Notes From The Field

How to transform organizational culture for better results, creativity and innovation

Every leader wants a peak organization where you can measure performance and results, and employees are innovative, committed and accomplished - but most haven't got that.

Every employee wants to work in a place that values their contributions, satisfies their purpose and leverages their strengths - but very few work in an environment like that.

Every shareholder, stakeholder or community member that interacts with an organizations wants to feel like their input matters, like the organization is credible and trusted and a good neighbour - but most view government and corporations with distrust and like they are only working in their own interests.

I've worked with a number of organizations over the last few years who want to change this. Who want all the possibilities and positives of a high-performing culture, workforce and the public perception that goes along with that.

Many of these organizations come to me because of a crisis, conflict or negative event. Often times what is happening outside the organization is like a mirror to what is happening outside the organization. For example, if there is conflict, controversy or distrust between community and the organization, when we look in the mirror we often see organizational cultures with conflict, tension and a lack of innovation and creativity. In order to address challenges outside our organization, we need to address challenges inside the organization. You can't get results in one area without dealing with the other. Most organizations wish this wasn't the case. They hope that I will identify the simple source of their challenges, help them fix it and make it better - quickly and easily. Sometimes they hope that some employee engagement, a new strategic plan or some external community relations will fix it all.

I wish it worked that way, but it doesn't.

As long as it took you to get the culture and results you've got now, it will take time to transform the system of your organization into something different.

So how do you do it?

#1 You need to know what your REAL organizational culture is RIGHT NOW before you can change it

Your strategic plan, mission and values are not your culture. Your public opinion polls or surveys about customer satisfaction or public perception are not your culture. Your employee turnover and key performance indicators are not your culture.

Culture is made up of many levels.

There are the things we can SEE and point to like our strategic plan and stated mission and vision, our logo, the buildings we operate out of, the community we are located in, who is identified as part of the organization, and who the organization serves.
There are the ways we OPERATE like our job titles and positions, the way our hierarchy operates and the roles we play in it, who has power (and who doesn't), the actions we prioritize in time, effort and resources, who has information and who doesn't.
There are the things we BELIEVE like how we interact with each other - who speaks and who doesn't, what behaviours are evident in our interactions, the level of conflict, the state of relationships, how we handle mistakes and "failure".

All three of these layers of culture are from our perspective so we can document what we think is happening in each layer, but we need to be sure we aren't the only people sharing experiences or perspectives - because they could be very different, and that too points us to our real culture. How do others in our system experience those things? How do employees, community or stakeholders experience it?

We can get to the bottom of understanding our real organizational culture by asking questions of those in the system. We can ask questions like:

What is a story that highlights the essence of your experience with the organization?
What is a word, phrase or image that sums up that experience?
What has been an opportunity or positive interaction in your experience with the organization?
What has been a challenge or negative interaction in your experience with the organization?
What do you believe is most important to the organization? What do they seem to prioritize in their actions?
What is your most common experience, feeling or result from interacting with the organization?
How valued, respected and cared for do you feel in your interactions with the organization?
If the organization could improve one thing about how it works, what would it be?

There are many more questions we can ask, but you get the idea; we are harvesting stories, experiences, feelings and actions that tell the real story of how the organization operates and how the norms of behaviour, belief and interaction impact those in the system. We can review the results, code and analyze them.

We might be tempted to bring people together to have this conversation, in the name of building community or connection. I would offer some thoughtful caution on that front; if you have a culture where there is fear or repercussion from speaking out, where there has been ongoing conflict, where there are challenging power dynamics or a perception of distrust then bringing people together right at the start of a change process without preparation, capacity building or a commitment to courage and care can actually take things backwards and make things worse. Perhaps commit to keeping input anonymous and gather ideas in this first step via survey or interviews. Think carefully about who will do the gathering of the stories and experiences, and can they realistically keep a commitment of confidentiality? You might need someone outside the organization to lay the groundwork.

