Promote a positive change culture
Creating an environment where change can thrive
Sharon Varney
Objectives
- To develop your understanding of what is meant by a positive change culture and why organisations need it.
- To help you learn how to create the conditions for change to thrive in your team and in your organisation.
- To help you negotiate six common hurdles to developing a positive change culture.
Overview
Like it or not, the world is changing. So, change in our working world is no longer an option. Organisations need to innovate continuously, not only to stay ahead, but just to keep up with the pack in this increasingly dynamic environment. Those that do not can quickly become outdated and irrelevant. That is why the ‘change or die’ imperative has become a common mantra in the business world.
Against that backdrop, a key skill for managers is to promote a positive change culture in their teams and across their organisations. The task is to create fertile ground for change so that it can take root, grow and flourish. And the strategic goal is to develop agility and resilience so that people and organisations are equipped to thrive in an increasingly dynamic world.
Creating an environment where change can thrive means nurturing change-ability so people feel ready and able to engage with change and make it theirs. It means creating a culture where people can take and make opportunities, where they feel able to innovate and experiment. It means encouraging people to learn fast and respond effectively, and sharing that learning to help others learn, too.
Making change your own is a very different proposition to having change imposed. It channels energy away from resistance and towards something more engaging and productive. It creates an energising, rather than an energy-sapping, working environment – the kind of place where most of us would love to work.
Yet many managers find themselves in organisations that are far from that ideal. They may be feeling overwhelmed by change that seems to be coming at them from many directions all at once. They may feel drained by the non-stop nature of it all and they might dearly want to hit pause or rewind. But that is not possible in a dynamic world.
The question addressed in this book is how managers like you can create an environment where change can thrive. Trying to change the culture in your team can feel like a mammoth task. But, just like the proverbial advice about eating an elephant, you cannot expect to do it all at once.
Q: So, how do you eat an elephant?
A: You do it one bite at a time.
Q: And how do you change a culture?
A: You do it one conversation at a time.
This book will do three things to help you create those conversations. First, it will help you to develop your understanding of what is meant by a positive change culture. Then it will help you learn how to create the conditions for change to thrive. Finally, it will help you negotiate six common hurdles to promoting a positive change culture.
Context
Managers like you play a vital role in developing change-able teams and organisations. In your role, you might be called on to implement organisation-wide programmes and initiatives that come down from on high. Or you might be expected to come up with new and better ways of working. Almost certainly, you will have challenging performance targets to meet that will require some degree of innovation or continuous improvement.
From time to time, you might feel caught in the middle. But that is actually the best place to be if you want to promote a positive change culture. It enables you to have everyday conversations with people who are doing the work. Being in the midst of it puts you in a great position to coach and challenge in the moment. You can start to have real conversations that will change the culture. You can help people to make sense of what is changing and to begin to take ownership of the change process. You are in the best place to make change part of business as usual, rather than it being an occasional interruption.
It is helpful to think about your informal network at work. Think about the people you interact with as part of your role – your manager, team members, colleagues, customers, suppliers, and so on. Now think about people you interact with more informally – people you used to work with, those you go to lunch with, people you chat with on social media, and so on. You have the potential to influence the culture through your conversations with all these people.
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Take some time to draw your informal network as a mind map. Put yourself in the middle and draw branches out to all the key individuals and groups that you interact with. This map represents your current sphere of influence. Think about whether you need to grow it.
Promoting a positive change culture is not something that simply can be driven from the top of organisations, or left to specialists. In an increasingly dynamic working world, developing change-ability is a key skill for all managers. Whatever your specialism, now it has become a vital part of the day job.
The good news is that change-ability is a core competency that is worth investing in because it is essential for now and also for the longer term. Short-term requirements include helping teams make the most of their current capabilities and competencies, perhaps increasing efficiency or maximising business or social returns to stakeholders. But longer-term survival requires organisations to explore new possibilities and to develop new capabilities faster or better than their competitors. Those organisations that become more adept at learning and change have an inbuilt strategic advantage in a dynamic environment.
The business need is compelling. But what sometimes gets overlooked is that promoting a positive change culture can also be enjoyable and fulfilling for managers because it helps to create a great place to work.
