There’s no use sugarcoating it: organizational culture management is hard, and it only becomes harder as companies scale and grow. It’s a process that requires visionary leaders who can inspire every member of the organization to commit for the long haul. Article from Partners in Leadership | Accountability Insights by Anique Mautner | Mar 27, 2018 Here at Partners in Leadership, we’ve helped dozens of executives foster a Culture of Accountability^Ⓡ within their organizations through our organizational culture consulting work. We asked three of them to share advice for those who are just beginning the process of culture change: Susan T. Carroll, the Chief Regional Executive Officer at Inova Health System; Joanne McInnerney, VP of Human Resources at Novelis; and Dave Schlotterbeck, the retired chairman and CEO of CareFusion. While they all come from different fields and backgrounds, these execs shared similar experiences and strategies when it came to successfully managing workplace culture. Here’s what each of them had to say about the challenges involved, and how they overcame them.

1) Make Change a Personal Priority, and Lead by Example

Culture change is an organization-wide process, but it has to start at the top. Every member of the C-suite needs to actively pursue the same goals, or the initiative won’t take hold. McInnerney, for example, recalls that several prior cultural initiatives at Novelis failed due to a reluctant CEO, and it was only when that CEO was replaced by a more committed executive that they began to see real results. Schlotterbeck notes that it is very easy to spot executives who don’t practice what they preach. “Culture changes one person at a time, and that includes the CEO,” he says. “If you aren’t leading by example, you can’t expect everyone else to do the work.”

2) Keep Organizational Culture Management Simple

When you’re measuring your progress towards cultural transformation, it can be easy to find yourself bogged down in a sea of data. But it’s important to keep things as simple as possible by focusing on the measurements that matter — that is, the ones that are most clearly connected to your organization’s Key Results. As McInnerney states, “it’s not about being perfect; it’s about being perfectly aligned to the outcomes.” In healthcare, for example, practitioners have a vast amount of data available that can be used to improve health outcomes, but working to improve results in every measurable arena simply isn’t productive. To narrow the field down, Carroll centered her culture management strategy around the core duty of healthcare: do no harm. By creating an understandable, measurable goal that every employee could rally around, she enabled widespread change across the organization.

3) Organizational Culture Becomes Strategy Through Execution

Execution is how you harness the power of an organization to actually deliver on that strategy. The more aligned a culture is, the easier a strategy transitions from plan to action. As Carroll notes, “most senior leaders truly believe that it is culture that drives outcomes.” For McInnerney, this was the central takeaway from the cultural initiative at Novelis. The company already had some innovative strategies in place, including a plan to become a first mover in automobiles, but struggled to actualize the potential returns. The company hit its Key Results once they focused on shaping a culture to match its strategic objectives.

4) Engage Every Employee

As you execute a cultural shift, engage with every member of the organization. As Carroll states, “one of the first lessons I learned was that everyone was involved in culture, including me.” Since culture is built on the actions and attitude of everyone who participates in it, the whole company must actively work together to change it. Schlotterbeck noticed that when you start focusing on culture, you realize that the people at the bottom of the organization — who have the least influence over the direction of the shift — tend to be the most receptive. By contrast, resistance tends to manifest among the ranks of the middle managers. Resistance to culture change can manifest across an organization, which is why it’s vital to engage and empower managers in the organization from the very beginning. Managers’ actions often drive the beliefs of the employees they manage. Once they buy into the culture you are trying to shape, the speed of progress usually grows exponentially due to positive peer-to-peer momentum. As all these executives learned, it takes great leaders to change culture; and great leaders embody patience and empathy to earn the buy-in and support of everyone in the organization. To truly take hold, companywide alignment is a must. Sign up here for our webinars to learn more about organizational culture change.

Every organization has biases and preferences surrounding the planning process. Reposted with permission from Partners In Leadership | March 19, 2015 Some organizations plan for everything in great detail in order to maximize control over all the relevant variables; some organizations plan as little as possible in order to maximize agility in responding to rapidly changing environments, and the others approach planning from somewhere in between these two extremes. Regardless of how you and/or your organization approach the annual planning process, we recommend that you identify the three to five Key Results that your organization must deliver—Key Results that must be delivered to sustain the organization’s health, well-being, strength, viability, growth, and success. These Key Results should not only be clearly understood by every employee in the organization; they should also consistently guide every employee’s daily decisions regarding work priorities—what work to stop doing, what work to start doing, and what work to continuously improve. When we recently communicated this to the senior leadership team of a large organization, we received a lot of push back. Their concern was that boiling down the organization’s strategic vision and operational complexity to three, four, or five Key Results would over-simplify, even trivialize, their leadership challenge and stewardship. Our response was clear and concise: if you can’t boil down your organization’s “must deliverables” to three, four, or five Key Results, then you will never be able to reach levels of accountability and alignment that are substantially higher than where you are right now. If you’re satisfied with where you are when it comes to accountability and alignment, then don’t worry about boiling things down to a few Key Results. If you’re not satisfied, then use your breadth and depth of understanding about the strategic and operational complexities of your business to capture the fundamental, essential “must deliverables” for your organization. Why? Because it will connect all of your employees to the fundamental and essential nature of your business and open up a new pathway to taking greater accountability and to building greater alignment. The senior leadership team listened to us and, within a few days, developed four Key Results that have already brought more focus, energy, and transformation to the organization than they imagined possible. Needless to say, they are now believers in the simplicity that resides at the far side of complexity. The sooner you identify the three to five Key Results that your organization must deliver to survive and thrive, the sooner you will put your organization on the path to greater accountability and alignment. Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars to learn how you can use Key Results to help your organization achieve great success. All registered trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.