You can’t change Culture!

I've overlooked something important.

I've worked with dozens and dozens of firms over 30 years to change their culture and the biggest thing I've learned, I've never shared with anyone.

You can't change culture!

Culture is the shared values, beliefs, norms, expectations and everyday behaviours that shape how people in an organisation think, act, and work together. Good luck with changing that, where do you start?
- Have an Executive retreat?
- Publish some values on your website?
- Have them made up into mouse mats and posters?

Or you can start with the understanding that Culture is an outcome, not an input. It is the direct result of how an organisation does innumerable small but important things, what I describe as the 'causal factors' for culture.

What are these causal factors, these levers for changing culture? Well there's a lot of them, but some of the big ones are:
- Leadership capability
- Communication, style and cadence
- Job Design
- Formal and informal decision-making practices
- Recruitment & Selection
- Development planning
- Recognition and reward
- Goal setting

Work on these, understand which ones are enabling and which are inhibiting a move to the culture you aspire to, then you might see the dial start to move on Culture. If you really want to ramp things up, let someone else have a go, get those people who live and breathe the culture to do the heavy-lifting, get them involved.

Like most things, there are robust and reliable relationships about how you do certain things (i.e. the causal factors) and their impact on Culture.
You could have an evidence-based roadmap to get you to where you want to go on your cultural journey in as little as 21 days.

If you don't have a clear map of which factors are helping and which are hindering your culture and what to do next, we should talk.