Challenge
Many articles on change in organisations make for depressing reading. Readers are repeatedly told that 70 per cent of change initiatives fail. And yet, managers remain under great personal pressure to make change succeed and to deliver ambitious benefits that others may have over-promised.
Promoting a positive change culture needs more than a glitzy presentation and a polished project plan. Managers need to recognise the obstacles they might face along the way so they can be ready to address them. Three key challenges, common across many organisations, are related to culture, resistance and change fatigue:
1 Culture. Despite an ever-increasing need for change, many organisations are very bad at creating the conditions for change to thrive. Worse still, organisations often are very good at stifling change. Hierarchies may pop the bubbles of innovation. In highly controlled environments, uncertainty about the way forward may prompt people to hold back. A culture of risk aversion may trump the desire to seize opportunities. Change initiatives may flounder in the doldrums, causing people to become disillusioned.
2 Resistance. Many people suggest that the biggest barrier to promoting a positive change culture is people’s resistance to change. The assumption is that most people naturally will work against change. Whilst some people can be persuaded to buy into change, particularly if there is some kind of burning platform, others are resistors or blockers. So, the manager will need to develop strategies for managing those who are resistant to change. If people are pushing against change and you push back, you will become locked in an exhausting battle with no possibility of a win-win. The challenge lies in turning resistance, a negative expression of energy that can be corrosive, into energy that is more positive and productive.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Be careful about labelling people as resistors or blockers or they might feel they have no choice but to retrench their position. Instead, listen well, listen really well. Enable people to voice their fears and concerns. Do not defend or sell. Each individual needs to make their own choice about taking ownership of change.
3 Change fatigue. Constant change can take its toll, particularly when it is handled badly. People can feel emotionally and physically exhausted, unable to build up energy and enthusiasm for another burning platform. They may feel battered by multiple change initiatives, unclear about direction and uncertain what it means for them. Time and support for transition and opportunities for people to make change their own are often neglected.
Key leadership approach
In an increasingly dynamic working world, promoting a positive change culture is becoming a key part of a manager’s job. Yet many managers feel unsure about how to do it – how to begin, how to get going and how to overcome the challenges they might face. This guide will get you off the starting blocks and help you on your way.
There are three key steps in promoting a positive change culture in your organisation:
- Step 1: Defining a positive change culture.
- Step 2: Creating the conditions where change can thrive.
- Step 3: Negotiating the hurdles.
We will look at each of these in turn.
Step 1: Defining a positive change culture
Objective
- To develop your understanding of what is meant by a positive change culture.
Let us start with the basics and ask: what do we mean by culture? A popular definition of organisational culture is ‘the way we do things around here’. And it is the definition we will use here.
Edgar Schein, a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and an acknowledged expert on organisational culture, suggests that culture is like an iceberg. At the tip of the iceberg are the visible signs of the way we do things around here, such as the way people behave, organisational structures and processes, the stories people tell, the way people dress, how the physical working environment is designed and used. New joiners tend to pick up these signs fairly quickly. Usually, they will adapt their own ways of doing things in order to fit in with the accepted norms in their new team and organisation.
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Think back to when you joined your current organisation. Can you remember any unfamiliar elements of the culture that particularly struck you? It is easier to notice what a culture is like when it is unfamiliar.
The observable signs of culture are underpinned and informed by beliefs and values – goals and motivations, perceptions and attitudes, strategies and experiences. You will have to dig a little bit deeper to find them because beliefs and values sit below the water line in the iceberg. But you can start to pick them up by talking with people and asking questions.
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If you want to promote a positive change culture, you will need to work both above and below the waterline.
Beneath it all, there are unconscious, taken-for-granted assumptions that determine people’s perceptions and behaviours. This layer is hidden – even from ourselves. However, a deeply held value or belief can come to attention quickly when someone contravenes it. The observable signs, the beliefs and values, and the hidden assumptions all form part of the way we do things around here.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
As you work to promote a positive change culture, you might hit some of these taken-for-granted assumptions – yours or other people’s. This can feel uncomfortable. Stick with the discomfort for a while, because it is a sign that something might be shifting.
Now we know a little more about culture, let us feast our eyes on the prize. This is what it might be like when you have developed a positive change culture in your team:
When new change initiatives appear, people are curious and ask loads of questions to find out more. There is a buzz of positive and productive energy in your team. They find ways to try these changes on for size and to make them their own. They offer helpful feedback about what works and what could be even better.
