Overcoming Obstacles to Successful Culture Change

As businesses work through the complexity of return-to-office strategies and determine how to manage a forever-hybrid workforce, the need to cultivate — and preserve — effective organizational culture is on everyone’s minds. Driving intentional culture is a critical element of an adaptable organization that can respond to emerging challenges and opportunities at today’s fast pace. As the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertainty and complexity that have accompanied it have clearly demonstrated, organizations need cultures that encourage flexibility, adaptability, and speed.

But despite shared recognition of the importance and role of culture, there is very little consensus on how to effectively change it. Typical approaches to culture change — relying on leaders to define the culture and cascade it throughout the organization, or fully outsourcing the responsibility of shaping and building culture to an HR group — rarely produce real results. These attempts often face major hurdles in the typical management-centric organization, which leans toward stability and reliability rather than change and agility, and whose leaders may view change as a threat.

Our observations of successful cultural change efforts suggest that organizations should take an approach that starts with new actions, not with leaders identifying or articulating a desired culture. Rather than merely stating a desire for a culture with greater collaboration, for example, you would encourage collaboration through actions: seeking input from others, including junior or new colleagues on the team; including end users in the solution design process from the outset rather than waiting until a new product is ready to beta test; or more actively using internal communication tools to share ideas and progress updates in real time.

These new actions, when consistent with the business strategy, start to generate tangible results, which, when celebrated early and often across an entire organization, can inspire more new actions. Over time, this cycle of new behaviors generates new, lasting habits that snowball across the organization. Once behaviors become habits, these new ways of working become “how we do it here” — rather than isolated, individual, or fleeting instances.

Our research on and observations of organizational efforts to define or evolve culture have revealed common pitfalls and some proven strategies for producing a meaningful impact on culture. Below are three of the most widespread dangers to culture change, along with strategies for addressing them.

1. Not connecting culture to business outcomes. Organizations often embark on a cultural transformation without clearly defined, measurable outcomes, which makes it nearly impossible to truly judge progress or assess which efforts are effective. The notion that culture cannot be measured leads to limited investment in it and the de-prioritization of it, especially in difficult times. While culture itself can be hard to measure, the prevalence and impact of new behaviors or actions can be measured through surveys, business metrics, and qualitative observations. Without a clear connection between culture and overall business performance, it’s easy to tag culture change as the responsibility of one individual or function rather than a companywide priority. But it is in each individual’s discrete actions and behaviors that true culture change takes hold.

Another common trap is trying to emulate the “great” culture of another organization. While an outside-in perspective can be helpful, you can’t simply copy and paste someone else’s culture into your own organization and expect it to fit or endure. Your organization’s distinctive culture must be aligned with its strategy while remaining tied to its values, purpose, and vision.

The key is to recognize that culture change is not a goal in itself, but rather a means to achieving a specific business outcome, whether that is greater customer intimacy, more innovative products, greater operational efficiencies, or something else entirely. This is also why culture change must be closely integrated with the overall business strategy rather than isolated within a single function. Starting with meaningful business objectives makes it easier to identify the specific behaviors and ways of working that will help you achieve these goals. It’s also helpful to intentionally call out, celebrate, and reinforce new behaviors that exemplify your desired culture. And when reporting on business results, explicitly and regularly highlight how these new behaviors and ways of working contributed to those outcomes.

2. Driving culture by decree. Many people believe that the job of senior leaders is to define and establish the culture. This view is not just unhelpful but actively harmful. Involvement and direction from senior leaders is essential in successful culture change — but change efforts, especially culture change initiatives, are unsuccessful when pushed from the top down. Lasting change arises from new behaviors, instilled over time, from many people across the organization. True behavior change requires that people become inspired by what’s possible and driven to achieve that vision.

The management-centric design of many organizations reinforces the fruitless practice of defining culture at the top and cascading it throughout the organization. Organizations that rely more on a management approach to decision-making than a leadership one — leaning toward control, problem-solving, and risk aversion rather than looking forward, innovating, and taking risks — may struggle to drive new behaviors. Employees in these management-centric organizations typically lack true autonomy and grow more accustomed to taking direction than showing initiative. While many leaders have a somewhat valid fear of losing control, culture cannot be imposed. Leaders must therefore find a balance between playing a role in intentionally defining the behaviors they expect to see and creating space for employees to shape the culture.

Leaders who instead view their role less as defining the culture and more as shaping or guiding the emergence of the culture are the most successful in driving change. In this model, the emphasis from leaders is on new actions, which form habits that lead to a new culture over time. In practice, this starts with articulating a compelling aspiration so that people understand what’s possible and what changes are necessary to achieve the goal. Leaders can encourage new ways of working by modeling the behavior they want to see, making explicit decisions reflective of desired outcomes, and recognizing and rewarding those who implement new behaviors.

3. Stopping short of sustainability. It’s exciting to begin seeing examples of success as a result of new behaviors that are aligned with the culture you’re trying to cultivate. While these proof points are critical and should be celebrated, it’s tempting to assume that emerging behaviors are more widespread or embedded than they truly are. Mistaking isolated instances of these behaviors for habits is dangerous, because, just as we’ve all had New Year’s resolutions that didn’t last, initial momentum is not always sustained over time — by employees or by leaders.

Without hard metrics, many leaders rely on loose qualitative data from a small group of trusted advisers as evidence that a new culture is indeed becoming embedded in the organization. The grueling pace of today’s world and the seemingly endless number of competing priorities can tempt leaders to judge early progress as “good enough” so that they can shift their focus to the next crisis or initiative.

Instead, don’t let up once you see signs of progress. Find ways to continue to uncover and broadly share examples of the desired culture in action. Viewing culture change as a way to enable business outcomes is also helpful in ensuring sustainability. Culture change is successful when new behaviors are embedded, outcomes are measurably achieved, and success is sustained — when the new way of doing things is the way of doing things.

Culture in any organization will continue to evolve due to internal changes and shifts in the external environment. To adapt to the changing environment within and outside your organization, it’s important to consistently and intentionally integrate culture into regular strategy conversations.

The Stakes

We are slowly emerging from one of the most challenging years many employees and organizations have ever faced. Although the pandemic has been exceptionally disruptive, the uncertainty, complexity, and volatility that we are experiencing are here to stay. For the sake of our employees, our communities, and our organizations, we need many more organizations that understand the science of culture change and are willing to adapt to the needs of our rapidly changing world.