Change Your Company Culture—Tools
The HR Professional as Internal Culture Consultant
This paper was written for the NCHRA* Bulletin, August 2002. It describes
the structure and role an HR manager should adopt to help the leadership team
change the culture.
In the first article of this series I described
a company’s culture as similar to a personality—complex, largely
subconscious, and difficult to understand and change. The second article detailed
some areas where Human Resource professionals can foster cultural change.
In this third article I describe a framework that Meridian Group has developed
over 25 years, that assures fast development of the company’s culture.
This framework develops a unique form in each company.
Assume you are the internal lead process consultant to a culture development process. Ideally these are the actions you will take, the structure you will establish and the role you will adopt:
THE STRUCTURE
1. Interviews
At the start of the culture change process you need to understand how managers and employees experience the company’s culture, and what the key cultural issues are. Do this by conducting confidential one-on-one cultural interviews (see The Cultural Interview) of the top management team, and a sampling of managers and employees across other levels. For people to honestly describe their experiences, they must know that these interviews are confidential, that what they say will not be acted on, or discussed with others in any way. Part of the culture development plan is your building that confidentiality. You will continue these interviews as part of the evolving culture change.
2. Close relationship with the leader
Whatever level or unit of the organization you are working with, it is the leader of that unit who sets the stage for the overall change process. People below will change as they see the leader actively supporting new ways, and personally doing new things. As the processes facilitator, you should establish a frank and open relationship with the leader, so you can meet regularly to discuss what he/she does as leader of the culture change effort, and the various meanings people might attach to these actions.
3. Regular leadership meetings
Just below the leader it is the leadership group that sets the stage for all that happens in the company. If change is to occur across the company, the leadership group must become a true team that actively supports the change. To understand this process, the group should meet at least monthly to discuss their own relationships, their goals for the change process, and their leadership of the evolving culture. These discussions include deciding what they will do differently, and then later discussing what flowed from their actions. Because this group begins with a full complement of difficult-to-discuss power and control issues, that will thwart the required level of open discussion, these meetings must be led by a neutral facilitator. This is you. After three or four meetings, you can encourage the managers to hold similar leadership meetings with their own teams, and to begin their own one-on-one Cultural Interviews.
4. Next-level meetings
As the management group develops into a team, it won’t be long before one or two like what is happening so much that they will ask you help them do something similar within their own unit. Over time, this process expands, until there is opportunity for everyone to be involved in the change process. At the first line level, these meetings take the form of supervisor-led problem-solving task groups. Part of your job is to help managers and supervisors be comfortable leading such open groups ( see Making Better Decisions). This is where you will spend most of your time, because this is where most people are. The time taken by this process is compensated for many times over by the increased productivity, and freed management time, as people take on increasing responsibility for identifying and solving problems at their own level, rather than ignoring them or passing them to upper management.
YOUR ROLE
1. Interpreting cultural themes
You come to understand a company’s culture:
- Through your own experiences in that culture.
- From your cultural interviews that reveal other’s experiences of the culture.
- From the management team’s discussions of their interrelationships and their own one-on-one cultural interviews.
With some help and practice, after about ten interviews, you will be able
to tease out the unique cultural patterns of the organization or unit. These
themes usually touch on areas such as authority, control, power, relationships,
information, trust, openness, direction, communications, values, safety, and
fear. These are the foundations that lead to engagement, from which creativity,
responsibility, and productivity flow. From this come profits. As the culture
change process continues, your ongoing interviews, combined with those of
the leadership team, will reveal the changes, and what is and is not working
well about the change process.
2. Confidentiality
As facilitator of the culture change process, you need to establish a clear role of absolute confidentiality with the leadership, and all other levels of the company. For example, after you have interviewed a person in a manager’s department the manager will naturally ask, “How was the interview?” or “What did they say”. Your reply, “You understand that these are confidential interviews.” brings home the point that their own interviews must be held with similar, firm, confidentiality.
3. Independence
You need to be independent enough—financially and in your career—to give managers direct and honest feedback. Facilitating a company’s culture change can be dangerous. Cultures resist change, and may lash out at those who attempt it—especially in the early months. You should expect this, and not take it personally or defensively. It helps to have a close ally in high places.
As an HR professional, some of the above actions may seem difficult to do as an insider, or you might not have the mandate for broad culture change. An alternative to overall culture change is focusing on one aspect of the culture’s development. Say for example, that the leadership team wants more “involvement”. You could ask them to explore what this means in practice, e.g. “What do we do here regularly, that if we changed it a little, we might get more people involved?” Or, if they want to get out more “information”, then you might ask, “How might we find out what kinds of information people want, and how they might like to get it?”
Culture change is difficult but rewarding work. As one senior manager said to me eighteen months into a culture change effort with his business unit, “This is the hardest thing I have ever done, and I have started plants from scratch. But this is the most exciting and most important.”
*NCHRA is the Northern California Human Resource Association: see www.nchra.org