Company Culture Transformations are all the rage in business these days. It’s hard to find a company that is NOT doing some form of transformation.

Yet it’s really hard to transform a company because most people focus on tech, roadmaps, strategies and the like – but they fail to focus on behaviours.

There are tech transformation, ways of working, agile, people, lean, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.

Yet, to shift the company culture, it’s imporant to realise that the culture of an organisation is nothing more than group habit; it’s what people with the company do every day.

Watch the video or read on below:

In this article we will cover:

• Why changes programs fail
• What behaviours are and what affects them
• 9 ideas to start shifting company culture

Changing Company Culture

What is Culture?

Culture is nothing more than how peoeple talk, interact, work and produce value. They are behaviours that we can study, observe, nudge and communicate about.

The culture of an organisation is the sum of everyone’s behaviours and interactions. It is group habit.

So, to change and transform a company means to focus on changing behaviours.

If you take a look at any high performing company (that people want to stay working in), they are full of people exhibiting high performing behaviours.

It’s not about agile, or lean, MoreOrLessSafe or any other methodology that’s the rage; it’s about how people interact, behave, communicate and work together.

People + Behaviours = Culture.

Company Culture Change programs are failing

A recent report stated that around 70% of Culture Change programs fail.

Why?

Because they don’t focus on changing… BEHAVIOURS.

Here are some of the reasons I’ve personally seen that I believe contribute to change programs failing.

Failure Reason 1 – Companies put EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT above BEHAVIOURS and BUSINESS RESULTS

Engagement is important, no doubt about it.

What would happen though, if every member of staff was highly engaged but the business didn’t meet its results or add value to it’s customers?

Blessing White X Model is a good model to see this play out in business. There are always people highly engaged but adding little business value.

There is also no scientific, industry recognised and agreed upon measure of engagement. If we can’t compare engagement in one company, with engagement in another – what value does that give us?

Even worse is that we often can’t relate employee engagement to business success. High engagement does not guarantee great business success, despite the tenous links touted in the media – so why use it?

• Most of the metrics and data I’ve read on engagement and the relationship to profit are promoted and sponsored by people selling those very engagement models.
• What does the score even mean? If someone is a 7 on a scale of engaged what value does that offer? If the company is 33% engaged – what does that tell you? That 77% aren’t? Or weren’t when the survey was run? Or actually took part? Or the 33% that were engaged weren’t incentivised somehow?
• What if the lowest performers are not engaged but your main contributors are? Doesn’t that sound like a good thing? (although you should be doing something to work on reducing the number of low performers)
• Smaller companies tend to have higher engagement…. Is it because they are doing more meaningful work? Or because they don’t feel like a cog in a machine? Or because they attract a certain sort of employee?
• Roll out a new survey and engagement goes up. Throw a party or pizza lunch and engagement goes up. Tell people their bonus is linked to high engagement scores and engagement scores go up (I’ve seen this SO many times that it’s no longer an exception).

When companies pick an engagement models from the shelf-of-engagement-models, they are putting their faith in that model to increase the bottom line of the business – that’s typically how they have been sold.

But there is rarely any concrete, scientific evidence that aligns the two. Most of the marketing spin is anecdotal. Most of it is just that – marketing.

Engagement models and surveys are qualitative – they represent how people “feel” – yet these feelings are turned in to quantitative data and new initiatives are created off the back of it at huge expense – with the goal of shifting a number.

Couldn’t you find out how the business can support your people by other means? Like managers working more closely with them?

One worrying thing I see is that engagement models take away the need for managers to know their staff. They rely on the data rather than building strong relationships with their team.

And most importantly, why are companies measuring engagement in the first place? Are they trying to to increase profit or doing it for the best interests of people.

It gets gamed

Whatever questions the “surveys” are geared around, is what you end up getting. People will start changing behaviours to meet the survey when it’s prioritised as a business initiative.

So, you’d better be sure the survey is combining business effectiveness with staff engagement. And many don’t.

I worked in one company where the bonus scheme was tied to the engagement scores so that HR and managers could prove they were effective at changing the Ways of Working – so they incentivised the engagement program.

Can you guess what happened? Of course, everybody scored highly, got their bonus and the company continued to flounder. People cheated the survey.

It’s the work that’s important, and if that work IS important then being engaged in it makes sense. But remember the honeymooners? They are engaged in their work – but it’s not adding value. So are they doing the wrong work? Or no work at all?

