When Culture Changes

Are you frustrated because you find it difficult to influence aspects of culture in your organisation?  You know having these aspects are crucial to progress.  No matter how many times you’ve tried to change these aspects, they revert back.  Perhaps people don’t take ownership and responsibility and keep elevating issues back up the management chain when they could be dealing with it themselves. Or, they don’t treat customers the way they should.  You’ve talked about it to so many people until you’re blue in the face and still nothing seems to change.   Maybe, just maybe, there is a belief in your top team that these things aren’t ever going to change.  What do you do?

Let’s understand a bit more about culture. Culture is your organisation’s unwritten rule book.  It’s the “should” and the “should nots” of how to behave in your organisation.  Culture is built on the concept of social proof.  People look around to see what others are doing.  This then tells them what they should do and what they shouldn’t do. They then develop habits. After a little while these habits become automatic and sink out of consciousness.  It becomes a way of living and the path of least resistance.

Below are some tips that may help you make that shift in culture.

  1. It’s always an issue of leadership.  Whenever you see significant culture change you see it demonstrated by the top tier of leadership. It becomes important to them. It annoys them when they don’t see these behaviours lived out.  Have them model the desired cultural traits.  This alone can be the difference between failure and success. Are you personally modelling these desired traits?
  2. Have a strategy.  Have a detailed plan.  Make sure it’s deliverable and make sure you measure it. It’s lack of sustained focus and inconsistency that make cultural interventions fail.
  3. Identify the influencers – find the people with influence in your organisation. These are the people who others truly look to, when weighing up what to do. They may not necessarily be part of your management structure.  Find them and work with them.
  4. Tell lots of stories – make sure your managers are continually telling stories of change.
  5. Raise personal awareness and self-development. This makes it easier for everyone to bring these habits to the surface. 
  6. Breakdown the behaviours you want to see changed. For example, ownership and responsibility are complex capabilities. They require self-awareness, emotional intelligence, personal commitment, ability to handle stress and ability to solve problems.
  7. Don’t think in terms of cultures but in terms of sub-cultures.  The “culture” is simply an abstract form of the entire collection of sub cultures.
  8. Expect resistance.  It’s normal.  It’s not deliberate. It’s the habits kicking in and people testing the waters to see what is acceptable and what is not. 
  9. Finally, believe it can change and keep pushing through.

SILO BUSTING

How do you stop silos from forming?  How do you break silos down when they are already formed?  What effect do you think they have on the accuracy of information that gets to you in order to make good business decisions?   

One thing we’ve noticed in our travels, is the devastating effects that silo working has on productivity, morale and results.  When silos form they make problems much more difficult to solve. They muddy communications, increase error and foster attitudes of them vs us.


The problem is that silos form under the radar and are a natural consequence of focus and good intention. No one ever sets out to form a silo – they just happen. It’s a classic example of good intention gone wrong.  And when silos form, they are notoriously difficult to break down. They almost seem to have a life of their own and drive undesirable behaviours and attitudes in employees.

One organisation we worked with commented that each silo seemed to have its own unique culture, so much so, that when they sent out corporate messaging, they felt they almost had to do a segmentation exercise – the result an unnecessary amount of unwanted organisational politics and emotional energy expended into combatting the effects of the silo.

To break these silos down takes a conscious co-ordinated effort. It means identifying some of the drivers and elements that keep these structures in place and it’s about helping your managers and key personnel adopt a wider focus rather than a narrow functional one. Here are a couple of things to think about:

  1. One thing we’ve found helpful is the adoption of a role and mind-set for people in management positions: that of “guardians of the system.”  If we use the analogy of Formula 1, too many managers spend too much time playing the role of drivers; they drive the car, set the pace and take the glory. They don’t spend enough time in the role of the pit crew. The pit crew meticulously monitor the vehicle and the systems and environment surrounding it.  It is they, that allow the chance of victory. Managers should be continually making it easier and easier for others to play their roles by understanding how the organisation ticks. In our experience, it’s more the exception than the rule that managers really understand how the business knits together as a whole.  How much time do your managers build into their schedules to keep a track of inter-relationships, inter-dependencies and the way the systems connect as a whole. How much time do they spend continually tweaking and adjusting that system?  When they begin to understand this, a weight is often lifted from their shoulders and they are often able to sort issues which produce extra amounts of work and energy resulting from the effects of silos.
  2. Another critical factor that needs to be addressed is this:  How do you as a senior leadership team inadvertently keep propping up the silo mentality with what you message in your decisions, actions and communications? Are you as an individual in the senior management team in the habit of constantly putting yourself into other functional perspectives? Can you argue their case almost as well as you can argue your own?  Are you a student of consequence, continually observing when and why things happen when they are not the norm? Do you reward people even when they display behaviours and attitudes that further cement the silo mentality?

One thing’s for sure, silos don’t go away on their own. What’s your plan for dismantling for them?

How Well Set up is your Management Team?

What would happen if you treated your top team as a high performing sports team. What would be different? How much more effective would you be?  How much more impact would you have?

