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Culture always wins. And if you don’t believe this, just take a look at all the organizational change that fails. It doesn’t fail for lack of solid business reasoning. If you look underneath all the well-conceived strategies and plans, you’ll run into the organizational culture that can quickly undermine all the best intentions.

Culture is the organization’s “personality” with beliefs, values, attitudes, language, work practices, behaviors and underlying assumptions. And like personalities, these elements are powerful and at times invisible.

If, in order to achieve successful change, one of the requirements includes a shift in the organizational culture, the first important step is the leadership team’s ability to understand the realities of the current culture, (the ‘real’ one, not the one displayed on the walls) and their role in shifting their own behaviors and mindset to match the new desired culture.

In my recent experience with the group of 30 executives, I was able to watch this phenomenon play out. I had the group “warm up” with a simulated experience using a card game to illustrate change which involved some cultural components. They did VERY well, and even utilized some excellent leadership teambuilding actions during the simulation.

Then I put them into a role playing activity based on a real company case study about a transformational merger that was stymied as a result of a cultural clash between the two legacy companies. Their assignment was to determine what needed to be done to mitigate this clash. They immediately went into “business mode” and came up with many tactical ideas – most involving strategic ideas that would help to “control” resistance, from new marketing plans, to systems implementations, to employee training. But not one team identified the kinds of changes that the leadership team would need to recognize for themselves. During the role play debrief, one executive stated that it was easy to behave skillfully in the simulated experience (card house) but much more difficult when the situation was “real” where they needed to move past their typical “business behavior” solutions. It was a defining moment for this team of executives, to discover for themselves how they had so quickly resorted to known business tactics in an attempt to solve the cultural clashes.

So what does this mean to those of you who are leading organizational change? How can you accurately identify your company culture and the importance of aligning the leadership team to own new mindsets and behaviors to ensure successful results?

QUESTIONS TO EXPLORE

• What is really valued in this organization? How is it demonstrated?
• How are decisions made and communicated?
• What skills and characteristics does the organization value?
• How do people from different departments interact?
• What kinds of behaviors get rewarded? What bad behaviors are tolerated?
• What kinds of stories do people tell each other?

ACTION TO TRY

Organizational culture change is necessary to support almost all organizational change efforts (strategic, structural, or process). Organizational change efforts will fail if organizational culture remains fundamentally the same.

Try to be an impartial observer of your culture in action. Look at the employees and their interaction in your organization with the eyes of an outsider.

What are they doing? How are they interacting with each other? How do they communicate with each other? What is important to accomplish? What gets rewarded?

You may be surprised at what you observe. It’s a good way to identify the cultural norms or the ‘real’ personality of your company. Then take a look at yourself as the leader and ask how others would view you as a role model for the desired culture.

Terri Hughes is the owner/principal of Terri Hughes, LLC, a leadership development & executive coaching business. She has been in the business of guiding change and developing leaders for over 25 years, primarily in the corporate space as vice president & director of leadership development and organizational change in a large retail corporation. She is a successful personal and leadership coach, and is a master facilitator.

Terri’s recent clients include leaders and teams in manufacturing, technology, retail, health care, government, small business and higher education industries. She works with individuals and teams in a variety of situational change arenas including: leadership behavioral shifts, new role transitions, career changes, and organizational changes.