Culture Change
An organizational culture can be compared to wind and tides created overtime in the background of our organization; sometimes noticed, sometimes unnoticed and other times obvious. They are made of “instinctive” and “repetitive” habits coupled with emotional responses and reactions delivered in form of daily action.
A company’s culture is a collection of self-sustaining pattern of “behaving”, “feeling”, “thinking” and “believing” created by condensed fundamental assumptions that determines the way things are done in a particular setting. Ultimately, we create our culture overtime.
The difference between “Operational Values” and “Stated Values” determines your organization’s present realities regarding your culture.
Between Culture and Productivity lies Emotional State and Motivation and these two variables whether positive (enhancing productivity and or growth) or negative (inhibiting productivity and or growth) influences daily results.
NAME IT:
Cultures is usually the way we do thing now; they are usually described and do not have a definite nomenclature; our first assignment is usually to name the culture. “Name It” is usually a two part element. “Name The Reality” and “Name The Ideal”
Name The Reality: We achieve this through our simple subtle yet powerful statusrevealing assessments which eventually creates an avenue for debate and brainstorming with key culture change stakeholders.
Name The Ideal: We use the available strategic plan and or stated values to analyze the preferred organizational culture, breaking the preferred culture down into daily behaviors in various parts of the organization including internal and external.
MEASURE IT:
Between “Teach It” and “Measure It” is “Live It”. “Live It” is basically about champions, leaders and general staff actually exhibiting the preferred organizational behavior. It is not what we can deploy as consultants except by showing example for your people to see.
However, in order to ensure people “Live It”, we deploy the “Measure It” part of our approach, “Measure It” is a form of Performance Management System housed in the Human Resource Department in collaboration with us. Employees performance at this stage would be measured to set standard; it is our believe that “what you do not measure cannot be managed, what you do not manage cannot grow and what does not grow remain stagnant or dies”.
TEACH IT:
With a robust documentation that defines our goal we then define the right strategy to Teach It. Unlike “Name It”, this stage hugely differs from organization to organization depending on various dynamics.
Part of the possibilities in “Teach It” include Training and Coaching, which could be cascaded through different levels or functional departments or location over a period of time.
There is also a possibility of creating change champions or agents; a critical few who will embody the new important behaviors that would have great impact on others. They can be trained to become change mentors and influencers.
Leadership behavior at various level must be aligned with the preferred behaviors
Training and coaching programs would include several topics that would be generated from the assessments deployed in the “Name It” stage. Possible training and coaching programs can include Emotional Cognition for Change, Professionalism, Business Etiquette, Customer Service, Personal Effectiveness, Intrapreneurship, Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Communication etc.
Alignment to overall Strategy and Core Values creates the standard upon which “Teach It” is pivoted.
In addition; attention to getting the employee’s buy-in through effective communication is critical at this stage. Such Communication Strategy would be intentionally designed to achieve expected buy-in.
CELEBRATE IT or REPRIMAND IT:
This part is usually a fallout of “Measure It”; where those who have bought into the change are celebrated and those who refuse or cannot adjust are reprimanded as a way to ensure performance improvement.