An amazing thing happens when you ask people to imagine their current workplace working to its potential. First, they smile. Then they hesitate. Then they want to talk about everything that’s wrong and why a better workplace is not real or practical or feasible. Purposeful culture change takes time.
If you’re patient though and you persist, slowly, very slowly, they start talking about what’s possible. And once that happens, before long, there are diagrams and dreams and the volume in the room rises from a gentle murmur to an excited buzz. Purposeful culture change becomes possible.
It’s hard to get people to quantify *next*. All their disappointments and concerns quickly crowd in to stifle the magic. But if you ask them patiently to put that aside and form a vision of what work should be like, aspiration slowly gets the better of them.
This isn’t about creating a dream kingdom. In fact, what works best is getting people to forecast what a “better us” looks like – and a key component to achieving that is asking them to find proof for what’s possible in what they have already done; to envisage a better future on the basis of what’s already happened, rather than just a pipe dream. Can-do is more easily achieved, even in the most cynical culture, when it’s based and built on a do that people ‘own’.
Six elements of successful culture change
In this article on the key levers for successful organisational transformation, the authors set out six elements that, their research shows, maximise the chances of success when it comes to transforming organisations. It’s not specifically applied to brand culture, but it forms a good guide for what any purposeful culture change framework should consider:
- Leaders must be willing to change by example
- There needs to be a shared vision of success
- The change in the culture must be characterised by trust and psychological safety
- The process must balance execution and exploration in order to let new ideas emerge.
- Implement the least technology you need, and build from there
- Develop a shared sense of ownership over the outcome
A purposeful approach
In Step 1: Agitation, we talked about building a case for cultural change that people understand. Making the conscious decision to change, not just improve, requires resolving a number of things:
- What’s the right culture model for our strategy?
- What’s the human case for change? (Why will people want to do this?)
- What are the strongest change resistors that we need to address?
- How can we use the FROG model to provide an incentive to change?
In our model, Agitation helps get leaders onboard by setting out why they need to lead change from the front in order to maximise the impacts of the strategy they are charged with delivering.
The first part of our second stage Activation is Inspiration: portraying in clear terms what tomorrow looks like – both in terms of how the culture must change to align with the strategy; and in terms of what people aspire to be part of. It addresses, at least partially, the second, third, fourth and sixth elements in the HBR article.
The aim of this step is to set an exciting goal for the brand and its culture.
The power of inspiration
Transpose this observation about the power of imagining the “impossible” from the classroom to the workplace and a clear rationale for Inspiration emerges. “For most people, the question, “What is your dream?” never comes up. We do what is expected of us from day to day, and get on with the business of living our lives. For most of us, dreams are just that; fantasies, relegated to sleep, idle daydreaming, and Disney movies …
“What recent research is telling us … is that dreams inspire learning – not the sort of rote, superficial learning that will help students pass state standardized tests … but real learning that inspires deep, meaningful, life-changing mastery and purpose. Learning that inspires positive change both for the individual and their community.”
People learn new ways to problem solve and they teach themselves to confront new problems – issues that they might once have seen as none of their business. Given a vision of what their culture could be, people will invest amazing energy into resolving the barriers that stand between today’s reality and that dream. As Alli Polin has written, “Leaders that tap into the hopes, dreams and strengths of the team create a magical culture that hums with possibility.”
The most powerful strategy any culture can devise, especially for itself, is one that its people have ownership of and that it is in their best interests to execute.
Collective and individual priorities
We break this process down into two parts: the cultural DNA, which identifies the driving priorities for the whole brand culture; and the inter-active elements that govern how people work together. The former provides the holistic and collective definition of why and what the culture wants to stand for. The latter, working off the basis that culture derives from how people behave with one another, defines how people engage based on a shared set of principles.
Core elements of the cultural DNA for us are:
- Purpose – the biggest change a brand culture want to make in the world, based on the strategy
- Vision – the brand’s greatest hope as a business
- Mission – what people come to work each day to achieve, as individuals and within teams.
- Brand enemy – what people in a brand culture are determined to eliminate (optional)
Alongside these holistic elements are the guidelines for personal priorities that set out shared expectations:
- Basis – the assumptions a culture carry forward for why they are the brand they are
- Beliefs – the ideas people have shared faith in
- Values – the characteristics of the culture that influence everything people do
- Behaviours – how people are expected to interact with one another
Some great advice from the NOBL team is that these elements need to be: applicable, simple, advantageous, testable and observable.
Motivating values and behaviours
So often, we hear talk of embedding values in an organisational culture and telling people what is expected of them. But if you change the order so that the culture tells itself about what it aspires to, and the values and behaviours become what all agree are required to get there together, it stimulates initiative and conversation. People look forward together – rather than sideways at each other. And they do so because they are motivated by a basic human inclination. They want to feel great.
To be truly effective, your Inspiration should be an opportunity for people across the various types of tribes in your culture to debate what the future could look like. You’re building consensus – for which, ironically, you also need to welcome healthy debate. And to live with the fact that some people will not want to operate within the inspired future you settle on, and that’s OK.
We recommend running Imagination sessions and asking these kinds of questions:
What could happen at work that would make people here clap their hands in joy?
What are we not telling ourselves that we need to be telling ourselves in order for that to happen?
When was the last time you were truly proud of us?
What did that prove about us?
A way to see where the strategy is taking people
A lucid Inspiration phase gives everyone the opportunity to buy into what they can contribute to. Building on the case for change, it effectively sets out the gap between the culture you have and the culture you aspire to have. And by aligning the collective and personal attributes and aspirations that come with that, hopefully people can see where the strategy is taking them in ways that are relevant to them, their values and their work.
Culture to Thrive is our strategically focused approach to big picture brand culture change for leaders wanting to align their people, strategy and core principles. You can read more about the range of brand culture services we offer here.
Culture To Thrive helps you find and define what you are striving for as a business, and the culture you specifically need as a brand. Together, we’ll build out why you should be one type of culture rather than another. We’ll also work through what you intend to accomplish and how every person can contribute to that.
Please contact us if you’re ready to change up why you compete.
Acknowledgements
Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash
Graphics designed by Fuller Studio.
Further reading
Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture
Exploration: Step 3 in building Purposeful culture
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