Most senior management teams evolve naturally. They come together through a series of common interactions and in time they play together as a team.  Most of you will have probably heard of the FORM, STORM, NORM, PERFORM theory. Teams get together. They go through a few stormy times as individuals get to know each other. Then they establish patterns of interaction and as these become more familiar, eventually they start to perform. You may even have had one or two team building sessions to help accelerate this process.

But is this the best way to set up your team? How well do you actually perform?  How efficiently?  How much clarity and buy in? How much real discussion with real issues put on the table and explored in the limited time that you have together? When you leave the set up to chance, there’s a high probability that you’ll have areas that just don’t work well.

The difference in a high performing sports teams is that the foundation of how it operates is built by design. It doesn’t happen by chance. People know their specific roles and where and how fast they should move and how everyone is moving. They know what everyone else is doing, how they’re doing it and why they’re doing it. They are set up with their current objectives in mind.

It’s rigorously pre-planned and structured. It’s drilled with feedback until they know it works. They’re well organised.

We’ve found that this kind of approach in working with business teams brings a large number of benefits.

First people feel safer. It’s not down to power and personalities. It’s a designed system where everyone plays their part. Because they feel safer, they are more likely to open up and put their true opinions on the table. This then results in better buy in.

Secondly, it’s much more efficient. Structure allows you to get more done in a shorter time with better quality

Thirdly, expectations are managed nicely. Team members are annoyed when expectations are not being met, which results in disengagement.

Finally paradoxically, having a conscious structure brings freedom as to how you play together. This results in more creative thinking, more innovation and more ownership. 

Do you want your Senior Management Team Functioning like a well drilled team?

There are a few easy things you can put in place that will enable your senior management team to work smoothly and efficiently. Doing these things increase the likelihood of getting true commitment not compliance. Not getting “buy in” results in the likelihood of your strategies not being delivered the way you want them to be. Below are five suggestions:


1.    Define the purpose of the meeting and what you want to achieve at the end of it – make sure that all participants know this in advance. Knowing it will help them stay on topic and work towards the goals.
2.    Publish the agenda in the form of questions – identify the exact questions you want answered before the meeting and make sure you stick to them unless you agree to deviate
3.    At any point in time during the meeting, identify a specific question and keep it in focus (eg. On a flipchart) – you can view any conversation that you have in the group as answering a question. Often, the question is NOT consciously identified and so people are answering different questions by implication. People interpret questions differently.  For example you are exploring what your team can do to increase performance in the marketplace. You are specifically looking for solutions.  Some team members start talking about why it’s hard to get a competitive edge. You get frustrated because they are going off topic and perhaps label them as negative.  They pick up on these signals.  They switch off and you no longer have commitment. If you keep the question precise and in view, they are much less likely to explore a different frame.  Write up on a flipchart, “What suggestions can we generate for improving market performance?” When someone deviates ask them to justify their deviation. Answer only one question at a time.  Groups are not very good at answering several questions at the same time. The result is non clarity.
4.    Let everyone know what communication model you are adopting for the particular meeting -  We've witnessed so many management teams adopt a debate model in early stages of problem solving or adopting innovations. The debate model is embedded in our education system. It works on the premise that whoever has the better argument will win. This way of thinking results in people locking into positions and also invites power games – none of which are good for collaborative working. A much better model is the exploratory model where team members are asked to suspend all assumptions and opinions with the intention of understanding and mapping. The debate model has its uses and is at its most powerful, when testing suggestions.
5.    Have a team member act as facilitator and give them the power for the meeting – if you don’t have someone regulating the flow of the meeting you risk the meeting going off track and running out of time. Whoever is facilitating should have the basic skills to regular sum up conversation flows and be the active driver to get to the desired results. Rotate the facilitator role from time to time. If you as leader always adopt the role as chair, your team subconsciously know you are framing and driving the meeting and this could result in them not buying in.

 

Nuances of Power

As a senior manager do you sometimes wonder why the middle management tier of your organisation don't perform better as a group? You know they’re a bunch of talented individuals, but they somehow seemingly refuse to take ownership. All too often they seem disengaged and the important issues do not even register on their radar.

In our years of developing managers, one of the keys in resolving these problems is helping managers perceive and adapt appropriately to hidden power dynamics that exist in organisations.

Managers exhibit ownership if they feel like they have control.  Power dynamics often strip this sense of control away from them. It affects how they perform and can even regulate their current capabilities at any given time. 

Consider this:  have you ever felt yourself changing in the presence of someone who you think is more powerful than you.  You think differently, you communicate differently and it shakes your sense of confidence. You perhaps become a shadow of who you are and are powerless to challenge the status quo.

The nature of power is deceptive. Those who hold it, underestimate it; those who don’t, magnify it.  This results in all kinds of strange anomalies.

Power dynamics often produce varying clarity, inadequate feedback loops and a general drop in communication, leading to poorer performance.

We’ve found that when we have helped managers develop their awareness of power dynamics, it can help lead to profound changes in performance.

When managers understand how power dynamics work and they are given the tools to effectively deal with them, their sense of control and confidence return and with it a sense of ownership.

Interested?  Please give us a call.