Company Culture in Building High-Performing Organizations: Culture Change
Transforming a company's culture can be challenging, but it is feasible. One way to do this is by implementing new leadership development programs, team coaching sessions, and training opportunities. By doing so, leaders can become more comfortable with cultural change. When people leave the company, it is essential to select new leaders who align with the desired values and emphasize a shared purpose. This strategic shift in culture can lead to a more diverse range of integrated service offerings and significant growth, especially in emerging markets.
To successfully change a company's culture, the following four practices are particularly important:
1. Articulate the aspiration: Like defining a new strategy, creating a new culture should start with an analysis of the current one. Leaders must understand what outcomes the culture produces and how it aligns with current and anticipated market and business conditions. An aspirational culture suggests the high-level principles that guide organizational initiatives.
2. Select and develop leaders who align with the target culture: Leaders serve as important catalysts for change. Candidates for recruitment should be evaluated on their alignment with the target culture, and incumbent leaders who are unsupportive of desired change can be engaged and re-energized through training and education about the important relationship between culture and strategic direction.
3. Use organizational conversations about culture to underscore the importance of change: Colleagues can talk to each other about the change, and various kinds of organizational conversations, such as road shows, listening tours, and structured group discussions, can support change. Social media platforms encourage conversations between senior managers and frontline employees, and influential change champions can advocate for a culture shift through their language and actions.
4. Reinforce the desired change through organizational design: When a company's structures, systems, and processes are aligned and support the aspirational culture and strategy, instigating new culture styles and behaviors will become far easier. For example, performance management can be used to encourage employees to embody aspirational cultural attributes, and training practices can reinforce the target culture as the organization grows and adds new people.
In conclusion, it is possible, and crucial, to improve organizational performance through culture change, using the simple yet potent models and methods outlined in this article. Leaders must first become aware of the culture that operates in their organization, then define an aspirational target culture, and finally master the core change practices of articulating the aspiration, aligning leadership, fostering organizational conversation, and shaping organizational design. In today's business environment, leading with culture may be one of the few sources of sustainable competitive advantage. Successful leaders will stop regarding culture with frustration and instead use it as a fundamental management tool.
