Culture never stands still
Every team, in every organisation, has a culture. It's the shared values, behaviours and practices that shape how work gets done. Whether or not anyone designed it on purpose, it's already there, affecting your results every single day.
Most leaders treat culture as a state you arrive at. In truth it's a living system that keeps evolving. Be intentional and give it attention and it compounds. Leave it to run on its own and it drifts, usually towards stagnation and sometimes towards something worse.
When I ask leaders about culture change, I tend to hear the same three phrases, said with total confidence. ‘It's hard.’ ‘It takes years, if it happens at all.’ ‘It can't be measured.’ Each one is wrong, and each one is a tidy excuse for doing (and spending) nothing on it.
Change feels hard because most organisations approach it backwards. They react to symptoms with restructures and operating model changes that never touch the behaviours that sit underneath. The strategy gets days of attention. The culture that has to deliver it gets almost none. HR managers are asked to produce a culture plan that gets cut as soon as the budget is tight.
Research found that adaptable cultures outperformed strong ones. The businesses that kept adjusting as the world changed did better than the ones that kept doing what had always worked.
Yet many senior teams assume the opposite, that a strong, settled culture is the goal. A culture that stops moving because it once worked is the kind that starts hurting your results well before anyone notices the target has been missed.
This is why culture change works best as a habit rather than a project. The organisations still hitting their targets in five years are the ones that refresh their culture on purpose, year after year.
None of this is mysterious. The elements of culture are known. The models that explain how it builds and evolves have been around for decades. What has been missing is a practical way to put them to work over a normal year, with the people who actually live the culture every day.
That's what my new white paper sets out. It brings the research and the established models together with my own experience of working with teams around the world and lays out the model I use to steer culture over different time periods so it's something you can act on rather than nod along to.
You can download it for free, with no marketing strings attached by clicking the image below:
Please share the document far and wide, as the more people that understand how to change culture, the more traction we’ll get in creating (and maintaining) fantastic places to work.
