Culture Change
Culture is a Business Challenge
It is almost impossible to achieve business results and effectively implement change when your culture is steeped in mistrust, poor communication, blame and self-interest. It doesn’t matter whether you have clear priorities, balanced scorecard, and dashboards that focus on metrics, the breakdown between functions and levels within your organization will prevent you from optimizing results. Culture is not a soft issue. Culture is a critical business issue linked directly to your success.
Why Culture has Become Soft in Most Organizations
Unfortunately, organizations have spent millions of dollars developing mission statements, a set of values, implementing climate surveys and offering training programs on soft skills that have had no proven or measurable impact on organizations that business performance.
Why have these programs been largely ineffective? Because culture is not determined by a proclamation of mission, values or the development of skills. Culture is determined by behaviors not isolated behaviors of a few, but the habitual behaviors of the many. Mission, values and individual skill building doesn’t change collective habits. Ineffective collective habits cause a breakdown in business results and morale at the same time. What are some of the collective ineffective habits that are common in many organizations that negatively impact business results and diminish trust and morale?
- Making decisions without including the areas impacted by those decisions resulting in breakdown, mistrust and conflict
- Information is not being shared openly causing breakdowns in projects and performance, while creating frustration, blame and conflict
- Everything is priority #1 resulting in wasted resources, poor project execution, confusion, conflict and overwhelm
- Silo behavior that results in a breakdown of trust, duplication of efforts, the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing, poor coordination and ineffective on hand-offs
Culture is based on the habits of thinking and behavior that impact business results and morale. And, they can’t be changed and sustained through indoctrination or skill building. If that were possible, we would all be thin, in great shape, and free of addictions. The key to successful culture change is the ability to change collective habits.
IMPAQ’s Solution
IMPAQ has a reputation of achieving rapid culture change because our focus is on habits of execution the link between people and teams, rather than on a set of core values. Unfortunately, habits aren’t changed by training or awareness, but by replacing old habits with new ones. However, it isn’t individual habits that need changing, but collective habits, which is IMPAQ’s core competence.
We begin by identifying A Picture of Success the ideal culture necessary to optimize business results within a 1-year future state. We clarify the roles and expectations of each level within the organization and translate those into clear collective habits of execution that are measured, tracked and linked to business results. Now, culture is directly linked to the business, instead of being thought of as soft and an afterthought. We measure the impact of culture change using team surveys and tracking business results within 6 to 12 months of the initial implementation thereby helping organizations to build true accountability.
The Result:
- The transformation of silos, blaming, politicking, mistrust, poor communication and avoiding conflict to taking initiative to proactively surface and solve problems, working cross-functionally and cooperating at all levels
- Culture is measured through a correlation of data points including business results, execution and relationships
- The culture is used for implementing change with efficiency and effectiveness
- The culture becomes an asset for the organization in developing future leaders and attracting and retaining top performers
- Leadership and engagement is demonstrated at every level
Please email info@impaqcorp.com for more information about our services or call 1-213-536-5685
