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Cultural Transformation is Key

Another factor that works against people's ability to change is culture. Most people readily talk about culture but few really understand its potential to insidiously undermine all efforts of leaders to improve corporate results. In describing his successful turnaround of IBM, Lou Gerstner stated, "I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn't part of the game - it is the game." These words powerfully capture the critical importance of ensuring that culture is fully addressed in any development programme.

Corporate culture shows up in both visible and invisible ways. It determines how people think, act, and view the world around them, thereby dictating the quality of their results. Yet, despite its far-reaching effects - it determines everything from a company's dress code, to the work environment, to the rules for getting ahead and getting promoted - it is generally little understood and allowed to evolve without conscious effort.

You'll need deliberate action

Such "natural evolution" creates huge challenges, as any organisation adopting this approach will be unlikely to be able to meet effectively the requirements of the changing competitive environment. To achieve a significant improvement in corporate results it is always necessary to create a shift in culture, and the need to do so generally becomes evident in one of three ways:

  • The situation eventually becomes unbearable, as it did for IBM in the early 1990s
  • Some sort of disruptive event is experienced to create the impetus for change, such as the arrival of a new CEO
  • The level of awareness of company leaders advances such that they can deliberately choose a more effective approach.

By far the best of these three mechanisms is to raise awareness, since it allows a company to anticipate events and be ahead of the curve in developing an approach to meet them. This is unlikely to happen without deliberate effort.

Click_here_to_download_our_free_report, "Corporate Culture - The Driving Force of your Business", which describes in much greater detail the importance of being sensitive to culture in all corporate transformation initiatives.

Some of the most significant, and often overlooked, challenges_of_cultural_transformation are listed below. Please click the link if you would like to read about any of them in more detail:

Change takes place one person at a time.

The task of evolving your cultural environment can seem daunting, but is definitely achievable, particularly if advantage is taken of the fact that subcultures exist. There are always multiple subcultures in any organisation, built around departments, locations, occupational groups, level in the organisation, etc. By working on team culture, individual leaders may create an environment in which the growth of individual members of the team will be supported.