How is an engagement survey going to tell you if someone is doing the right work? That’s a manager’s job.

I’ve seen this firsthand a number of times. People who love where they work (mostly because nobody asks them to step up and do more, or improve, or fix their poor behaviours – so they get paid to get left alone).

It is very misleading indeed to state that increasing employee engagement will therefore increase business results and productivity.

Engagement belongs to management. If managers build strong relationships, help people grow in their career, design meaningful work, unblock systemic issues and actually care about the people they manage – then you get engagement for free.

Failure Reason 2 – Companies focus a lot on COMPANY CULTURE CHANGE, but it’s rarely directed towards BEHAVIOURS

Take a wander around many modern offices and you will see posters and banners stating the company values.

You will find these values on their websites.

PR friendly executives do talks on company values at conferences and on webinars.

These values often form part of interviews, onboarding bootcamps and the like. Company handbooks are full of nice words, glitzy copy and warm and fuzzy platitudes.

But the values you write down may or may not be what the leaders of the company value.

If you want to know a company’s true values – then find out how people are promoted.

Find out how people are incentivised and promoted. Find out how people are rewarded. Study what behaviours the executives and managers exhibit every day. And if these behaviours, incentives and reasons for promotion align with the words on the walls – then you have found a very rare thing indeed. Stay at that company and help it flourish.

The reality is leaders and managers (and employees too), often don’t walk the talk.

They often exhibit behaviours that are counter to the values.

Don’t tell people how to behave – show them.

And if you do a good enough job of showing them what you value and how you believe people in the company should behave – you won’t need to write them down.

But companies doing transitions and transformations often spend a ridiculous amount of time, energy, attention and money on wording, copy and launch initiatives – when that resource would be much better spent on changing behaviours and role modeling.

Failure Reason 3 – “EMPOWERING PEOPLE” is a common phrase in companies

It’s common to hear managers say that they are empowering people. As though simply saying it actually makes a difference.

The reality is we are empowered anyway. We can walk away, we can find another job, we can make decisions like a grown up, we can challenge and stand up, we can help others who can’t do that, we can take on toxic workplace behaviours, we can blow the whistle. The real thing to study is WHY people aren’t making decisions, or WHY they feel powerless, or WHY when they take some power, do they get reprimanded for it.

Leadership and management behaviours – that why.

In order for people to use the power they already have; managers must change their behaviours.

They must support and coach and help people to make bigger and better decisions. They must release power through delegation and clear vision and better ways of measuring outcomes.

Simply by saying people are empowered changes nothing. Behaving differently does.

Failure Reason 3 – FIDDLING WITH THE NUMBERS is a typical change strategy

I see this all of the time. Leaders and managers who are fiddling with numbers as they try to bring about transformation. More people, more work, more output per person, less budgets, more budgets, no budgets, more NPS, better engagement numbers – you name it.

Target operating models, designs, stories of change and the like. All geared around plotting a new world with guess work numbers. Numbers that can be easily measured or gamed, or numbers that you can blame with, or numbers that give people a false sense of certainty.

But change doesn’t emerges from people working to a future plan with randomly selected numbers and targets.

Sometimes targets stifle even bigger growth. Sometimes targets cause people to cheat. Sometimes targets are completely unachievable. Sometimes targets contradict other targets.

Change programs are full of numbers and targets (reduce capex by %20, reduce headcount by 40%, increase revenue by 300%) and the best thing to ask about targets are the following few questions:

1. Who came up with the numbers?
2. Why are we measuring these numbers?
3. How were the numbers decided upon?
4. Where is the evidence for these numbers?
5. What are we not measuring?
6. Why are we not measuring certain things?

I’ve seen change programs stuffed full of numbers pulled directly from a consultancy company’s playbook.

I’ve even seen a large consultancy provide a “PowerPoint of change” that had a different client’s logo in it. It had a different client’s leadership team listed. And yes, it had the same numbers in it when they sent the correctly branded deck. Different clients – same targets for change.

When I asked the questions above about the numbers, I got blank faces. All the numbers were made up – and likely they were for their other clients too.

Change programs are not about optimistic made up target states. They should be about a clear direction of travel, robust measures of current business performance (from a customers perspective) that people can see so they know how their behaviours affect those numbers. Then they will know how to affect them positively. And of course – always ensure there is a counter balancing number. Speed without quality is nuts. Growth without employee wellbeing causes implosions.

