 2 and you need another couple of years to see more. See what? Well, good question, err, a different culture? How do you measure that? What do you mean? I told you, 20 senior managers workshop, 150 middle management and… Hold on, this is activity, not outcomes. Oh!

In traditional change management, you start with the top and cascade down one layer, then another one, peeling the organizational onion with lots of messages and workshopsterone.

The following is an example of non-workshopsterone-led fast cultural change: A new CEO said ´enough of meetings, I am not having them.´ 6 months later they had a 60% reduction in meetings, significant increase in direct communications, better fluid collaboration, the sky did not fall, business is booming. Guess what, employee engagement scores are up.

I am not bringing this case as an example of how cultural change should be done, but as a representation of a situation where culture change and culture re-shaping take place in a short period of time.

As I have repeated ad nauseam, organizational culture change is bottom up, behavioural based, peer-to-peer, using informal networks and with a particular kind of leadership that is movement-supportive (we call it Backstage Leadership™ ) I am of course defining Viral Change™, no apologies for the reference. Viral Change™ is orchestrated like a social movement, not as a management consulting programme.
Learn more about Viral Change™

 
Successful cultural change is not top down, not workshopsterone-fuelled, not an information tsunami, certainly not long, painful, super-expensive and ending in a fiasco. Hold on! The example of the meeting-hater CEO was top down! Yes, the trigger was at the top but the Anti-Meeting Movement took place with no meetings (about not having meetings), no workshops and no communication plan. It was Homo Imitans in real life, viral and behavioural spread by massive social copying.

Can we say that the Emperor of the long, difficult, herculean, massively complicated, information tsunami, unpredictable organizational cultural change has clearly no clothes whatsoever? Yes, we can! Given the time this has been going on, he must be freezing.

Only behavioural change is real change

You can map new processes and re-arrange the organization chart. Install a new corporate software (ERP, CRM, etc.) and explain to people why this is good and necessary. Create a massive communication and training campaign and make sure that everybody has clearly understood where to go. Perhaps you’ve done this already and noticed that many people hang on to the old ways. That is because there is no change unless there is behavioural change. It is only when new behaviours have become the norm that you can say that real change has occurred. If you want a new culture, change behaviours. Cultures are not created by training.

Start your journey here.
If you want to discuss your behavioural and cultural change needs – let’s talk. Contact my team at: [email protected].

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