Why culture change is more than five steps to success…
There are lots of reasons why more and more charities are starting to fundamentally rethink their strategies.
Models that felt sustainable in the past are becoming ever harder to maintain. Social issues we thought we were making progress on seem to be going backwards. The shared challenge of systemic failure is increasingly hard to ignore.
I’ve been involved with quite a few organisations recently, helping them think about how they can respond to those challenges, and I’m seeing some really good, innovative strategies emerging.
But one implication they invariably share is that their people will need to change how they work, which means getting serious about culture change if their strategy is going to succeed.
Most leaders aren’t naïve about this. They know the truth in the old saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, so it’s usually a big part of the plans that emerge.
But one thing I’m seeing that’s more of a concern, is leaders underestimating just how big a part of the workload culture change will end up being. And how long that extra workload can last.
Partly that’s probably the fault of consultants like me. We tend to pitch things as a simple recipe, like a LinkedIn slideshow with “five steps to culture change success”.
And it’s true, there are aspects of culture change we can talk about like a recipe.
We can list out the ingredients: clarity about the culture you need and how it differs from what you have; a set of values and a breakdown of “what good looks like” for personal behaviours and interpersonal dynamics.
And we can write the method: communicate clearly and use stories; model the behaviours as leaders; align the incentives and consequences and regularly highlight great examples; build development and support programmes to help the transition; and fix any structures and processes, status symbols and priorities, that you need to embed the new culture.
But the cake is more than just the recipe. There’s an art to culture change just as there’s an art to cooking. One that comes from practice, attention, observation and reflection. One that recognises the importance of context, and the big significance of small details.
Culture is an emergent property of humans working together. It forms spontaneously whenever you put a group in a room and give them a problem to solve.
But culture also endures. New people entering the room will often adapt to the culture that’s already there, even when all the original people have left, the new ones will continue with the patterns they’ve inherited.
We also carry the legacy of whatever cultures we’ve experienced and adapted to in the past, especially during our formative years. Whether that’s a kind and compassionate culture that tends to avoid conflict, or an assertive and combative culture that actively rewards it.
This is why it can sometimes feel scary to recruit people from business into charity. It can add enormous value, and it can raise the risk of a culture clash, and that can be a good thing and a bad thing all at the same time.
The same is true with culture change. Those who’ve struggled with the culture your organisation had in the past can feel liberated. They could end up as shining examples, advocates and evangelists for the wider change.
In contrast, those who’ve been most advantaged by the old culture might be the most anxious and resistant. Equally, they might not be, but you’ll only find out by paying attention to exactly how things unfold.
These are the details, and they matter.
Attending to the details is what makes the difference between following a recipe and learning to cook. Learning to use fresh eggs for poaching and older ones for hollandaise; the feel of an egg on your fingertip when it’s perfectly cooked; the particular shine you get when the hollandaise is about to split and needs warm water whisking in.
The same attentiveness is what makes the difference between turning the handle on a project and actually changing your culture.
Culture change, and even restructuring for that matter, isn’t as simple as a five-step slideshow. Plans and values and behaviours and appraisals are all essential ingredients, but they’re only part of the endeavour.
Because culture change is about people. It’s about changing how they act, how they think, what they believe their job is, and often what they think your job is too.
And those changes take time, and attention, and practice.