Measure the value to the customer and make everyone aware of how they contribute to this – and then ask people to improve their work in service of the customer, with good managers supporting then hopefully – positive change will emerge. Positive, lasting change that may often out perform any made up number a consultancy company could provide.

The case for focussing on behaviours

By focusing on behaviours, you are focusing on culture.

Behaviours can:

• Be described, documented and communicated
• Be observed, changed and measured
• Be modelled, demonstrated and copied
• Be interviewed for and used for performance reviews

What are behaviours?

Behaviours are:

• The output of work (work items, deliverables, ideas to reality) – these are behaviours in action
• The communication that happens (what people say, how they say it, non-verbal communication, paralanguage)
• What people do

Behaviours matter because they are objective – they can be studied. The words we use may not align with our behaviours – we fool ourselves all the time. Our leaders and managers say they value people, that they are there for them, that they care, that they don’t care about the money and that they’re trying to build a 100-year business – yet our leader’s behaviours sometime betray them.

People don’t always mind sub-standard behaviours (depends on what they are!), but they often can’t stand hypocrisy.

I worked with one organisation where the leaders rolled out new values about trust, integrity blah blah blah. I asked them why “a successful exit at all cost” was not one of their values. After all, the leadership team were doing everything possible to sell the company through immoral, wrong-headed and insulting behaviours. I wasn’t invited back.

I like the way manager-tools.com describe behaviours. I’ve added some examples for clarity.

1. The Words we use.
   1. These affect business results, retention and other people’s behaviours
   2. Here are some examples of poor language I’ve heard in just the last few years
      1. “Just do it”
      2. “You’ll be the one to hang for this” (Really? Threatening!)
      3. “I’ll take you outside and shoot you” (Really?)
      4. “I’ll crucify you if you get this wrong” (OMG)
      5. “I’m going to watch your entire department fail” (WOW)
2. How we say what we say.
   1. Speed, tone, inflection, confidence, pitch
   2. “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”
3. Body Language.
   1. Is it congruent with words?
   2. Is it aggressive or open?
   3. Deviating from baseline?
4. Work Output.
   1. Quality, quantity, timeliness, communication
   2. Relationships
   3. Ability to get on with others
   4. Ability to co-operate around a shared goal

What affects behaviours?

Lots of things affect behaviours in the workplace

1. OURSELVES and our view of the world.
   1. What are our own expectations?
   2. Our upbringing, entitlement, belief about what the world owes us.
   3. And a whole load more – we are complicated beings so we won’t focus on “ourselves” as managers and leaders cannot do much about other people’s beliefs directly.
2. HEALTH
   1. Our health has a huge impact on our behaviours at work.
   2. This includes mental health as well as physical health.
3. Our SEASON of life
   1. What do we want from work?
   2. Are we after career growth and high salaries?
   3. Or are we looking for meaning?
   4. Do we have demands and motivations outside of work that mean we behave in a certain way at work?
4. STRUCTURE and organisation of the work and work environment
   1. Different people in the same structure often achieve similar results.
   2. When people fail, they blame people in other parts of the business, but these other people are often constrained by the structure too.
   3. Reporting demands, measures, metrics, targets, pressure, stress from unachievable targets.
5. MANAGEMENT behaviours
   1. These have a huge impact on us at work.
   2. Do our manager’s and leader’s behaviours cause us problems?
   3. Do the people we work for share the same values and expectations?
   4. How are people treated at work?
6. The WORK
   1. The work itself can seriously effect our behaviours.
   2. Do we enjoy the work we do?
   3. Do we feel any affinity to the work?
   4. Or are we merely going through the motions?
7. CLARITY over our Roles, Responsibilities and expected BEHAVIOURS
   1. Do we know what’s expected of us?
   2. Do we know what role we play in the workplace?
   3. Under-utilised people often create carnage in the workplace as they strive to protect what little they have.
   4. People who have no direction wander aimlessly, often dabbling in work and areas that they aren’t qualified to dabble in.
8. FEEDBACK from managers and peers about positive and negative behaviours
   1. Is anyone telling us we’re doing well?
   2. Is anyone telling us we’re failing?
   3. Does anyone care about us?
9. INCENTIVES
   1. How we are incentivised plays a significant part in our behaviours.
   2. Are we rewarded for doing the right thing?
   3. Are we rewarded for cheating and gaming the system?
   4. Are we after the perks that come with the title?
   5. Do we have shares or options that we’re heading towards? As in a stake in the business outcomes?
   6. Is the work meaningful at a personal level?
10. COACHING and TRAINING and career development around expected behaviours
    1. Are people receiving training that shifts behaviours?
    2. Are they being coached to be better?
    3. Are they being left to their own devices?
    4. I worked in a company once where around 50% of the team were VASTLY underperforming. Nobody had ever spoken to them to explained this. When I did, and made it clear where the standard was, performance vastly improved.
11. DECISIONS by leaders and managers
    1. Leaders and managers should go to where their decisions have impact but few do – so they unleash carnage in the business, often through positive intentions, but without understanding the impact of their decisions.
    2. A lot of poor behaviour in organisations is a direct result of a leader or manager not understanding their world, systems of work or people well enough.
12. ROLE MODELLING by leaders and managers
    1. We copy what influential people do, say and create.
    2. It’s why it’s so important to start with leadership and management behaviours.
13. The MARKET and its impact on the business
    1. Are we working in a growing and emerging market?
    2. Or are we in a dwindling market?

