On Culture Change, Leadership and Change Management

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CRM, Customer Experience, and Digital Business Require Culture Change

What I notice is that in order for an organisation to be effective in the games of CRM (building profitable relationships with customers), Customer Experience (competing on the basis of a superior customer experience) and/or digital business (rethinking the business through the lens of what digital technologies enable) requires culture change: a change in the way that people think, in their expectations, and in the way that they go about doing things.

Yet, rather than deal with the challenges of culture change, I find that just about every management team in every organisation that I have come across gets busy with buying the technology. And thus ignores the risk spelled out in the following ‘equation’:

Old Organisation + New Technology = Expensive Old Organisation

Why does this happen, again and again, one management fad after another? I point you to these wise words:

It is easier to buy stuff than it is to create and stabilise new ways of relating, new frameworks for organising, and new expectations and norms. Those are the tough, messy issues that accompany shifts to more mindful, reliable, resilient functioning…

Karl Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Managing The Unexpected

What Is The Default Mode Of Going About The Challenge Of Culture Change and Doing Change Management?

This week I found myself in a meeting talking about culture and change management. I found myself listening to one senior person articulating the challenge of getting his organisation, especially senior management and the sales teams, to move from one way of doing things to a substantially different way of doing things. Yes, a shift in the “way we do things around here” is needed for the longer term. And yet there is an awkward reality to deal with. What awkward reality? The existing “way of doing things around here” has been and continues to deliver the results (sales, revenue growth, profits).

Without a moment’s hesitation I found another senior person (an advisor) offering a solution to this challenge. Which solution? The solution that occurs to me as the default one: the application of “stick and carrots”. I noted that the particular emphasis was on the stick rather than the carrots. The assumption being that if the Tops yielded a big enough stick then the Middles and Bottoms would fall into line. I found myself dismayed. Why?

My 25+ years of experience suggests that this approach is largely ineffective and in some cases does considerable damage to the organisation’s long-term resilience-performance. Why? I can think of at least two reasons:

First, change in behaviour is merely compliance. And repeated use of the stick to get compliance almost always, and inevitably, leads to a reduction of motivation to do one’s best and usually an increase in motivation to ‘get back’ at or merely ‘resist’ those wielding the stick.

Second, the people who are the most able tend to leave (as few of us like to be treated as cattle) thus disrupting the network of relationships, degrading the quality of communication and information flow between the players, and putting a dent in the intellectual capital of the organisation.

One more point. It occurs to me that those of us who advocate the sticks and carrots approach to change have failed to appreciate that lasting-sound change requires change in two levels; change at the behavioural level is one of these levels. I will go into what these two levels are and the critical importance of both levels in another post. Let’s continue with this conversation.

What Does It Take To Effect Culture Change?

I invite you to consider-grapple with-meditate on the following way of looking at culture change:

The culture change process is a two-sided coin. On one side is the “bottom-up” phenomenon that many changes arise from those actually doing the work. On the other side is the “top-down” reality that changes in conducting business often get made by direction or sanction from top management. Both are essential …

Changing the organisational culture ….. will require commitment at every organisational level…. Culture change is not triggered by a magic bullet or directive. Rather, culture is changed by a series of small steps taken by the leading members of the culture at all levels.

Leadership is standing up and leading the way. It is behaviour and it is demonstrable. It is showing, not telling....

Changing the way business is conducted requires people at all levels to lead by personal example in demonstrating new approaches to achieve safer (and more reliable) operations……. This requires that we strengthen accountability at all levels of the organisation…..

– TriData Corporation, Wildland Firefighter Safety Awareness Study, Phase III Implementing Cultural Changes for Safety (1998)

At this point, I confront you with that which is so about us, human beings: our freedom. I leave you to choose which road you wish to travel: that which is convenient-easy and on the whole ineffective even damaging to long-term performance (“sticks and carrots”) or that which is effective, takes time, requires embodied leadership day after day from the Tops, and calls forth leadership and accountability from all people at all levels: Tops, Middles, and Bottoms.

One thing that I am absolutely clear on is this: buying technology in the absence of cultural change (changing how we think about, what we expect from one another, and how we do things around here ) is likely to turn out to be a waste of time-effort-money.

I wish you a great week, and I thank you for your listening.

Author: Guest Author

Published On: 16th Jun 2014 - Last modified: 6th Feb 2019
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