Culture is the most effective vehicle to energize the large-scale change that’s necessary to position a company to thrive. These four principles can help organizations ensure that culture stays top-of-mind for more than just a moment:
- Purposeful Leadership from the Top
- Personal Change
- Broad Engagement
- Focused Sustainability
As the first culture-shaping consulting firm, Senn Delaney has quite literally made organizational culture its business. Larry Senn and his colleagues, including partner and executive vice president Bill Parsons, have brought their mission of “creating healthy, high-performance cultures” to more than 500 companies. Bill shared in this article some of the knowledge they’ve gathered over their 38 years of experience including the four principles that must be upheld to really shape culture and improve performance.
Purposeful Leadership from the Top
When deciding to launch a culture initiative, many organizations hand the reins over to human resources. In Bill’s experience, if culture change is viewed primarily as an HR initiative, it’s doomed. This is not necessarily due to any failings on the part of HR departments, however. In order to succeed and not be seen as “just another program” that won’t really make a difference, culture change must have full and ongoing support from the company’s senior leadership team.
Personal Change
The onus doesn’t just fall on the senior leadership team. To be successful, everyone has to “live the change”. Relying on an intellectual approach, with the focus on the reasons for wanting to change, will only result in short-term compliance. “Changing what people do is not enough”, Bill said. “It has to be about who they are as people.” Senn Delaney uses inside-out learning to inspire change at a deeper level.
Broad Engagement
One of the things that makes Senn Delaney’s inside-out learning approach successful is that it is infinitely scalable. The development program “touches” every single person in the organization, from the CEO to the front line — which is critical for widespread acceptance. “Cultures tend to resist what they need the most,” said Bill. “It’s almost like we have an organ in our body that needs to be transplanted and the body is going to tend to reject it; cultures do the same exact thing. So, if you want to be innovative they’re going to try to maintain status quo. You can’t change or shift the culture to drive this change by only dealing with 100 people or 200 people.”
Focused Sustainability
Once organizational members buy into the need for change, it’s relatively easy to get them on board for a brief period and build momentum and excitement at the outset. The real challenge comes with sustaining energy and effort over the extended period required to realize meaningful change. “It’s easy to get somebody committed for a year, but I’m telling them five years,” Bill explained. “Once your attention wanes, [the change] is going to die because habits are very powerful.” Maintaining the culture shift requires constant attention and reinforcement to prevent old habits from returning and undoing the hard-earned progress.
Read more from Bill Parson in the full article by Meghan Oliver here on ConstructiveCulture.