How to CHANGE behaviours – and therefore CULTURE

What follows are some ideas I’ve seen work. Not all will work for you, not all are needed – and of course, there will be things I’ve missed.

1 – Focus on role modelling from the top

The simplest way to change a culture in the organisation (people’s habitual behaviours) is to role model the right behaviours from the highest levels you can.

We cannot expect others to behave in ways that we cannot. We cannot demand from others what we cannot exhibit from ourselves.

If need be, write down the sorts of behaviours you expect from people, communicate them – and then role model them.

2 – Hold others accountable for their behaviours

There’s an old management saying – “You don’t get the behaviours you expect, you get what you tolerate”.

This is a major problem infecting many businesses – managers and leaders who simply do not address poor behaviours. They let poor behaviours and poor performance slide.

They avoid the hard conversations and the difficult feedback. Why? Because it’s hard – it’s awkward sometimes and it requires leaders and managers to develop strength of character, nerves of steel and the outstanding communication skills.

When managers avoid dealing with low performance and poor behaviours, they are simply failing at their job.

If somebody exhibits consistently poor behaviours, they must receive feedback about it. If somebody does illegal, dangerous, immoral behaviours – they must face some consequences – yet I work with SO many companies where this is simply not happening – at all levels in the organisation.

I also see some managers waiting for the dreaded annual review to give feedback. Why wait? It’s not fair on anyone.

In my experience simply sitting down and explaining the lapse in behaviours or performance is enough to get people moving towards improvements.

Most people have never received feedback, either positive or negative. People exhibiting poor performing behaviours are often extremely good and capable – they just need someone to point out where they’re going wrong.

3 – Leave the hierarchy alone

The number of consultants that I meet (usually from giant consulting firms or “agile companies”) who propose removal of the hierarchy during a transformation is insane. Every single company I have been into has people stating this. Why?

Sure, you don’t want layer upon layer of pointless hierarchy, but you cannot seriously expect everyone in the business to make strategic commercial decisions, deal with shareholders, do all of the hiring and firing and have every lens needed to operate a successful business.

You can’t expect everyone in the business to have the same high, medium and low-level view of the business.

Sure, leaders must understand the business and the impact they have on it, but they don’t have to do all of the work. Equally, when we employ people to do a role we shouldn’t expect them to not do that because they’re busy doing shareholder meetings or dealing with clients who are about to leave.

We need people in many roles and levels within the business.

The hierarchy serves many purposes. It allows delegation, succession planning and different expertise to flourish.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a hierarchy in a business – it’s the people in it that cause the problems.

And this comes back to leadership and management behaviours. The hierarchy is not always bad. And any hierarchy with low performers in it will fail. Made even more obvious and stark when those low performers are leaders and managers.

4 – Understand the system and the impact you have on it

Leaders and Managers must understand the system they are in governance of. They should study it, staple themselves to work and know the impact they are having on the system.

With this knowledge they are able to focus energy and attention on the right things.

They will then know what needs transforming, why and how.

Without this knowledge leaders and managers will continue to release carnage and red tape on the people in the business.

Managers and leaders must go to where their decisions have impact – and see for themselves what the outcome was. Was it what was intended? Or did they create a series of problems instead?

They must understand the very world they are trying to change with insights, evidence or data and be able to understand how their actions affect others.

5 – Leaders and manager must be able to clearly articulate the aim and purpose of the system

If you’re trying to change the culture of an organisation through transformation programmes it helps to be able to articulate the very purpose of the business. As in, what does the business do, why and for whom?