We can look at what people have told us and find the meaning in the data. What do the stories tell us about what is really happening? Are people afraid to make mistakes? Or are they creative, willing to invent and try new ideas and see what they learn, with organizational support and flexibility? Do people talk about each other, with rumours and gossip shared freely but real information scarce and carefully controlled? Or is information shared freely, even if the full answer isn't known and people talk together about big and small things, even if some of the conversations are difficult? Is the hierarchy strictly controlled, with ideas generated but reviews, approvals and decisions withheld and autonomy punished? Or do people generate ideas, get feedback and refine, revise and test them so the whole organization learns together? Are people committed to the mandate and goals of the organization and attracted to the work because of the good work they believe they can do? Or are they there for the salary and position, actively looking for more satisfying work and turnover is high? Not all answers are going to give us clear themes and it might be we've got some amazing indicators of the culture we want, and - but we need to know what we are comparing them against, which leads us to #2.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

#2 Map the results against the evidence for high-performing, creative, inclusive cultures

Once we have the results of our surveys and interviews, we can compare the themes that emerge against some general guidelines or criteria. We will want to share the results with everyone who participated to demonstrate transparency, but do it in a way that builds trust by sharing themes rather than specific comments, don't attribute any input, and make sure that nothing you report identifies anyone.

There is loads of research out there on what creates high performing, creative cultures. I like to draw on a a couple key sources to create some principles to focus on and make sense of the data.

Daniel Coyle offers three pillars of culture in his book The Culture Code. He focuses on the pillars of:

Safety
Vulnerability
Purpose

I have often used Coyle's pillars as a place to start, tailored to the organization I am working with. For example, for a recent organization, we identified the following as core pillars:

Courage & Compassion
Authenticity & Accountability
Commitment
Structure and Flexibility
Creativity, Play & Learning

Daniel Goleman gives us his foundational work about emotional intelligence and how it contributes to better leadership by building self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management and we can consider how individual competencies affect the collective, and what needs to adjust or change. What do we see in the data that tells us about the emotional intelligence and awareness of people in the system?

Harrison Owen was an early pioneer in the power of story, self-organization, and spirit as the path to solving most challenges, saying “Not only do we live in a self-organizing world, but our job – or perhaps better, our opportunity, is to leverage this force for our purposes and so ride the waves of self-organization as an intentional, and conscious act.” His work reminds us to bring out the best, most innovative and creative, connected solutions by letting go of control and getting out of the way. How do we measure our organizations against just enough structure for support, and enough flexibility and freedom for generative work? What do the results of the stories we have gathered tell us about structure, flexibility or control and compliance in the system? What impact does that have on the people?

In a similar way, Otto Scharmer and his work in the The Presencing Institute guides us to look at leadership competencies and systems change through a deepening, relational, inter-connected lens. When we look at the stories and experiences we have gathered, what can they tell us about the ways we listen and talk together and how that impacts the outcomes we achieve?

There are many more frameworks or research you can apply, but that gets you started with some of my favourite work in this area. All those big brains and ground-breaking research give us some guiding principles, criteria and a general direction for what we want in a culture, and that gives us a lens to look at the results of what we really have as a culture to see where there may be gaps, areas of focus, opportunities and strengths to leverage, and challenges to address as we work towards culture transformation.

#3 Build individual leadership capacity to work in new and different ways

Systems change happens when individuals transform and take action to change the system. So we need to build capacity in each person to grow, learn and expand so they can imagine and bring to life the change that is possible.

That includes growing individual leadership skills to collaborate, listen, communicate, grounded in self-awareness and self-regulation, with clarity on commitment, impact and vision.

We could start with the leadership team in the group or organization, and we often do, but we aren't looking to build the capacity of only the formal leaders. We need to activate and equip the leader inside everyone in the system to take action and show up to affect change.

#4 Build collective capacity for new ways of working

While building individual capacity is listed as #3, and collective capacity is listed as #4, we really need to do these concurrently, like a dance or a weaving of growing self, expanding experience of the group, applying learning to self, enhancing and creating new group norms. Everything each person learns contributes to the ways the collective operates, which supports change. This is why we don't bring everyone together right at the start, especially if we are in crisis or high conflict.

