You do not achieve cultural change by trying to change the culture

I was inspired today by @flowchainsensei’s tweet "You do not achieve cultural change by trying to change the culture." Which strangely enough is attributed to Francis Maude MP.

I think there is great truth in this statement. In my experience any attempt at culture change without simultaneous changes in the system of work will simply result in further demotivating staff, increasing stress and increasing waste. It is starting at completely the wrong end of cause and effect.

If you begin by examining the system of work, together with eliminating the overlay of traditional management predilections such as quotas, arbitrary targets, service agreements, and “just get on with it” – once people believe you are for real their levels of engagement and excitement go through the roof and culture change comes for free.

I was reminded of a story told by Peter Scholtes on p45 of “The Leader’s Handbook” (pscholtes.com/handbook) where he asked a client “What are your biggest problems?” “Morale” was their immediate and universal response. “I didn’t want to work on morale problems because they are symptoms of something else and working on them usually involves a lot of useless complaining. I got them to agree to defer working on this”.

Instead, Scholtes got the staff working on improving processes that impacted on customers. For example, they studied the core process with the aim of reducing downtime, and set up a series of subprojects to develop real solutions – for example looking at reducing the time spent waiting for parts.

“After six or eight weeks of involvement in such activities, I suggested at a meeting “Now let’s talk about the morale problem.” “What morale problem” they responded.

So the message is clear: change the wasteful and sometimes daft ways of working you currently have, involve the people who actually do the work, and you will gain an energized and more committed workforce into the bargain. If you like, a corollary of “you can’t motivate people, you can only stop demotivating them”.

Scott Adams has useful insight also. Famous mostly in his deriding of management, Adams offers something more positive in Chapter 26 of “The Dilbert Principle” with his “New Company Model:OA5”. His grand insight about company fundamentals is ““Companies with effective employees and good products usually do well”.

The prime aim of his new company model is “to make the employees as effective as possible, and so to get the best out of employees and make sure they leave work at five o’clock (hence OA5)”. He goes on “Most people are creative by nature and happy by default. It doesn’t seem that way because modern management is designed to squash those impulses. An OA5 company is designed to stay out of the way and let the good things happen”.

Overall he is saying “Put in place the culture for transformation – keep your people fresh, happy, and efficient, set a direction – and then stay out of the way”.

Whenever I hear an organisation say “We need culture change around here” I give a sigh and roll my eyes. Instead, let’s just get on with improving the system of work, eliminating wasteful management practices, and allow people their right to joy in work.