Open and engaging dialogue with colleagues up and down and across the organisational hierarchy is the norm. That conversation often extends to include a wider network of people within and outside your organisation. New ideas bubble up from those conversations. People are listened to. They try things out and learn from them. They support and challenge one another.
People take the initiative to explore possibilities and to listen to different ideas and they use them to create something new. They know when and how to seize opportunities. They experiment and learn fast, and they share their learning with others, so the whole team continuously improves.
You will need to develop a clear picture of the positive change culture that you would like in your team. Start by imagining what it will be like in your team when that positive change culture is up and running well. As you create that mental picture, ask yourself what is going on:
- What can you see people doing?
- How are they relating to one another?
- What does the working environment look like?
- What kinds of things are people saying to one another?
- What kinds of things are you saying to yourself?
- What is the energy like?
- How does it feel to work in this environment?
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Jot down any ideas that come to mind about your ideal change culture. Use words or pictures. Congratulations, by developing this vision, you have just taken the first step in promoting a positive change culture.
What we often see
Sadly, what we often experience is nothing like this.
Instead of posing curious questions, many people greet the prospect of change with defensive questions. So, rather than asking, ‘What does it mean for me?’, you are likely to find people challenging, ‘What’s in it for me’? Instead of generating a buzz of positive and productive energy, you might find an increase in energy that is characterised by frustration, fear and other negative emotions. Rather than a multi-way and open dialogue, you might find top-down diktats. Rather than reaching out, you might find teams closing in and circling the wagons. In this kind of environment, opportunities for new ideas to bubble up are limited and, instead, many of the old ones are repeated and defended, whether or not there is any evidence to suggest that they will work in a changing environment. Risk trumps opportunity. Knowledge is hoarded. Fear and blame stifle experimentation and learning.
This is a fairly extreme description of a toxic change culture. But you may recognise elements of this that you will need to address in your own organisation.
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Are there any issues you recognise? If so, jot them down. What are the top three most concerning issues within your team? And within your organisation?
ASSESS YOURSELF
- How clear is your vision about the positive change culture you would like to promote in your team?
- How is it different from the existing culture?
- What facets of the existing culture might you be able to build on?
- What facets of the existing culture will you need to address?
Step 2: Creating the conditions where change can thrive
Objective
- To help you learn how to create the conditions for change to thrive in your team and in your organisation.
Now you know what you are aiming for, it is time to start developing a positive change culture. This section sets out eight enabling conditions of a positive change culture: diversity; engaging communication; listening; experimenting; learning; involvement; groups; connectivity.
Condition 1: Promoting diversity
Forget alignment; you are not going to get a positive change culture if you develop a team of clones. What you really need is diversity. Social diversity in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and so on is a good place to start, but it is unlikely to be sufficient. What you are trying to promote here is thought diversity: different ways of thinking, contrasting ideas, varied experiences, new perspectives and unusual viewpoints. As a manager, you have an important role to play in creating an environment where people feel able to express different thoughts and opinions, rather than just outwardly conforming to the company line. You can create boundaries that give people permission to express different ideas. Try setting a space and time where you actively encourage people to do this. How about a Friday free-thinking meeting?
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In your next team meeting, try limiting the agenda to half the allocated meeting time and devoting the remainder to any other business. Make sure you use all the time.
Remember to agree some ground rules about how people might contribute. Here are some ideas to start you off: listen well; ask questions to aid understanding, rather than to respond; and try to build on ideas, rather than tear them down.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
As team manager, people will follow your example. So, remember to role model the culture that you would like to promote and to champion diversity of thinking because people will do what you do, rather than doing what you say.
Condition 2: Encouraging engaging communication
Communication is a fundamental enabler of a positive change culture. Without it, ideas cannot flow freely. Think open conversations, think informal connections, think communities. All are vital if you want to create an environment where change can thrive.
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Hold stand-up meetings. It tends to keep meetings short, you can invite more people, and standing up is said to make people more creative.