I see too many change programmes designed around “industry standards” etc that result in the business forgetting what made it great in the first place. Sometimes, during big change, they forget what their purpose it.

The purpose of the business is important because it helps everyone galvanise around making positive change in support of the purpose, not just changing for the sake of changing.

Once you know the purpose you should have some measures that measure that purpose – so you know that when you embark on change you’re making a positive difference to the right numbers, that measure the purpose. There could be many measures (in fact there should be).

Then you need to paint a rich, bright and compelling vision of the future – as in, what are we all changing and transforming towards. This is about painting a picture of the future, building a strategy and then aligning people around this bright future and plan.

Without a True North or shining light, or painted picture, how will your people know where to make decisions in alignment with what the business exists for?

More importantly – why will they care enough to change their behaviours?

People need to understand why the business exists and put that at the heart of the change.

6 – Study the real problems before any transformation takes place

Here are the two major problems facing most businesses – and simple ideas on how to look at these problems.

1.Limits to delivery and growth

• Many managers and leaders PUSH for more.
• More people. More capacity. More work. More hours. More features. More marketing campaigns. More demand. More incentives. More revenue. More change!
• But the solution is NOT to push for more, it’s to understand what is stopping delivery or growth in the first place.
• This is exactly what Cultivated Management’s model of Release Agility is geared around.
• What’s stopping us? Why aren’t we delivering? Why aren’t we growing (if that’s a goal)?
• By studying the real reasons that are stopping delivery (and ensure this is studied across the widest flow of work you can – as in, don’t limit this studying to departments or teams – it needs to be systemic) – you can move quickly and grow.
• Think about:
  • Poor communication
  • Poor leadership and management behaviours
  • Too many steering groups, committees and boards
  • Confusion over what the business is trying to achieve
  • Too many meetings
  • Too many functional divides in the business
  • Competing departments, requirements, goals, measures,
  • Lack of decision making
  • Slow recruitment
  • Too much money, not enough money
  • Too many vendors with no vested interest
  • etc

2. Short term problem solving

Problem number 2 is that many companies (well, the people in them) aren’t solving problems sufficiently or at the root, so they re-appear – often with more intensity and a growing array of symptoms.

It’s easy to focus on the shiny problems, the interesting ones, the easy ones. But these are often the wrong problems to solve. As system thinkers often say, solving the symptoms (or easy problems) often creates the problems of tomorrow. And there are always more problems at work than we can EVER solve. Hence, we need a painted picture, some measures and appetite to take on the long running, cross functional, systemic, deep rooted problems. Only by doing this will you release agility and deliver.

• Some of the following are examples:
  • They are not addressing behavioural issues or low performance
  • They are not addressing systemic process problems
  • They are bringing in tech to solve a problem that doesn’t exist
  • They are bringing in coaches to solve management problems
  • They are throwing engagement surveys and other “people” orientated initiatives at people, rather than dealing with low performing leaders and managers
  • They are incentivising delivery at the expense of smooth and consistent process
  • They are rewarding salespeople for selling to meet numbers, even when they sell things the company doesn’t even have
  • They reward a hero culture creating single points of failures and relationship driven team selection – at the expense of everyone else
  • There is no succession planning meaning key roles often go unfilled.
• The solution is to fix the real problems and fix the root cause of these problems – no matter how gnarly.
• The solution is to study deeply why things go wrong and make these problems so compelling and interesting that like minded people want to help you solve them.

7 – Change is emergent – you need to study it

Change is a result of actions, interactions and behaviours. And it’s ALWAYS happening.

Not all change is good. Not all change is bad. Some change will be positive for the business, some not.

But change is a result. It emerges as people go about their work.

Change is always happening – the key is understanding the change, measuring the change and trying new things to see what happens. The best managers are those that are always on the look out for big change, not just when a transformation is taking place. They study what caused the change and what impact the change is having on the team and business.

Change cannot be predicted in advance. We may test some hypothesis and expect something, but change may not play that game with us.

It’s why I have such a problem with Target Operating Models. I’ve seen some beautiful examples:

One was a genuine work of artistry. It looked amazing. A lot of hard work went into the company handbook.

The reality was nobody studied it or understood it. After publishing it people continued to behave in the same way, getting the same results.

Another TOM I saw was dissected and brought to life but the reality was the customers, nor the business, needed it. It was shelved. They’d built a TOM for a future that had no place in this company.

