Is Your Company Ready To Change Its Culture?

Peter Bregman wrote recently about changing a corporate structure. In the article he cited a study by the University of Illinois researcher Leann Lipps Birch. In the late 1970’s a series of experiments was conducted on children to see what would get them to eat vegetables they disliked. This is a high bar. We’re not talking about simply eating more vegetables. We’re talking about eating specific vegetables, the ones they didn’t like.

You could tell the children you expect them to eat their vegetables. And reward them with ice cream if they did. You could explain all the reasons why eating their vegetables is good for them. And you could eat your own vegetables as a good role model. Those things might help.

But Birch found one thing that worked predictably. She put a child who didn’t like peas at a table with several other children who did. Within a meal or two, the pea-hater was eating peas like the pea-lovers.

Peer pressure.

We tend to conform to the behavior of the people around us. Which is what makes culture change particularly challenging because everyone is conforming to the current culture. Sometimes though, the problem contains the solution.

First we have to decide why we want to change the culture. Think carefully because this is not going to be easy. It took a long time to build where you are and the people, even though it may not be pleasant are used to it. The rules are established, changing them now will bring resistance. Want to proceed?

Then you need to change the story.

“You change a culture with stories. Your culture tells one type of story. Those who toe the line get promoted. No value of an employee or their personal life. Micromanaging of projects or no trust . Whatever it is it’s the story everyone knows.

If you change culture change the story. Begin rewarding the behavior you want to see. Let others see the reward and talk about it. Keep moving forward with the new stories.

Here is an example from Bregman: if you want to create a faster moving, less perfectionist culture, instead of berating someone for sending an email without proper capitalization, send out a memo with typos in it.

Or if you want managers and employees to communicate more effectively, stop checking your computer in the middle of a conversation every time the new message sound beeps. Instead, put your computer to sleep when they walk in your office.

Don’t begin by changing  the performance review system, the rewards packages, the training programs. Don’t change anything. Not yet anyway. For now, just change the stories. For a while there will be a disconnect between the new stories and the entrenched systems promoting the old culture. And that disconnect will create tension. Tension that can be harnessed to create mechanisms to support the new stories.

To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:

1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.

 2.  Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.

What about your company? Are you changing culture? If you are I would love to hear your stories.

Creativity and Design Thinking

Stanford put together this video on the design thinking process. Audio is a little distorted.

FREE Read the Book

Here is the book FREE by Chris Anderson. If you are looking to add value to your business or even your personal brand you will want to look at the concepts in this book.

View this document on Scribd

Happiness is Contagious

This wonderful video shows how easy it is to spread happiness. In these difficult times when people are nervous and scared a little fun can go a long way. As a leader when you look at the people who work for you or you do business with think about creative ways to provide joy.

Moving Your Traditional Marketing Online

Everyone’s telling you to do it but you are not sure how. Online marketing is through the roof in popularity for a reason. It is cheap and powerful when used correctly.

Here are twelve ideas from Channel V Media to help you get started.

1. Audience Identification. If you know who your audience is, you’re already one step ahead of the game. The next step is to figure out where they interact online.
2. Platform Development & Design. Figuring out how to engage and interact with this audience.
3. Brand Campaign Integration. It’s possible for a social media program to piggyback off a good brand campaign, but it has to be transformed into its cooler younger brother.
4. Content Creation/Coordination. You must create a consistent message.
5. Goal Mapping. In other words, how do you measure your success? Is it brand mentions? Traffic? Email sign ups? Leads? Sales? 
6. Brand Identity. Everyone that is engaging via social media on your team must understand your goals and messaging.
7. Audience Attraction. Larger brands like to start spreading the word of their new, fancy and glossy initiatives at the outset, but if your social media program is good, your audience will find them on their own and the spread the word for you.  
8. Social Media Listening. If you don’t know what people are saying about you and your products, their related interests and more, how are you going to interact with them?
9. Community & Social Responsibility. Social responsibility is increasingly expected of everyone – and this engagement is an essential part of your online identity. 
10. Internal/External Community Engagement & Response. Be everywhere. All the time. It’s up to you to let people know that you are listening, engaging, helping, and offering solutions.
11. Brand Advocacy. Authenticity and transparency are such huge aspects of social media, your social media and management team must be 100% on board.
12. Customer Service. Good customer service involves listening (within and outside of social media) and responding appropriately. 

Want To Be An Agent of Change?

Harvard Business Review recently published an article on change. Before we embark upon a change in Business or Career we need to make evaluations by asking ourselves some relevant questions….

1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn’t see?
IDEO’s Tom Kelly likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, “The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” The most successful companies don’t just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of me-too thinking.

2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?
One way to look at problems as if you’re seeing them for the first time is to look at a wide array of fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions that have come to define so many industries.

3. Are you the most of anything?
You can’t be “pretty good” at everything anymore. You have to be the most of something: the most affordable, the most accessible, the most elegant, the most colorful, the most transparent. Companies used to be comfortable in the middle of the road — that’s where all the customers were. Today, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What are you the most of?

4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?
I first heard this question from advertising legend Roy Spence, who says he got it from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as a guide to what really matters.

5. Have you figured out how your organization’s history can help to shape its future? Psychologist Jerome Bruner has a pithy way to describe what happens when the best of the old informs the search for the new. The essence of creativity, he argues, is “figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.” The most creative leaders I’ve met don’t disavow the past. They rediscover and reinterpret what’s come before as a way to develop a line of sight into what comes next.

6. Can your customers live without you?
If they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers — from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question: “Can you imagine a world without this product?” One of the make-or-break challenges for change is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of your customers.

7. Do you treat different customers differently?
If your goal is to become indispensable to your customers, then almost by definition you won’t appeal to all customers. In a fickle and fast-changing world, one test of how committed a company is to its most important customers is how fearless it is about ignoring customers who aren’t central to its mission. Not all customers are created equal.

8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people?
It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners. These days, the most powerful contributions come from the most unexpected places — the “hidden genius” inside your company, the “collective genius” of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who surround your company. Tapping this genius requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to know you don’t have all the answers.

9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change?
Pundits love to excoriate companies because they don’t have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from the most recent management fad to the newest. If, as a leader, you want to make deep-seated change, then your priorities and practices have to stay consistent in good times and bad.

10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, and it may be the most urgent question facing leaders in every field. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving — so that your company can do the same?

Your Office Environment Speaks Louder Than You Do

A friend of mine went to see a homeopathic doctor with a specialty in psychiatry this week. He has an extraordinary amount of experience and the finest degrees in his field. She could not wait to get out of his office and will never return.

Why? The office was completely out of sync with everything he was trying to achieve. The entryway and waiting room was filthy. The receptionist was inappropriate in the way she handled the greeting and her paperwork was in disarray and seemed unsecured. The doctor had his two dogs in a pen and they were smelly and one was recovering from an operation with bandages and a head cone.

Everything about the environment showed a complete disregard for the type of client base he had and the issues they may be dealing with. How much business does this professional who had worked so hard to gain insight and education lose by not attending to the details of his office?

Your clients see the environment that you create as an extension of who you are. In business sometimes loyalty is more about a personal connection and how your clients view you than anything else.  Take a look around your business environment. Does it provide your clients with an immediate connection to you? Does it reflect the professionalism and expertise you want them to see in you?

If you need additional information and an evaluation of your business atmosphere contact: vbrannock@organizationalarchitects.com