Building an amazing culture is a great investment. It is quickly becoming a competitive advantage for organizations in terms of productivity, the attraction of talent and retention of staff.

​In this episode we take everything we’ve learned and apply it to building an amazing culture.

Culture is driven from the top down, so if you’re in charge, you have the ability and more importantly the responsibility for building your culture.

Describing culture is the first step, using descriptors to define what you want to see in your culture.  Then, linking the behaviors and interactions to demonstrate how those attributes are expressed help everyone understand what the culture is, what it means and how to demonstrate (or “DO” the culture).

Just like you will need a strategic plan, you will need to build out a cultural plan. 

I walk through some case studies and examples that show how others have built amazing cultures and how these accelerated and developed over time.  Time is still a factor when we are building culture. This takes time.

When building a culture, it is important to describe what we want to be, and how that is demonstrated, rather than what we don’t want to be. When we define a culture as being different than a prevailing subculture, (as in what we are NOT going to be like) it is vulnerable to drift and extinction.

Reinforcement plays an important role in making sure your culture is building in alignment, both positive and negative reinforcement are required to align behaviors and culture.

Lastly, how do you know that your cultural building initiative is working? I talk through a few ways to measure cultural progress beyond the typical lagging measures of turnover, retention and staff attraction.
 
Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

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The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts is the essential phrase that sums up Group Dynamics. This characterises the “why” of the social fabric of organizations and why culture has such a strong gravitational pull. Group dynamics describes the social system that humans, by our nature, build and participate in. 

Social systems can be invisible and intangible, but they are very much real.  Belonging and inclusion drive our alignment and conformance with social groups. This accurately describes how culture as a concept operates within organizations. 

When we’re looking at an organization, change and culture, group dynamics helps us understand why culture operates the way it does, why culture is so persistent and resilient and how power, and our relationship to power is expressed. 

I go back in time to week 1 of my MBA and the phases of group formation (which in practice has proven to be true!) I’ve encountered it many times since. I walk through the different types of groups and why describing organizational cultures as “families” is counterproductive, especially when we talk about the essential nature of family groups vs. organizations.
 
 
References:
More on Group Dynamics in the workplace
Remember Kurt Lewin?
Social Cohesion / Group Cohesion
Tuckman’s 5 stages of group development
More on Social Groups
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Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

So what if you actually want to change your culture?  This episode walks through the steps and the requirements to build a cultural change.

I make the case that culture is a leadership responsibility as if follows the organization’s operating model and strategy.  Also, the importance of leadership in demonstrating the desired cultural behaviors through their interactions and behaviors goes a long way to build trust. 

I talk through how to handle mistakes, the importance of accountability and what to do if there are people who just won’t change (hint, we covered this in a previous episode) 


Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

It's culture month at the change course podcast! Tune in all month as we bring you amazing content on organizational culture and culture change. 

When we implement change, we need to pay close attention to the culture that we are working within.  The prevailing culture of an organization will help you or hinder you in implementing change.  Some of the things we see when change comes up against culture are resistance, change slippage and change failure. 
 After understanding and defining the existing culture, we need to dig deeper and define the interactions and behaviors that demonstrate this. What are the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable behavior?  

Changing culture means that we are changing how people behave and interact. So you need to define in detail the behaviors and interactions that you want to see, and what is the difference between what that looks like today. 

I talk through two case examples of organizations that I’ve worked with.  The first, an organization that had a dominant culture but had to create a subculture to execute on a strategy.  An article coming in the next week, will detail more on how they did this. The second, I talk about the best culture that I’ve encountered at a client organization and how the team built that, against the current of a prevailing industry subculture. 

Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" coined by Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr in 1848 is as true then, as it is today.  The more things change, the more they stay the same. 

It's culture month at the change course podcast! Tune in all month as we bring you amazing content on organizational culture and culture change. 

Culture is one of my favorite subjects to discuss and one of the 5 elements in Connected Change (TM) for a reason.  One of the central tenets of organizational culture is that it is stable. It has a gravitational center that remains the same over long periods of time and is difficult to shift! That's why our theme for this month is "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" or: "the more things change, the more they stay the same".

The key resources that I talk about are linked below.  The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change is a great manual for understanding and building culture change. It also has my preferred definition for organizational culture.
 
The organizational metaphors are also what I most often use to identify and describe the organization. I had the privilege of studying with Dr. Gareth Morgan many years ago, and his work on the Images of the organization are ones that I still refer to today.  Fons Trompenaars’ and Charles Hampden Turner’s work in Riding the Waves of Culture is also important foundational work and the four archetypes link to observed behavior which is another level of analysis I use.
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Lastly, I mention the Denison Organizational Culture Survey – linked below. This is a tool I use to quantify and analyze the organization’s culture. 
 
Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

​Links to resources:

Les Guêpes: Karr, Alphonse, 1808-1890
 
Denison Organizational Culture Survey

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