There are lots of practical ways to encourage communication outside the normal flow of work. You could:
- set up cross-team projects, or introduce stand-up meetings
- initiate peer mentoring, where people share their different experiences to support and encourage one another
- introduce reverse mentoring, where someone new to the workplace mentors someone with years of experience
- encourage people to get involved in off-job learning and development, social events or charitable activities.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Too many people think of communication as one-way, focussing primarily on the message or the meaning they intend to send. Some people think of communication as two-way and focus on the message and meaning for the person on the receiving end. But communication is about the meaning that is created between people, and that can be different from what either party might have expected.
Condition 3: Learning to listen really well
Listening is a central part of communication, but it has such an important part to play that it merits its own billing.
Promoting a positive change culture does not mean getting all Pollyanna-ish about change. Change can be difficult and challenging. People need the freedom to express their doubts, to voice their concerns and to share their worries, not just to offer unthinking and uncritical support for change. They need to be listened to and to know that what they have to say will be heard. Sometimes, your role as manager is to do just that, to listen really well.
When people bring their different views and opinions into the mix, it is not always easy to listen well. It can be tempting to discuss, debate and defend. What is needed instead is dialogue, something that William Isaacs from MIT calls ‘the art of listening together’. There are four principles to dialogue:
- Respecting others and their differences.
- Suspending certainty and judgement.
- Listening to the spoken and the unspoken conversation.
- Voicing diverse perspectives.
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It is hard to listen really well when you feel distracted by things that are going on in your head or outside the room. So, before your next meeting take two minutes to stand up, walk around, breathe deeply and listen to your thoughts and pre-occupations. Then, let those thoughts float away on an out-breath. It will help you to be really present in the meeting.
Condition 4: Changing by experimenting
Traditional approaches to change in organisations plan and then implement the change. But, in a dynamic environment, you can plan only so far. Change is always live and it is often unpredictable. So, the best way to work out how something will turn out is by trying it out; that is, by experimenting.
Experiments test how a hypothesis – an educated guess – works in practice. They have clear goals, they have clear boundaries and they are designed to gather data to inform decision making. Using experiments can help managers avoid costly mistakes and they may also highlight new potential solutions. Taking an experimental approach shortens the feedback loop between action and learning. In a longer-term change, it enables informed adjustments along the way to take account of changing conditions.
Experiments are different from pilots. Pilots often go to great lengths (and resources) to show that something works prior to a larger roll out. In so doing, they create an ideal world. Experiments are designed to assess how ideas work in the real world.
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Think about how you could conduct an experiment to test out the effectiveness of new team meeting formats in promoting creativity. Write down your hypothesis, plan how you would collect data and decide how you could evaluate your results.
You need to learn to love your failures in change. What you are aiming for in a positive change culture is to fail fast and inexpensively, rather than to fail slowly and expensively. It is a learning process, so it is important to learn from failure and to share that learning.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
- Unlovable failures include those resulting from deliberate sabotage, inattention or incompetence. These kinds of failures are, generally, preventable.
- Lovable failures are those that arise from deliberate explorations designed to expand knowledge or to test out whether an idea works. These kinds of failures are sometimes inevitable and can be a rich source of learning.
Condition 5: Instilling a culture of learning
If experimenting is an approach to creating change-ability, then learning is the mindset that supports it.
Learning is not training. Often it is informal and in the moment. Many organisations now follow the 70:20:10 view of learning, where 70 per cent of learning comes from direct on-the-job experience, 20 per cent comes from coaching and mentoring and 10 per cent comes through formal training. That puts you, as manager, in the prime position to create the conditions for learning in your team.
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Remember that your role as manager is to create the right conditions for learning.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it think!
So, think about what opportunities there are for people to learn in the normal course of their work. That might involve changing the nature of the work to give people the chance to get involved in new projects, new opportunities or new challenges. It might involve changing the way people learn from their work by encouraging them to set learning objectives for themselves, by introducing after-action reviews, knowledge-cafés, or peer-assist sessions.
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Focus on squeezing as much learning as you can out of every action – learning before, learning during and learning after.
Condition 6: Harnessing the power of groups
If you want to promote a positive change culture, you cannot do it alone. You will need to harness the power of groups.
In the 1940s, Kurt Lewin – probably the very first change guru – explained that group dynamics are crucial in change because group behaviour modifies individual behaviour. He advocated a participative approach where people are tasked with creating change for themselves through cycles of action and reflection. This is similar to the ideas put forward earlier about experimenting and learning. But the difference is that the experimenting and learning are the tasks of a group.
