Culture change is both easier AND harder than you think…

Culture change is both easier AND harder than you think…

Easier = it’s the stuff you do everyday, the processes you have, the expectations you set, how people are (or aren’t) held accountable, i.e. things that are generally free to change 💸

Harder = changing your own behavior and structures to achieve that culture is WAY harder than training everyone on your desired “culture” 😂

If the things you say you value and are your “culture” aren’t actually panning out in real life, you need to look at some of the things that reinforce the culture you want, AND look at things that do the opposite 🫠

• Transcript

  [00:00:00] Culture change is both easier and harder than we think it is.

  Changing culture and identifying what's going on with culture that needs to be changed can actually be a fairly simple process. The process of changing it is where it gets a little hard. So let me talk to you about where it's simple.

   I like to think about the cultural iceberg. The stuff above the water is the stuff you hear. It could be our offices have really cool artwork and open office environment. Our values that are posted on the walls. Here's the things that we espouse out loud and say, this is who we are as a company.

  What's below the surface of the cultural iceberg is the stuff we don't see, it's the way people in your organization behave and act and think about it like this. You have a new person starting at your company and you say, Ooh, we have a value of collaboration.

  And then that person's in their role for a couple of weeks and their coworkers like, we absolutely do not collaborate with people across teams. What you're seeing is a mismatch in culture. You're seeing that the things that we espouse, or the things that we talk about out loud, do not actually match the lived [00:01:00] reality.

  So this is where I think it actually can be fairly easy to identify the piece of culture that you want to change. For example, we want people to collaborate more. Where it gets hard is how you actually do that. Let me give you a couple of things that might help make it a little bit easier. Instead of looking at training or telling people they need to collaborate more, look at the systems, processes, policies, ways that you hold people accountable and follow up and the expectations that are set that either reinforce people collaborating or reinforce people not collaborating.

  So think about it. And I'd love to hear where you think there might be a cultural mismatch or, the best, a cultural match