Changing your organizational culture is the toughest task you will ever take on.

Your organizational culture was formed over

Organizational cultures form for a reason. Perhaps the current organizational culture matches the style and comfort zone of
the company founder. Culture frequently echoes the prevailing management style. Since managers tend to hire people just
like themselves, the established organizational culture is reinforced by new hires.

Organizational culture grows over time. People are comfortable with the current organizational culture. For people to
consider culture change, usually a significant event must occur. An event that rocks their world such as flirting with
bankruptcy, a significant loss of sales and customers, or losing a million dollars, might get people's attention.

Even then, to recognize that the organizational culture is the culprit and to take steps to change it, is a tough journey. In no
way do I mean to trivialize the difficulty of the experience of organizational culture change by summarizing it in this article,
but here are my best ideas about culture change that can help your organization grow and transform.

When people in an organization realize and recognize that their current organizational culture needs to transform to support
the organization's success and progress, change can occur. But change is not pretty and change is not easy.

The good news? Organizational culture change is possible. Culture change requires understanding, commitment, and tools.

Steps in Organizational Culture Change

There are three major steps involved in changing an organization's culture.

1. My earlier article discusses How to Understand Your Current Culture. Before an organization can change its
culture, it must first understand the current culture, or the way things are now. Do take the time to pursue the activities
in this article before moving on to the next steps.

2. Once you understand your current organizational culture, your organization must thendecide where it wants to go,
define its strategic direction, and decide what the organizational culture should look like to support success. What
vision does the organization have for its future and how must the culture change to support the accomplishment of that
vision?

3. Finally, the individuals in the organization must decide to change their behavior to create the desired
organizational culture. This is the hardest step in culture change.

Plan the Desired Organizational Culture

The organization must plan where it wants to go before trying to make any changes in the organizational culture. With a
clear picture of where the organization is currently, the organization can plan where it wants to be next.

Mission, vision, and values: to provide a framework for the assessment and evaluation of the current organizational culture,
your organization needs to develop a picture of its desired future. What does the organization want to create for the
future? Mission, vision, and values should be examined for both the strategic and the value based components of the
organization. Your management team needs to answer questions such as:
 What are the five most important values you would like to see represented in your organizational culture?
 Are these values compatible with your current organizational culture? Do they exist now? If not, why not? If they
are so important, why are you not attaining these values?
Take a look at the rest of the actions you need to take to change your organizational culture.

 What needs to happen to create the culture desired by the organization? You cannot change the
organizational culture without knowing where your organization wants to be or what elements of the current
 organizational culture need to change. What cultural elements support the success of your organization, or not? As an
example, your team decides that you spend too much time agreeing with each other rather than challenging the forecasts
and assumptions of fellow team members, that typically have been incorrect.

In a second example, your key management team members, who must lead the company, spend most of their time team
building with various members of the team on an individual basis, and to promote individual agendas, to the detriment of
the cohesive functioning of the whole group. Third, your company employees appear to make a decision, but, in truth,
are waiting for the "blessing" from the company owner or founder to actually move forward with the plan.

In each of these situations, components of the organizational culture will keep your organization from moving forward
with the success you deserve. You need to consciously identify the cultural impediments and decide to change them.

However, knowing what the desired organizational culture looks like is not enough. Organizations must create plans to
ensure that the desired organizational culture becomes a reality.

Change the Organizational Culture

It is more difficult to change the culture of an existing organization than to create a culture in a brand new organization.
When an organizational culture is already established, people must unlearn the old values, assumptions, and behaviors before
they can learn the new ones.

The two most important elements for creating organizational cultural change are executive support and training.

 Executive support: Executives in the organization must support the cultural change, and in ways beyond verbal
support. They must show behavioral support for the cultural change. Executives must lead the change by changing their
own behaviors. It is extremely important for executives to consistently support the change.

 Training: Culture change depends on behavior change. Members of the organization must clearly understand what
is expected of them, and must know how to actually do the new behaviors, once they have been defined. Training can be
very useful in both communicating expectations and teaching new behaviors.

