Culture Change - Realizing the Vision

Organizational cultures are comprised of behavior patterns that are reinforced by people and systems over time, and are often best viewed through the lens of your employees. There are many indicators that can help you determine how your company’s culture is functioning. Look closely at your employees’ words and actions, and the resulting consequences of these behaviors. Careful observation will help you develop an accurate picture of how your culture operates.

Cultures are formed regardless of your management team’s desire for the company to embody a particular type of attitude. How your employees work, talk, manage and solve problems often becomes cemented in your company’s culture as a result of the way leaders respond to everyday situations. And, leaders often do what they do simply because that’s the way it has always been done.

Understanding the Impact of Culture

Your senior leaders need to have a solid grasp of the behaviors that drive the company before they undertake an effort to change its culture. Leaders who are change-focused understand that the single biggest challenge to implementing change is entrenched culture.

That’s why it is key to know and understand your employees’ behaviors, and how those behaviors shape your company’s culture. If your objective is to truly transform the way your company operates, you must first identify the source of your group’s behavioral patterns. Prior to initiating behavioral changes, take a hard look at your definition of culture and whether your company’s current culture will aid in or impede the realization of your corporate vision.

Cultural Entrenchment

Your organization suffers a number of unfavorable consequences when employees become entrenched in the established ways of doing things. While they may not be able to point to the reasons they are conducting themselves as they are, they are still resistant to change, preferring to continue with “business as usual.” As a result, they resist new behaviors, thereby impeding strategy execution and the deployment of performance improvement initiatives.

Further, your organization’s ability to achieve a return on investment on new people, assets and ideas is encumbered by the constraints of the old way of doing things. The impact on your leadership will be significant unless your team understands the behaviors that got them where they are.

Obstacles to Culture Change

Obstacles to realizing the vision occur when your leadership teams underestimate the power of the existing culture and how long it took for the structure of the culture to become entrenched in the company.

When leaders underestimate resistance to change, it’s often because they have failed to recognize where the source of the resistance originated. As a result, the organization’s vision is often sabotaged, with middle management excluded from change efforts. CLG’s approach ensures effective coaching of front-line supervisors as owners of current and future cultures. With buy-in at all levels, you’ll have a clearer vision of why certain barriers exist.

How CLG Addresses Culture Change

CLG will help you create a performance culture by ensuring that critical path behaviors that lead to desired business results are consistently reinforced to ensure business momentum, providing optimal conditions for discretionary effort.

We work with your senior leaders to Make It Clear, ensuring that the desired business outcomes are achieved. We’ll provide you with the behavioral road map to get there - including key levers for change and indicators of progress - to guide the change effort.

Once the vision is clear, CLG works to Make It Real for the leaders of your organization. We explore the critical behaviors required at all levels to shape the type of culture that enables a powerful and positive impact on your business.

We help your organization Make It Happen by teaching your leaders how to establish conditions for discretionary effort. Individual leaders learn the art and science of designing work environments where employees are motivated to excel. New critical path behaviors are activated and consistently reinforced across the organization. As your company starts to change the way it operates, strides made in the right direction are acknowledged and celebrated.

CLG helps your company Make It Last by ensuring that management practices and human resource systems sustain the new culture by reinforcing the right behaviors.

Learn more in our related case study, Enabling Technology Solutions through Culture Change.