There are two underlying assumptions here. First, people need the opportunity to make change their own, rather than having change done to them. Second, the group is more than the sum of its parts. Those assumptions are powerful, but they can be challenging. The implications are that you cannot tell people to change and you cannot sell people change. Instead, people must be empowered to co-create change.
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Pause for a moment and consider how you feel about sharing power to co-create change that might be very different from the change you had personally intended. To what extent do you feel energised by the idea? To what extent do you feel anxious about losing control? Do not be surprised if you feel a mixture of both.
Condition 7: Building wider connectivity
So far in this section we have focused on creating the conditions for change to thrive in your team. But you can amplify a positive change culture by building relationships and networks outside of the team and outside the organisation. By casting your network wider, immediately you open up the possibility of greater diversity and new ideas that are not constrained by the dominant culture.
With the help of technology and the prevalence of social networks, it is easy to build connectivity. There are so many ways to connect with people around the organisation, no matter where they are located around the world. Now that web-based video calls are available freely on various platforms, it is much easier to communicate and engage on a wider scale. But face-to-face meetings are still hugely valuable.
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Consider introducing randomised coffee trials. Innovation charity Nesta describes them as a way of institutionalising serendipity. People sign up, they are paired up randomly and, some time over the next week, they meet for a coffee. They might be paired up with people they know or they might meet new people. It is a simple way to build a network, share knowledge and stimulate ideas.
Building wider connectivity in your organisation helps you to develop connections with other pockets of like-minded people. These connections can help good ideas and practices to spread virally. By connecting pockets of people and practices, culture has a chance to spread. Once it reaches a tipping point, you will find that a positive change culture is now part of the dominant culture in your organisation. So, if your change target is the wider organisation, you need to look for some serendipitous connections.
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Take a moment to think about which groups or communities you belong to. These might be formal groups, such as your team or a group of managers at your level, or they might be informal networks. Are any of these groups engaged in a similar task, in terms of promoting a culture of change-ability?
Condition 8: Developing your confidence
Setting out on a journey of change in a dynamic environment is like travelling somewhere you have never been to before. Actually, no one has ever been there before. Every organisational change journey is unique. No one else will start from where you are, no one else will end up where you do, and no one else will take exactly the same route. So, any maps or directions you pick up from other experienced travellers or from travel guides will never be exactly right for your journey.
Whether you feel anxious or excited by the prospect of a journey into the unknown, you are going to have to build up the courage to set off.
Paying attention to creating the other seven conditions will help you along the way and your confidence will build. You can start small, experiment and learn. Listening and engaging with people, building groups and establishing broader connections will enlist others in the process. Remember, no one can change a culture by themselves. The way we do things around here is co-created.
ASSESS YOURSELF
This step has set out eight enabling conditions for change to thrive. As a manager, you play a key role in creating those conditions. So, for each one, consider what you, personally, could do to nudge it up, just a notch:
- Promoting diversity.
- Encouraging engaging communications.
- Learning to listen really well.
- Changing by experimenting.
- Instilling a culture of learning.
- Harnessing the power of groups.
- Building wider connectivity.
- Developing your confidence.
Step 3: Negotiating the hurdles
Objective
- To help you negotiate six common hurdles to developing a positive change culture.
None of us lives in a perfect world. None of us works in a perfect organisation. Promoting a positive change culture means working with what you have and making the very best of it. Any manager who wants to create an environment where change can thrive will have to overcome barriers along the way.
Here are some hurdles that you are likely to face as you work to promote a positive change culture, and ideas on how to negotiate them.
Hurdle 1: The antibody reaction
It is all too easy for something new and different to become marginalised or squeezed out, especially if it challenges the status quo. If you want radical change, you are going to need some change radicals. Change radicals are people who are more change positive than others. They are people who do not give you 50 reasons not to change. Instead, they ask questions, imagine something better, explore possibilities, find ways to change rules and they connect with others. Change radicals create new opportunities for change and they implement change by making it their own.
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Identify the change radicals in your team or your organisation. Do not forget to include yourself!
