Your culture is watching you
Your culture is constantly screening and scanning its environment to look for signals of how to behave in order to « survive ». Send it the signals it needs to see so that the “new behaviours” become the new social norm, and it will be « reassured » that it can follow you and change!
You may be tempted to use standard communication approaches to do so (read more on the need to not overcommunicate in this other article). But the truth is that the signals you will send to your culture shoudl primarily come from 4 other channels:
1°) Formal leaders (from first line leaders all the way up to top management) will intentionally show a different behaviour. Middle managers are particularly important. They will do this especially when noone is watching. Faking it to please their boss or because they were told it is the right thing to do will not fool their teams. They need to believe in their new behaviour, and humbly want to show vulnerability and progress, so that their team truly believes in them.
At humanize, we partner with the best players in the market to offer training, individual coaching and team coaching of your leaders on the importance of adopting the new behaviours and on how to work with informality and networks. Talk to us
2°) Trusted colleagues will never give up adopting the right behaviours. Your people will see informal influencers around the organization behave in the « new » way. Informal influencers are your “change angels”. They play a crucial role in culture, even more so in culture shaping/transformation.
At humanize, we help you identify informal influencers and build rapport and constant emotional connection with them. Curious? Contact us to discover how.
3°) Simple everyday facts and proofs of behaviours in action that your culture can understand. From symbolic decisions and actions at the very top of the company, to second line managers leading their meetings or f2f differently, or to everyday shopfloor success stories. Those are the key signals your culture will be looking for. It will seek and find examples: good or bad…
At humanize, we accompany you in communication activities, both for formal and informal channels. And we train your culture team so that become autonomous in orchestrating those signals, so that stories of new behaviours spread faster to eventually accelerate the desired culture shift. Reach out to us for support.
4°) Consistent business processes will remind everyone constantly that the new behaviours are the norm. Key intiatives will build on those « new » behaviours, those who not display those « new » behaviours will not be considered for the talent pool or for promotion etc… This consistency is necessary for your culture to truly consider changing, and it will also help accelerate conversation rates of employees to the « new » behaviours. Those constant reminders should be seen everywhere in your organization. This will demonstrate the consistency of the « new » behaviours across the whole organization, and people will feel pulled to change. Call us: we can show you where to start.
