Culture change is probably on your leadership agenda. You may want (or feel forced) to create a post-pandemic culture, or become more collaborative, innovative, or aggressive.
But most companies fail in this because they try to change culture directly—through speeches, training programs, or direct intervention in meetings. Twitter is a perfect example. Concerned that Twitter’s “nice culture” held back innovation, Dantley Davis, the new vice-president of design, asked employees in a meeting to critique each other. The idea was that tough criticism would help. Instead, people ended up feeling insulted and angry. But Twitter hasn’t backed down from the idea and has even promoted Davis. Employee dissatisfaction, the company said, is sometimes the cost of shaking things up.
"Culture gets changed by doing real work in line with the new strategy, a new governance model, business processes, or performance management systems."
Pain is part of the cost of successful knee surgery, but that doesn’t mean banging someone on the knee with a hammer is successful knee surgery. Culture is how a group does the things it does. It changes because people start doing things differently or start doing different things. The causality doesn’t go the other way.
So, in a company, you first need to change how the company is organized, managed, and led in light of its strategic goals. The goals themselves may need to change. A new culture then emerges as a byproduct of these changes.
Culture isn’t something you fix
Consider Vince Forlenza’s experience, as former CEO of medical technology maker Becton Dickinson, in developing a more innovative culture to meet the changing competitive landscape. He recently told me, “The barrier that was most difficult to change was our culture—our lack of constructive conflict and engagement.”
The company formed a “culture committee” that Forlenza considered a waste of time and, ultimately, jettisoned, adding that:
“Culture gets changed by doing real work in line with the new strategy, a new governance model, business processes, or performance management systems. Not much happens from pure culture conversations because they don’t result in a clear idea of what needs to change and how it will be changed to reinforce key strategic priorities.”
Harvard Business School professor Jay Lorsch and investment analyst Emily McTague interviewed current and past CEOs who had led successful corporate transformations and came to the same conclusion in a Harvard Business Review article:
“[These leaders] say that culture isn’t something you 'fix.' Rather, in their experience, cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges like reworking an outdated strategy or business model. The culture evolves as you do that important work.”
Lorsch and McTague offered Ford as an example. When Allan Mullaly took over Ford in 2006, he faced a culture of competition between units rather than cooperation on strategic goals. Instead of chasing shadows by trying to change attitudes and culture directly, Mullaly created cross-unit meetings to identify and solve major business problems. Focusing on changing the way work was done to solve concrete business problems inevitably changed the norms for collaboration—that is, the culture.
A model for culture change
My colleague Russ Eisenstat and I, in collaboration with senior executives at Becton Dickinson, developed a powerful way to change culture by first coming to an agreement—in very practical terms—about what the company should be doing and how it should be done.
"Changing how the business is organized and managed results in dramatic and often rapid changes in culture."
Our Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) results in a “conversation” that’s honest (with the whole truth on the table), collective (involving key people across the organization) and transparent (nothing is hidden—neither the process nor what senior management learned and plans to change).
Forlenza says the SFP he led at Becton Dickinson in 2010:
- Encouraged open communication as employees provided feedback and suggestions.
- Aligned stakeholders and teams needed to address barriers to change.
- Elevated high-potential talent by giving them an opportunity to identify and solve challenges across the organization.
“Task force members working in a given function or business are asked to interview people in functions and businesses they are not working in and to be involved with people from other activities to solve them,” Forlenza says. “It’s very positive from a cultural standpoint.”
SFP has proven a powerful tool because it not only changes how work is done and with whom, but also increases commitment to dramatic change and the trust that is essential to such a commitment.
SFP has since been applied in hundreds of organizations. Consistent with the research cited above, our own rigorous evaluation of these applications shows that changing how the business is organized and managed results in dramatic and often rapid changes in culture—and that’s what boosts performance.
Michael Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School.
[Image: Unsplash/Andrej Lišakov]
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