Five bold moves to quickly transform your organization’s culture

Five bold moves to quickly transform your organization’s culture

“There are five power moves that leaders can take to reinforce their transformation plans and drive a culture movement in their organizations:

• Don’t just tell—show. It’s not enough to outline plans for culture change and expect managers, employees, and other key stakeholders to simply fall in line. Senior leaders need to actively expose individuals to ideas and best practices they might not have previously considered, encouraging them to take lessons from wherever it makes the most sense.
• Don’t assign—enroll. It’s also not enough to just assign people various roles in a culture transformation. Large-scale change requires everyone to step up on their own and contribute to the cause of their own free will. Without such voluntary enrollment, the status quo will be too strong, and the odds of a successful transformation will decline.
• Shake it up—all of it. For a transformation to take hold, leaders should introduce and embed new rituals into the workplace and continually revisit and refine employees’ roles, mindsets, and behaviors. The new rituals and changes must be widespread and meaningful (and even hard to reverse). And any role changes must reflect what the organization needs to execute effectively on its strategy.
• Connect the dots. We all know about the hidden influencers in an organization who can have an outsize impact on their colleagues’ actions and behaviors. Particularly in a cultural transformation, it’s important to bring these individuals out of the shadows. Leaders should provide these individuals—some of whom may be the mavericks in an organization—with the tools and information they need and turn them into change agents.
• Remember, it’s personal. It’s important for business leaders to acknowledge the sometimes-personal nature of changes associated with a culture transformation. It’s difficult for people to drop long-established ways of working, take up new roles, and otherwise change the way they think and operate. Business leaders therefore need to attend to employees’ minds, bodies, and spirits during a transformation. They should reiterate the connections between the company’s culture and its role in helping employees achieve peak performance.”