We guide leaders and organizations through cultural transformations. But culture change is never the actual goal.
If it were, we could all sit together, sing Kumbaya, have a good time and call it a day.
Cultural transformation in an organizational context starts with the intent to improve one or more outcomes: higher safety, less incidents, higher quality, lower losses, higher output, lower costs, higher employee fulfilment, less staff turnover.
Or one of these results is, or will be under pressure, due to changing circumstances in the market, laws, macroeconomics, raw material availability, climate, and so on.
To face these challenges, organizations need people and departments to:
→ Align and agree on the same goals and priorities
→ Adopt clear and effective strategies to reach them
→ Collaborate across functions, departments, and hierarchy to get there
This is where culture can be a catalyst. Or a hurdle.
Of course, not every problem is a cultural one.
A pump that fails is a technical problem. If it fails over and over, it’s still technical, caused by out-of-spec usage, bad design, or other technical causes.
But if the problem lasts more than a month, it becomes a leadership problem.
Or a cultural one.
A bad hire (a mismatch between person and job) can happen. But if the employee stays in the wrong job for longer than 3 months without proper guidance or follow-up, that’s a leadership problem.
Often, we find similar problems showing up in different parts of the organization, an expression of the same underlying cultural pattern.
Well-known examples: silos, bureaucracy, islands, kingdoms, ineffective handling of underperformance, poor use of hierarchy, information hoarding, judgment or blame culture, lack of openness.
This is the first post in a series on how cultural patterns show up in business performance, and how to work through them. Leadership development and personal growth will be part of the answer.
I can guarantee that.