Additional Ways to Change the Organizational Culture

Other components important in changing the culture of an organization are:

 Create value and belief statements: use employee focus groups, by department, to put the mission, vision, and
values into words that state their impact on each employee's job. For one job, the employee stated: "I live the value of
quality patient care by listening attentively whenever a patient speaks." This exercise gives all employees a common
understanding of the desired culture that actually reflects the actions they must commit to on their jobs.
 Practice effective communication: keeping all employees informed about the organizational culture change
process ensures commitment and success. Telling employees what is expected of them is critical for effective
organizational culture change.
 Review organizational structure: changing the physical structure of the company to align it with the desired
organizational culture may be necessary. As an example, in a small company, four distinct business units competing for
product, customers, and internal support resources, may not support the creation of an effective organizational culture.
These units are unlikely to align to support the overall success of the business.
 Redesign your approach to rewards and recognition: you will likely need to change the reward system to
encourage the behaviors vital to the desired organizational culture.
 Review all work systems such as employee promotions, pay practices, performance management, and employee
selection to make sure they are aligned with the desired culture. As an example, you cannot just reward individual
performance if the requirements of your organizational culture specify team work. An executive's total bonus cannot
reward the accomplishment of his department's goals without recognizing the importance of him playing well with
others on the executive team to accomplish your organizational goals.

You can change your organizational culture to support the accomplishment of your business goals. Changing the
organizational culture requires time, commitment, planning and proper execution - but it can be done.
Take a look at the first steps you need to take to change your corporate culture.

Resistance to change

Resistance to change is the inevitable consequence when senior management overlook the people
related issues that are crucial to success, but there is a further, closely related, reason and that is to do
with organisational culture.

There is no single "golden bullet" that guarantees a successful change initiative, and that overcomes all
resistance to change. Dealing with resistance to change is based on a composite understanding of a
number of inter-related factors, including: clarity about what you are doing and why; good leadership;
an appropriate change model and methodology; and clear understanding of what is required to translate
the change vision and strategy into actionable steps.

Understanding the cultural composition of your organisation

One often-overlooked yet important dimension of resistance to change lies in a clear understanding of
the cultural composition of your organisation.

The process that leads to this understanding involves a thorough cultural mapping and analysis focusing
on the key questions of "How we look now" and "How we want to look in future". You need to define a
cultural framework for the organisation that identifies the:

(1) Dominant-culture of the company now, how it really is now

(2) Espoused-culture - what senior management think (or wish) the culture is - often reflected in so
called "mission statements"

(3) Desired-culture - how it will all look after a successful change initiative

But you need to go deeper than that and specifically, you need to know how to identify and connect with
all of the "sub-groups" or sub-cultures in your organisation that will assist or resist the change initiative.
These can be categorised as:

"Regressive-subcultures" and "Subversive-subcultures"

There are sub-cultures that are "regressive" and who show resistance to change, and there are sub-
cultures that are "subversive" and who will go beyond mere resistance to change and seek to undermine
it.

"Emergent-subcultures" and "Aspirational-subcultures"

Fortunately, there are other sub-cultures that are "emergent", moving forward and receptive to change
but doing so "unknowingly" (that is without full conscious awareness of the significance of their attitudes
and behaviour). These people just naturally and automatically seek to do things in the best way
possible, and they are naturally open-minded about change.

Better still tho, there are sub-cultures that are "aspirational" and who embrace change and seek it
positively. These sub-cultures behave knowingly (that is with full conscious awareness of what they are
doing). These are the people who are constantly seeking to "up their game" and who are naturally
change-positive.

It is these last two groups who will be key to overcoming resistance to change and who need to an
integral part of what John Kotter refers to as your "coalition for change".
For more on this please see: Resistance to Change 

To learn about out the specifics of the tool and process that will enable you to undertake this detailed
cultural and sub-cultural analysis please refer to: The Practitioners' Masterclass which includes a whole
module specifically on cultural mapping and analysis.

Read more: http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/resistance-to-change-working-with-
supportive-sub-cultures-to-overcome-it-2631998.html#ixzz0wyrMCxtD 
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