To avoid the antibody reaction, you need to know and to love your change radicals. You want to cherish and protect their maverick ideas, without smothering them. Here are two practical ways to do that. First, make sure that you create time, space and permission for your change radicals to be radical. This will legitimise new and different ways of thinking. Second, find ways to help your change radicals connect with one another as an informal community, so they can recharge with other change-positive people.
Hurdle 2: Rigid hierarchies
Rigid hierarchies that impose tightly defined role boundaries can stifle a positive change culture because change rarely fits neatly into little boxes. Instead, change typically spans formal boundaries – often it goes across roles and departments – and it can challenge those boundaries, too. If you want to promote a culture that explores the space of possibilities, then you will need to empower people to experiment. Yet finding the right balance between freedom and control can be tricky for managers to get right. One way to approach that challenge is to develop simple rules to guide action. Simple rules are concrete statements, framed in the positive, that start with action verbs. Examples of simple rules include: work ethically and effectively; recognise and appreciate differences; consider the company, consider the environment. What you are aiming for is no more than a handful of rules to generate positive patterns of behaviour. They need to be very specific to your own context.
POTENTIAL PITFALL
Do not try and create the simple rules by yourself. Involve users in making the rules. Allow the rules to evolve as you begin to learn and as your context changes.
Hurdle 3: Change fatigue
There is no getting away from it, multiple change initiatives are the norm nowadays for many organisations. New initiatives are launched whilst others are still in motion. Yet too much change can be overwhelming and exhausting. No wonder that many people simply put their heads down, do what they have always done, and then hope it will all go away. If you want to create an environment where change can thrive, you need to watch closely for the signs of change fatigue. These can include:
- apathy
- disengagement
- confusion
- frustration
- complaints
- cynicism
- low morale
- high staff turnover
- poor performance.
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Have you noticed any of the signs of change fatigue in your team?
Spotting the signs of change fatigue is just the first step. Once you have spotted them, you need to take action. The most important thing to do is to acknowledge and explore how people are feeling. Listening is very powerful. Then you need to help people make sense of the change they are experiencing and to share your sense of what is going on. The more involved that people feel, the less out of control it will seem.
Hurdle 4: Political behaviour
Political behaviour is a normal part of organisational life. But some kinds of political behaviour can be very unhelpful if you are seeking to create an environment where change can thrive. Examples of unhelpful political behaviour include paying lip service to change, but not really changing anything; jumping on the change bandwagon to impress others, without considering the wider implications; rejecting change because it was not invented here; and always saying yes to top-down change, but no to bottom-up change. Political behaviour often increases during times of change. Managers need to develop their knowledge and skills to help them to understand and navigate the political dimension in organisations. However, open communication, creating opportunities for dialogue and keeping information flowing can all be used to limit the effects of political behaviour.
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If you notice any of these behaviours in your team, then your biggest allies to negotiating the political hurdle are your communication and engagement skills.
Hurdle 5: Fear and blame
Fear can be a major hurdle in culture change because fear is enough to stop many people from taking those first steps in change. Fear works as a kind of self-censorship. Fears might be specific, such as fear of dropping a ball or of generating more work. Alternatively, fears might be general, such as fear of the unknown, fear of looking a fool or fear of failure. Normally, the general fears are more frightening, like the monster hidden under the bed.
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Do a negative brainstorm about all the things that could go wrong. Writing down your fears helps make them explicit, so you can decide how to tackle them.
If fear of failure creates self-censorship, then punishment for failure is an organisational censorship that, almost certainly, will stop change in its tracks. Punishment can take the form of criticism, blame or finger pointing. In this kind of environment, people will want to hide mistakes rather than love them and learn from them.
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One of the best tools for transforming a blame culture is to adopt a coaching management style so that mistakes become the source of learning.
Hurdle 6: Time pressures
When the day job is all-consuming, there may be no time or energy left for something new – even something as vitally important as developing a positive change culture. The problem is that time pressures can readily sap energy and undermine good intentions. New ways of working might save time and generate productive energy once they are up and running smoothly. But you cannot just flick a switch. Transitioning to new ways of working will require an investment of time and energy.
Change always takes the time it takes. You have two choices: fast start, slow finish; or slow start, fast finish. The former introduces the change and then tries to get people on board after the fact. The latter invests time to engage people first and involves them in creating sustainable change.
