Speed Up Culture Change: A Leader Guide

The Process of Culture Change Needs to Be Faster
Experience and project postmortem analyses consistently show that organizational change is rarely easy. At best, adoption of new behaviors and mindsets often lags behind the pace demanded by your strategic objectives, creating gaps in performance and alignment. Yet, the process doesn’t have to be slow — there are proven approaches that can speed up culture change and help your organization move with both speed and consistency.

The First Steps to Increase the Speed of Culture Change
Strategy only succeeds when it flows through culture and people. That means you must be unequivocally clear not just on your corporate strategy, but also on the specific cultural attributes that will enable your strategic priorities to succeed.  The initial step is to gain absolute clarity on your current corporate culture by:

• Assessing the behaviors, norms, and values that define your organization today.
• Defining the culture required to deliver on your strategic objectives.

This enables you to create a reality-driven plan to close key culture gaps.

Culture is the “How” and Strategy is the “What”

Culture represents how work actually gets done in an organization — the behaviors, team norms, and habits that shape day-to-day strategy execution.  Studies on organizational alignment reveal that culture accounts for 40% of the performance gap between high- and low-performing organizations in terms of revenue growth, profitability, leadership effectiveness, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.

Strategy, by contrast, defines what must be accomplished — the critical choices about where the company competes and the few pivotal actions it must take to succeed.  At its core, strategy is the big problem your organization is solving and the decisions you make about how to allocate limited resources and energy to tackle it effectively.  It accounts for 31% of the performance difference.

Culture and strategy are inseparable: without the right culture, even the clearest strategy will struggle to translate into results.

Reach for the Tipping Point
Change management consulting theory teaches that small shifts can reach a tipping point, triggering larger, more impactful transformation. In the context of culture change, this means that once a critical group of employees consistently demonstrates the desired behaviors, values, and mindsets, adoption spreads more rapidly and broadly across the organization.

Some research suggests that as little as 10% of the workforce modeling the desired culture can influence the majority. Our experience, however, indicates that meaningful, sustainable change typically requires at least 50% of employees — or all of your top performers — to fully embrace and succeed with the “new way.”

Who Matters Most to Speed Up Culture Change

If you are hoping to accelerate the process of culture change at your organization, you must identify the critical employees who will have the greatest impact on the rest. Here, based upon data form our change management simulation, is where you should focus your attention:

1. Those Who Lead
   Certainly those who are in leadership positions and visible as role models need to buy into, support, and exhibit the desired behaviors day in and day out. If leadership is not on board with the desired cultural changes, few employees will be motivated to shift in the new direction.
2. Those Who Influence
   Influencers are not always in defined leadership roles. We define influencers as those who have earned the respect and admiration of their colleagues. While they may not have the same visibility level of formal leaders, those around them listen to and follow them.
3. Those Who Get It
   Find those employees who already successfully exhibit the values and behaviors you want. Make sure they understand why those behaviors matter and how they fit into the business strategy. Then use them as enthusiastic culture champions to help spread the word.
4. Those Who Perform
   Your high performers set the standard for those around them.  If they continue to perform and are modeling the new ways, people will take notice.  High performers set the example by being the first to demonstrate that the changes are possible and make sense.
5. Those Who Are Open
   There are some who will resist change. Instead, go for the employees who are early adapters and support your strategic and cultural shifts. They can comprise those last few needed to reach the tipping point of cultural evolution.

The Bottom Line
Cultural change does require patience, but it doesn’t have to be slow. With a clear strategy and a carefully chosen group of culture champions, organizations can accelerate adoption, creating change momentum that turns desired behaviors and values into lasting, widespread change.

If you want to learn more about creating an aligned corporate culture faster, download 3 Levels of Culture that Must be Addressed to Create Cultural Change

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.