Driving Cultural Change

I am putting together my thoughts around driving Cultural Change in a company.

You will find many books on “Driving Change” or “Business Turn Around” and they are all good. There is always something in there that can help. No one book is a “fit” for every organization, so keeping yourself educated on the majority of permutations is good because every company will go through one of those at some point or another. Not unlike Chess where players can see the board with all the pieces in place and recognize possible strategies to win. Companies are the same, you will see patterns of behavior in customer, staff and systems and you will recognize very quickly what stage of development or change the company is in at that moment.

The trick after understanding where you are in the change curve is deciding what to do next.

In Chess, you might take a defensive posture, but as someone who I used to play Chess with – he beat me the majority of the time – once told me, a solid offense is your best defense. Don’t be afraid to go on the attack to win, keep the opponent busy by attacking them and keeping them off balance. Know what pieces are not required for your win and let your opponent go after them and believe they are winning.

In a company, you have the same choices – protect what I have or go after what I want. Most people will build to a certain point and then stop for fear of loosing what they already built. Those companies tend to stay where they are at and for an owner that might work since they are really using the company to pay their lifestyle. Others would look at that situation and ask, “what do I give up so I can take this to the next level?”

My experiences in these situations and with companies, usually happen at a transition in ownership or leadership. Maybe the company was acquired recently, and the owner stayed on as the leader or maybe the company is moving from one generation to the next, in all cases a change in culture is required.

The staff at one company I dealt with would use words like “mom and pop” to describe where the company came from and “corporate” to describe where it was going as part of a merger/acquisition. So, the challenge was to move a company made up of over 200 employees and several thousand customers from a “mom and pop” to “corporate,” and he first place to start was with all the people who described the company using those terms.

Since I came from large corporations, I spent over 15 years and AT&T and then Lucent Technologies, many people in the “mom and pop” culture would look at me and express that I was more familiar with the “corporate” world and knew the next step. The reality is that nothing could be further from the truth. What they saw as “corporate” was just another flavor of “mom and pop” that had a bit more polish in certain areas. How did I know this? I knew because the culture of those running the HQ and their way of communicating and expressing what needed to happen was not structured by design but had grown organically.