We bring people together in small groups and larger groups, facilitating conversations, building skills through training and experiential learning, providing tools to implement on a daily basis.

We first lay out the landscape so everyone can see it together and identify the real culture that is present now, then we ask each person to do their own work and learning, and we ask them to come together as a collective to do the work that powers system change. And we keep doing it, over and over again until we can see the outline of the new tapestry we are weaving.

#5 Weave a vision of a new, evolving cultural landscape

You might think this one focused on weaving a vision of a new culture and system comes before #2 or #3, because why wouldn't we map out a plan and then implement it step by step? Culture change doesn't happen in a linear fashion; it moves forward, sideways, backwards and forwards again in a new direction. Old patterns and habits rise up and pull people back, urgent circumstances and priorities take energy and effort and people struggle to apply new ways of doing existing work. Some people race ahead, excited about the potential for change and light the way for others to follow, modelling, demonstrating and bringing to life new norms, but not everyone gets on board at the same time. Some people cling to what is familiar and known even if it isn't serving them, and some cling to the familiar because they benefit from power, influence or identity. Systems change is messy, so even if we mapped it out at the beginning, we would be constantly changing it as we move along the journey.

The other reason why we don't imagine this new tapestry of culture at the start is that for the most part many people in the system won't have the skills, knowledge or ways of being to talk about what is happening now, what needs to change or adjust, and what they dream of without escalating conflict, tension or reinforcing old norms. So we need to build our individual capacity and our collective experience so that we can talk about these things, so that we can together imagine what the future holds.

Whatever new cultural tapestry we imagine will take time to create, and it will likely change and evolve as we build it, as new people are engaged, new ideas surface, possibilities are tested and discarded or amplified.

#6 Identify and Assign champions, ambassadors and change makers

In the old system, this is where the person who usually coordinates or writes the strategic plan or the annual report is given the job of culture change, because it seems to fit that they would write the plan. Or the President of the Community Association leads it because they know the community and are used to leading initiatives. However, when we are changing a system we need to follow the energy rather than give the task to the most obvious person. Who has enthusiasm, passion and energy for the transformation? Who can see it, taste it, imagine it? Who has skills, knowledge and ways of being to create momentum, bring others along, grow collective capacity for the journey? Who could be part of a group of champions together with different ways of seeing and knowing, different skill sets, different networks and relationships?

We also need to ask what roles others will play - culture change is a responsibility of everyone in the system. If you want real transformation, you won't put a couple people in charge, write a change plan, and have people add a couple new activities to their to do list. You are transforming people to transform the whole, so everyone will play a role.

#7 Remember that this is the new way of working, not something to check off a list

Transformation means we are fundamentally different, individually and collectively. Changing culture isn't about doing the same work and adding something else to your to do list. Instead it is a fundamental change to how we work together because we want a different outcome.

If culture change starts to feel like a burden, momentum will immediately slow. That doesn't mean it might not be uncomfortable or crunchy sometimes - it definitely will as people change roles, stretch boundaries and transform norms.

We want to consider how we can embed joy, fun, novelty, memorability, relationships and connection into the change. These are all keys to neuroplasticity, enabling our brains to change and grow, and they are also keys to building momentum in the change process too.

#8 Keep momentum AND rest, recover and build resilience

While everyone is on the up and down, back and forth of the transformation journey, they will also need rest. Talking together about hard things, changing modes and norms of interaction, doing things differently - it can all be exhausting and require large amounts of energy.

Everyone will need time to step back to recover, to re-set, and a priority should be placed on building individual and collective resilience. When we are whole, rested and well to function in our lives, we are whole for the journey of change.

Note: if you want to explore more about culture and your organization, consider taking training with me - IAP2 Transforming Engagement Culture is a great introduction to assessing your organization's culture and making a plan for transformation OR reach out by email to talk about implementing a leadership program designed to transform your culture.