The Goal isn’t Culture Change!

Organizational culture is like a cow path.  It is really hard to change a cow path (culture). Cows stay on the beaten path because the cows in front of them are on it and so the path’s gotten smoother over time.  What would make those cows take a different path?  They might follow a couple cows who’ve discovered some fresh clover over yonder. Or, if the weather’s bad, maybe the path’s gotten muddy and isn’t traversable anymore. Or maybe the cows realize the path isn’t taking them where they want to go anymore. Usually, it isn’t about trying to change the “old” cow path — it seems to be more about creating conditions that require a new cow path.   Focusing on performance outcomes can begin to nudge your existing culture away from its current “cow path” and toward greater mission success for your organization.  

True story: My colleagues and I were in a meeting with a client — let’s call her Marion — a senior government executive who wanted to change the way her organization thinks about and implements change. Marion had convened a few meetings with several of her high-ranking managers and at each meeting she laid out some visionary, far-reaching and frankly exciting change initiatives she felt their agency needed to embark upon.  What she encountered though was resistance right out of the gate: stalemate. 

The problem is the culture, Marion declared! “We need to change the culture! If we can’t change the culture, we won’t be able to get anything done!”  Oh, how often I hear this.  And, it’s true: The problem often has a lot to do with the culture. Leaders bemoan: People are stuck in their ways!  They don’t want to change!  They don’t want to learn.  They don’t talk to each other.  They resist change.  They won’t get with the program. They are siloed.  They don’t realize what’s going on!  Note the “they” — I never (and I mean never) — hear “we.”  It is always “them.” Hmmm…

What is culture?  It’s the “organizational waters” that everybody — leaders included — are swimming in without even thinking about it.  It is the proverbial “way” that everyone defaults to — it is “the way we do things, the way we act.“ It’s the norm, the behaviors that we not only welcome but also the behaviors we actually tolerate.  And by tolerate I mean, we turn our collective heads, we don’t call out, we grow to live with.

Back to Marion!  “So, what should I do?” Marion wanted to know.  Instead of trying to change the culture, we suggested Marion focus developing a “performance change” plan.  We recommended two things:  First, from the start, frame the change questions in terms that are as concrete and specific as possible — not big and abstract like “culture,” “more efficient,” “more effective,” “agile,”  or “more strategic.”  Second, create a process that engages not just your leaders but people across the organization in asking “what needs to change?”  For example, rather than ask “What do we do to change the culture?” ask questions like: “Are we getting the performance results we need? How do we know?  What gaps do we see?  What do we need to change?  What should our first steps be?”    

Here are more questions we offered to Marion to think about — and note the “way” the work is framed — in each case it is about mobilizing people across her organization to work together toward defining and implementing performance outcomes:

• Does everyone know what the organization’s goals are? What are the top 3-4 strategic imperatives your agency needs to focus on over the next 12-15 months?   If you don’t have the answer, what steps can you take to convene leaders at multiple levels of your organization to help you answer this question? If you’ve ascertained those key imperatives, what steps have you taken to communicate — again and again — those imperatives down and in to all levels of your midlevel and front line leaders and their teams?

• Do teams and their leads feel like they have a stake in your agency’s performance outcomes?  In what ways are front line leaders and their teams collaborating to establish measurable goals and objectives that support achievement of your agency’s  strategic imperatives?  In other words, are staff from the front line on up participating in the process of setting the performance indicators for which they will be accountable? Or are you and higher ups in your agency doing this for them?  because if you are doing it for them,  front-line team members are far less likely to feel a sense of ownership in the results they produce. 

• Do teams get recognized for advancing performance excellence?  What are teams across the organization doing right? Not just individual contributors, but teams.   What inroads and innovations have they implemented that get the organization closer to the performance outcomes everyone is striving to achieve?   Saluting teams — not just individual performers — sends the message that performance is a “team sport” and that working with each other means increased productivity, and higher levels of creativity and problem-solving. 

Here’s my guiding principle:   If you can’t change the culture to get something done, get something done to change the culture.  Why?  Because the goal isn’t culture change — the goal is performance:  top notch, consistently high, world class, preferably customer-centered, innovative, and measurable — but always, it is about performance outcomes. 

Nina is a change management practitioner with Rockwood Company, a woman-owned Washington-based strategy and change management consulting firm serving government leaders and their teams as they work to address our nation’s most complex and meaningful challenges.  In her client work, Nina supports a wide variety of organizational change efforts — from digital transformations and functional re-alignments to the stand-up of enterprise risk management programs, organization-wide policy-change initiatives and more. She has an MA in Communications and an MS in Organization Development, and graduated from both the Johns Hopkins Fellows in Change Management Program and Georgetown University’s McDonough School’s Change Management Advanced Practitioner Program (CMAP). She is ProSci trained, and has written about organizational change for govloop.com, Change Management Review, and Government Executive.

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