The « Culture Barbecue » approach
Focus on the hot coal If you have ever tried to start and run a barbecue, you know it pretty well: it is no use blowing on the cold coal! It is much more efficient to try and lit up 3 or 4 and blow on them so that they contaminate coals around them. It […]
Your organization is a living being
Your culture runs the show In an organization, you can see people are cells, teams as organs, departments as systems. And if you push the metaphor, each of them have their own ways of working and have their own mission, and all of them also all work towards a shared goal, which is to keep
Carefully orchestrate
Spray and pray is not an option If you think of culture like a living being fighting to stay alive, then it becomes clear that shaping culture is not about communicating or convincing, and that training people will not help very much. Shaping culture is about managing the everyday behaviou
Map your change angels
They make or break your change programmes Once you have determined which behaviours you would like to change and understood that informal influencers are the Engine of your company’s copying machine (check this article about how your organization is in fact a big copying machine), then y
Your company is a copying machine
Behaviours (good or bad) spread like an infectious disease Because we are social animals, we look for signs that others are adopting a particular behaviour, and seek confirmation through converging signals. Those signals can come from multiple channels (more on that in this other article).
Alignment: the big illusion
Where is this obsession with clarity and alignment come from? We continuously hear that our organizations. People want things to be clear. Management need to bring clarity to their purpose and vision. People want clarity first before they accept to join a project etc… As if clarity i
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
Culture as a survival kit
Understand the survival kit However big or small your company is, it has a set of behaviours which people consistently adopt and expect others to adopt around them. They do this without paying attention, simply unconsciously replicating what they see around them. Remember your first day in
Shape behaviours, not values
It is all about Jane, Jack, Simon, Sophie or Denise Your unique culture is not about values (did you notice that pretty much all companies have the same values?). Your culture is about what people do everyday. Culture is not defined a priori, it is an outcome. What we think and say is not
Don’t overcommunicate
You’ve been told in management schools or leadership trainings that you never communicate enough. Yet, the story might be different with culture shaping. Indeed, the most important thing when you want to change behaviours of people at scale, is to make sure the behaviours you want to
