Name: Change the Culture, Change the Game
Rating: 4.1 (174 reviews)
Author: Roger Connors and Tom Smith

What’s in it for me? Discover how to energize your organization’s culture.

Too many leaders and management consultants try to take short cuts when tasked with shaking up the culture of an organization. Just by stating, “We want a higher profit margin,” they think that employees will jump to action and align their work with this broad and poorly conceived goal.

It just doesn’t work that way!

These blinks show you that to change a culture, you have to integrate that change from the very top of your organization to the very bottom. And focusing on results and goals is just one small part of the puzzle. You have to consider all the elements on the table – company experience, employee beliefs and ingrained practices – and then ensure that what you change is actually sustained.

Yet in doing so, you’ll find that your organization will hum along like a well-oiled machine, and processes that were previously bogged down now run with precision and ease.

In the following blinks, you’ll discover

how General Motors overhauled its corporate culture and stemmed massive losses;
why changing a culture is a transition and not a transformation; and
why one bookstore lets employees give tokens to each other.

Use the results pyramid to achieve your goals. Define your firm’s experiences, beliefs and actions.

Managers shape a company’s culture every day in the experiences they create for employees. Employees in turn learn how things are done, and an organizational culture establishes itself.

Yet not all organizational cultures are healthy. In some cases, they can even do more damage than good.

This is why leaders need to focus on creating a culture that is beneficial for the company as a whole, from the lowest levels all the way to the top. But how is this done?

The first step is to define your goals and a strategy to reach them. For example, “Make decisions. Take risks. Move fast. Be accountable,” was the strategy General Motors put forward in 2009 to change its culture and stop the company from losing money once and for all.

How did GM decide on this route? To shape your culture and help your organization win, you have to understand the results pyramid.

There are three key components that make up the results pyramid: experiences, beliefs and actions. Stacked on top of each other, the components all contribute to the end result, or the achievements of your organization.

In short: experiences promote beliefs, beliefs impact actions and actions generate results.

Alaris Medical Systems had a bad rep on Wall Street and was criticized for its inability to execute on otherwise quite good ideas. This was the case, that is, until the company turned to the results pyramid as a guide to change its culture.

Alaris executives discussed with every manager how to create the right experiences to foster the desired beliefs, which would in turn produce effective actions, and ultimately achieve the company’s desired target results.

Once the program was introduced, every employee at every level was motivated, optimistic and determined to get results and execute. Within six months, Alaris had completely turned their reputation around!

To shift your culture, you have to shift the experiences, beliefs and actions of those in it.

In a world where being first means everything, you can’t take your time implementing a culture change. But equally importantly, you can’t take shortcuts, either!

Too often, leaders try to change the way people act to get the results they want without working to change the way people think or what they believe. So while employees might appear involved, they won’t actually be committed to the company’s cause.

Key ideas in Change the Culture, Change the Game