How can managers change a company's culture?

Aloha mai kākou,

I ended my last posting this way:

So this brings us to the good news:

While I accept that the prevailing organizational culture may be going against you many times, great managers are more than capable of leading (and creating clarity with) a better way individually. They do this by clearly understanding for themselves first and foremost that when you define it as Kuleana, responsibility is what you accept more than what you are given. Again, it is a statement which implies, and rightly so, that responsibility is more about what you think it is, over and above what others might think.

The "prevailing organizational culture" is the hard part though, isn't it.

Mahalo to Linda and Andrew for their heartfelt voices here, for I realize many of you were probably nodding your heads too:

I totally agree with the statement you make about most managers having a hard time applying and using the "soft stuff" of leadership skills. ~ Linda

It sounds simple and the advice is spot-on; however in practice it is very hard to do! Especially in a large corporate office. ~ Andrew

We were talking about strengths management and the work of Marcus Buckingham there, and I wanted to highlight our conversation so we could take another look at this, in the MWAC archives: It was taken from a video program we listened into last summer where Marcus Buckingham gave his answer to the question in my title, responding;

“There are four key levers to pull if you want to effect change in a culture;”

1. You can change the expressed values of that culture — “the stuff that’s up on the walls.”

2. You can change the heroes of that culture

3. You can change what gets talked about in the informal communications network — “around the water cooler, in the lunchroom, in the car on the way home”

4. You can change the metrics “with how performance gets measured”

Revisit the posting here:
4 Things Managers Can Do to Bring Managing with Aloha to their Company Culture

I heartily agree with Buckingham: Individual managers CAN effect change when they are transparent about it with the teams they lead and enlist their entire team in their goal, illustrating how it can be a win-win agreement for everyone, and then mentoring and coaching people through whatever it takes.

Maybe not easy, but certainly a higher return than the other equally hard work you may be frustrated with.

The biggest mistake frustrated managers make is that they go it alone instead of rallying the troops: You can enlist the help of others, come to a mutually beneficial agreement with them, and not be a renegade. You can create a great Lōkahi team, as in these stories: Lōkahi Teams: When can a manager step away?

A quote which should be given to every team and manager in the world to adopt as their credo:

A small group of thoughtful people could change the world.
Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
~ Margaret Mead

In addition to these 4 levers that Buckingham suggests, take the time to think about it very individually, and through our present lens of Kuleana: What can you do as "just one manager" in a larger organization?

• You can accept personal responsibility for defining your own role by merit of your own actions.
• You can make this clear for everyone who works for you by simply being upfront and honest about it, so that people are not left guessing what you might be up to.
• You can deliver results to prove your point, and thereby set up the team that you are directly responsible for to be the heroes of the culture Buckingham speaks of. People who value Kuleana by demonstrating it in their work are definitely hero and heroine material!

What else can you do without waiting for permission from anyone else?

What can the single, responsible, Great Manager do to effect cultural change?

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You may also want to visit this posting in the MWAC archives:
MWA3P: Part Three – How Organizational Culture Happens

...and this one at www.ManagingWithAloha.com:
Strengths Management Coaching with Marcus Buckingham (in a podcast with Lisa Haneberg). An excerpt:

We can’t expect managers to take on the full responsibility for employing people’s strengths and making them feel worthwhile and important at work; the bigger responsibility lies with each of us as individuals. Buckingham says it this way;

“Managers must be open, but it is your responsibility to give them the raw material they can work with.”

You are the raw material. See yourself as the expert and authority on YOU. Who knows your strengths better than you do? Be proud of them, own up to them, and articulate them. Why should managers have to guess what they are?

Photo found on Flickr: weekend inspiration by muha...

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This is what MWAC is About, and Kuleana is the value study of the month for February.

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Ho‘ohana with us!
~ Rosa Say
More about me here.

Comments

[Rocky]

Great article Rosa,
Over the course of the past year and half I have been working to change the culture of a large organization. The program I am working with is the result of a merger of two former programs that were much smaller and have been merged into one large program. Each program brought their individual cultures with them. However, they never really merged into a new culture. It made for a very bad merger and lots of problems as a result. I don't have the time or the energy to write about all the issues at this point and time, but can say that you have hit on a key point. I have found that the best way to effect the culture is to capitalize on the strengths that exist in the culture. I found that I could not force changes in the culture and get people tofit into some idea that does not resonate with them. Capitalize on the strengths and the weaknesses begin to tumble. I found that I cannot change people or their values. I can recognize their strengths and they will then begin to go about the difficult task of making the changes for me. This is my Kuleana, to capitalize on the strengths that exist in the culture.

[Rosa Say]

I’m cheering for you in hearing this Rocky: “I have found that the best way to effect the culture is to capitalize on the strengths that exist in the culture.” For that’s the gem of it all; as difficult as it may be at times, strengths do already exist in every culture; it’s up to the great manager to discover them, optimize and celebrate them. Sometimes all you have to do in a merger is re-frame them in a new, jointly spoken language of intention.

Organizational ‘change’ efforts always make me nervous, for rarely is there enough thought about the constants that need to be kept, and tweaked perhaps, but not necessarily totally changed. When I read your comment, I reached for a book that has two of my favorite value/ change quotes to remember, so that I share them with you correctly. The book is The Dance of Change by Peter Senge, and these two are right in the beginning of it:

“Deep changes—in how people think, what they believe, how they see the world—are difficult, if not impossible, to achieve through compliance. Reflecting on twenty years of leading change toward more value-based work environments, retired Hanover Insurance CEO Bill O’Brien says, “What people pressuring for management to ‘drive’ cultural change don’t understand is: A value is only a value when it is voluntarily chosen.”

And this: As organizational change pioneer Richard Beckhard once put it, “People do not resist change; people resist being changed.”

Within your Kuleana Rocky, you can be the champion who gives people the healthy affirmation that the ‘change’ desired isn’t about them not being good enough; it’s about the culture they are working in not being good enough FOR them.