Stop Talking About Culture and Do Something About It
WHEN I’M OUT on the speaking circuit talking about culture, people frequently come up to me and say “Wow, you guys must be swamped these days, culture is all everyone’s talking about!” And culture is the number one challenge on leaders’ minds today. These comments started about a year ago, but interestingly we’re not “swamped.” We’re busy, to be sure, but we’ve been consulting on culture change for many years now, and the pattern today doesn’t feel much different than the pattern from a few years ago: The people who talk about the importance of culture are still vastly outnumbered by the people who are doing something about it.
It doesn’t seem logical. Leaders will agree with me that culture drives employee engagement. They will agree that culture problems reduce the effectiveness of their employees and make attracting and retaining the best talent harder. Yet, year after year, they have no plan in place to make culture stronger. If they know they have these problems, then why are they not solving them?
I think the answer is that they think culture change is out of reach for them. Conventional wisdom has told leaders for decades that culture is almost impossible to understand, let alone change. I once heard an association CEO declare at a conference that it takes a minimum of eight years to change a culture. No one challenged her; everyone just nodded in agreement.
Yet that statement is staggeringly untrue! You can start changing your culture tomorrow, and with manageable effort you can get visible results in about six months. Besides, culture change doesn’t have a start/end date. You’re either continuously managing your culture, or it is changing without your permission. But the work doesn’t stop.
It’s time to stop talking about culture and start doing something about it. In our research, we have found a way to make culture change more manageable. It starts by looking for your existing culture patterns, rather than trying to define an ideal culture.
Culture patterns are the parts of your culture that contain what we call a competing commitment. Your culture values something, like transparency, for example, so you’re committed to people sharing information with each other. But at the same time, your culture values something else that gets in the way of that first commitment, which messes things up.
For example, does this sound familiar? Member inquiries are often met with, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out and get back to you,” and members eventually stop going to your customer service staff for answers. By the time the other department gives them the information they need, they’ve missed the window of opportunity to act.
These problems exist because of a common culture pattern that we call “lagging transparency.” That’s when a culture values sharing information, but it doesn’t value being proactive about it. If people ask for information, their colleagues will generally share it, but they usually wait to be asked. And the waiting – the lag – is what drives those problems mentioned above around poor customer service, missed opportunities, and difficulty with change keep happening.
The good news, however, is that patterns can be changed. You don’t have to launch an eight-year campaign to create the perfect culture. You just find the patterns that are getting in the way and fix them.
The case study in our most recent book that defeated the lagging transparency pattern invested in what we call a “transparency architecture,” rooted in people, process, and technology:
- People: they have a VP of Internal Communications.
- Process: quarterly all-hands meeting to update everyone on all aspects of the business.
- Technology: a carefully designed and implemented intranet.
Your solutions will look different, and that’s fine. Maybe your changes will be more focused on fixing your project management systems, or finally upgrading to an AMS that can provide the right information real time. Other steps could include revamping onboarding, role modeling desired behaviors, or tweaking performance incentives.
The point is, you need to look at the way your association has patterns that are holding you back, and then pick the specific things to change related to people, process, and technology that will move the needle. That’s the work of culture change, and it IS within your reach. In fact, it’s the one thing that’s going to make you an employer of choice.
Article originally published in Associations Evolve: 2024 & Beyond Journal.