The problem is that you cannot make change happen any faster than people can transition. However, there are things you can do to support people in transitioning. The first is creating space for change by stopping some things that you do now. William Bridges, an expert on transition, explains that managing transition is a three-phase process: endings, neutral zone and new beginnings. You cannot just jump into a new culture without letting anything go, because endings precede new beginnings.
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Think about what things you might need to stop doing to make space for a more positive change culture.
ASSESS YOURSELF
Now take a moment to reflect on the hurdles you have noticed in your organisation:
- Which ones are the most worrisome for you and why?
- Which one hurdle do you most need to tackle?
- Which one hurdle would you most like to tackle?
- Which one hurdle do you feel most able to tackle?
Success
Creating an environment where change can thrive does not happen overnight. It takes time, attention and commitment. This section will help you understand where you are starting from and help you to recognise your progress.
If you were entering a marathon, you would want to assess how well you were doing along the way. You might consider outputs like increased speed and endurance. You would pay attention to creating enabling conditions for success, such as building overall fitness; managing your hydration and nutrition; and getting enough rest. And you would make sure you had the appropriate tools for success, such as the right shoes and the right kit.
When it comes to assessing how well you are doing in promoting a positive change culture, you can use these same three elements – outputs, conditions, tools – to help assess your progress.
Outputs
Start by reminding yourself what the culture was like before you embarked on this journey to promote a positive change culture. Then think about where you are now.
- How are you doing against your vision of a positive change culture?
- What aspects have you improved on?
- Where are you starting to see results?
- Where are you lagging behind where you had hoped to be? And what might be the contributing factors?
- How do you need to develop your vision in light of what you have learned, or in response to a dynamic environment?
Creating enabling conditions
- How well are you doing in creating the eight enabling conditions?
- What is new or different?
- What is working particularly well?
- What have you learned along the way?
- What kinds of hurdles have you come up against?
- How have you negotiated those hurdles?
- Which are the next most pressing hurdles? And which conditions might you need to work on to help you to get over those hurdles?
Tools
- What new tools, approaches or processes have you started to use?
- How well are they working for you?
- What new tools or approaches would you now like to have?
- How do you need to develop your tools and approaches in order to adapt to a dynamic environment?
Assess your progress regularly. Every week is probably too often, every year too rare. But every two to three months should give you a picture of your development over the course of a year.
Checklist
Overview
- Do you understand why you need to create an environment where change can thrive? Click here to review.
Context
- Are you clear about why being in the middle is the best place to be if you want to promote a positive change culture? Click here to review.
Key leadership approach
- Can you remember the three key steps in promoting a positive change culture? Click here to review.
Step 1: Defining a positive change culture
- Do you understand what is meant by culture? Have you got a clearly defined vision of the positive change culture that you want to create? Can you recognise a toxic change culture? Click here to review.
Step 2: Creating the conditions where change can thrive
- Do you have a good understanding of the eight enabling conditions of a positive change culture: diversity; engaging communication; listening; experimenting; learning; groups; connectivity; and confidence?
- Do you know how to promote thought diversity and create an environment where people are willing and able to express their differences?
- Do you have a plan to encourage communication flows?
- Are you prepared to listen really well and to engage in dialogue?
- Can you tell the difference between a lovable failure and an unlovable failure?
- Are you ready to squeeze as much learning out of experience as possible – before, during and afterwards?
- Do you understand why you need to empower people to co-create change?
- Are you ready to build networks outside your team?
- Are you confident enough to set out into the unknown on the journey of culture change? Click here to review.
Step 3: Negotiating the hurdles
- Could you recognise the six common hurdles to developing a positive change culture?
- Do you understand the value of change radicals?
- Are you ready to create a handful of simple rules that are specific to your context and provide a flexible guide for action?
- Could you spot the signs of change fatigue and help people make sense of the change they are experiencing so they feel less out of control?
- Are you aware of what you can do to limit the effects of unhelpful political behaviour?
- Do you know how to transform a blame culture?
- Are you clear on how to support transition, from endings to new beginnings? Click here to review.
Success
- Are you able to assess your progress in creating an environment where change can thrive? Could you set yourself a regular and realistic schedule to map your progress over a year? Click here to review.