The best managers in the business are already moving to a better state. They are continously improving their work and the system that their people work in. They are already moving to something brighter and better.

Change is emergent. It’s constant. It’s part of everyone’s role in the business.

It needs people to embrace it, swim with it, nudge it, experiment with it, change themselves because of it, build teams around it, understand it, enjoy it and develop the behaviours that embrace the ever changing nature of business.

In other words, it needs people who know how to study change.

8 – Set the bar high for learning – Knowledge can only be gained by studying

As change is emergent and organisations are constantly changing (they are organic after all), it needs managers and leaders to role model high behaviours of learning.

Learning is how we study change; it’s how we adapt to it and it’s how we study our problems and address root cause issues. It’s also how we get better professionally and grow as humans. We learn.

Learning isn’t just about consuming new information. It’s also about self-reflection, owning past mistakes and learning from them, and critically understanding our own strengths and weaknesses. Learning is also about both acquiring information and learning through doing.

Our management will never be more or less than us as a person. If we want to be a better manager, we must become a better person.

By role modelling learning and growing, we will encourage others too.

To transform a company culture you need the newly sought after behaviours to be lived and breathed and acted upon.

To gain knowledge of our work, of ourselves, of the changes happening in our organisations – we must study. Don’t tell people how to do it – do it.

9 – Stories go where facts cannot

Transformations in work and life are emotional. Or at least they should be.

If you’re transforming a company culture you must ensure its personal, emotional and visual. Stories help to bring facts to life.

Tell stories. Explain how people will change and grow and overcome obstacles. Paint a picture of the future and explain why it’s so important.

But most importantly, as leaders and managers we often decide on initiatives and feel an emotional connection to these decisions. But that doesn’t mean other people will too. They will not feel the same way that we do about our new plans, ideas and initiatives. We must help them to feel connected to them – stories are how we do this.

10 – HR should play a large supporting role

No transformation or change program will work if HR are not actively supporting managers. As we’ve discussed, behaviours need to shift if you’re changing the culture of an organisation.

To change behaviours managers must give people feedback, explain new standards of behaviours and nudge people to be better. And this will unsettle people, especially in organisations where feedback about performance is non-existent.

I see tweets every day from people telling me they would quit a job if a manager gave them feedback. Really? Good.

Feedback is designed to enhance careers, performance and company results. And if you’re receiving feedback about low performance and poor behaviours, and you don’t want to, then quitting will make that company better.

Feedback is a way to nudge better behaviours. And HR must support the business with this by having a robust process, training managers and supporting managers if people “don’t want to be given feedback”. Good feedback is a joy. It helps you get better.

I worked in one company where the quality of behavours was SO low. I was shocked at how bad it was.

So, I started giving people feedback. Most people responded brilliantly. I’d say 85% of the team started lifting and became great performers – simply from having somebody tell them what the standard of behaviours was, how they were below the standard, and how to improve. But one or two contacted HR – they didn’t like to get feedback.

As this company was SO intent on keeping its staff happy, it had an employee engagement model in place. Sadly, it measured how happy they were – not whether they were effective. I had made them unhappy, so HR told me I couldn’t give these people feedback again! Just these few – the rest, it’s fine. You can imagine the conversation that happened there!

If you are shifting behaviours (as in shifting cultures), you must have HR supporting managers with this. As long as the feedback is professional, entirely about behaviours, in line with the goals of the business and delivered in a calm and neutral way – there is NOTHING wrong with giving employees feedback.

Changing behaviours is holistic – and HR, with their high value initiatives, should play an integral part in supporting managers and leaders.

Closing Thoughts

If your change program does not involve studying, understanding and nudging behaviours, then you’re likely to get the same results in your new world as you did in your last – if you even get there.

How people behave is the company culture. It’s not the tech, the values on the wall or the beer on a Friday – its how people behave.

Change requires a focus on behaviours.

Consider though that high performing people will naturally work well with others, improve the processes, focus on the customers and help others. The more people you have behaving in the way the more you can pull the car of motion until the momentum has everyone moving in the same direction.

If you’re embarking on a transformation program I wish you the best of luck. There is absolute value in transforming company cultures. Just be sure to focus on behaviours. Business results with different behaviours 🙂

And that’s why I encourage managers to become extremely good at observing, studying and nurturing constant change. This constant change is inevitable – and the best managers are those that understand why it happened, what happened and the impact it has on the business.

Good luck.

Rob..