This is one of the most frequent questions asked by prospective clients.
If top leadership is not truly committed to a fundamental cultural shift, then the answer is “NO”. However, when leadership is committed to implement a cultural change and willing to risk their political capital for change, then the answer is “ABSOLUTELY YES”.
It is a well-known fact that as many as 75% of reengineering, total quality management, strategic planning, and downsizing efforts fail entirely or create problems serious enough that the survival of the organization is threatened because the leadership of these organizations have failed to recognize the need to properly integrate necessary changes in their organization’s culture.
Although strategy, market presence, and technology are clearly important, highly successful organizations have capitalized on the power of developing and managing a distinct organizational culture. This is why Wal-Mart killed Sears and Kmart; why Southwest Airlines prevailed when Eastern, Pan Am, and People Express went belly up. How about Coca-Cola, Disney, General Electric, Intel, McDonalds, Microsoft, Rubbermaid, Sony or Toyota? Their distinctive cultures create success.
A proactive organizational culture reduces uncertainty. It creates order by reinforcing explicit goals; creates continuity by consistently communicating key values, creates a commitment to bind employees together and communicates a vision for the future. Employees are energized and create positive change.
In other words, even when procedures and strategies are altered, or some technological innovation is adapted, organizations can quickly return to the status quo when values, orientations, definitions, and goals stay constant.
Sustainable improvement is realized when management creates conditions that allow employees to adopt a different way to think about the company and their role in it. Higher levels of productivity, quality, efficiency, and moral will follow when the culture is properly transformed and integrated with other change initiatives, such as lean, six-sigma, total quality management , re-engineering, etc.
Next month we will present a framework for managing change and producing sustainable performance improvements. That is, a repeatable process that highlights goal development, top-down communication of goals, identification and resolution of performance barriers, and middle management’s role to facilitate bottom-up interventions.
