By: Kensel Tracy
A recent Globe and Mail article by Harvey Schachter stated that corporate culture is amorphous, often difficult to describe and difficult for managers to change and that organizational change is really cultural change. The article goes on to talk about three simple areas that can be identified within an organization to bring about change. These include critical behaviours of your people, cultural traits of your organization and the need to identify true leaders or informal leaders within an organization that can really make a difference to your culture.
Schachter, goes on to state that “The cultural aspect of an enterprise is of equal importance to its strategic imperative and operations approach” and that those three will determine the success of a company and that culture is very different from the other two, and hard for you to change quickly. Strategy and operations management are analytical, while culture is as much more emotional and rational and because of that changes within an organization occur much more slowly. This is completely the opposite to the views of those turnaround consultants and new incoming Managers and CEO’s who insist that they can make big changes quickly.
We subscribe to this process at the Center as we believe that there are no magic bullets inside this scenario. Change is about small incremental improvements over time. The key to Schachter’s article is that you cannot yell at something and stomp your feet and decree that you need to make changes. Culture change is not about change but is really about a corporate culture evolving more slowly over time.
The first step he says is identifying critical behaviours. Critical behaviours are those ways of doing things in your current operations that can easily spread from one employee to another and have the potential to have a real impact on business. A perfect example is West Jet where all employees are treated as West Jet Owners. This has an impact on how customers are treated, the attitude on staff and ultimately the feeling that is supported by those customers flying West Jet compared to Air Canada.
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The last point that Schachter promotes is identifying employees who are “the informal leaders” within your organization. These are people at various levels who motivate others by what they do and how they do it. They are recognized by their colleagues as credible, trustworthy and effective and they know how to influence behaviour. These are the people you want to help champion change within your organization so that others will buy in. A true leader should be able to identify those people quickly and work with them to bring about slow incremental changes.
So these three things critical behaviours, cultural traits, and informal leaders that are the crucial few elements that can help you create cultural change, slowly. As the article states cultural change is a slow process but ultimately has a sustained impact on growing and transforming your business.
For more information on Harvey Schachter’s complete article see www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/management/key-steps-to-change-corporate-culture/article17557724/
Do you need an open discussion on how to transform your organization for more growth, profit? Are you interested in shifting the culture within your team to reduce stress, increase productivity and get things done? Contact kenselt@cbtlistens.com for more information. Let us put a process in place that will help transform organization into everything you want it to be.