S1 E30: A Fish out of Water

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