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Culture is the chief enabler of change.
The global business environment is changing at a faster pace than it ever has before. It’s more digital, it’s more diverse and it’s more reliant on advanced technology. The workforce is changing. People have new expectations of what to expect from an organization. But also due to a lot of the volatility in the global business landscape many organizations out there are forced to at least attempt to grow faster with fewer resources just to survive and thrive in this unsettled 21st-century landscape.
But according to the 2017 Deloitte ‘Human Capital Trends Report,’ CEOs and senior executives from all over the world that were surveyed cited the areas of culture, retention, and employee engagement as urgent, meaning critical areas that need managerial prioritization. And although many of these organizational CEOs, leaders, and managers understand its importance because of the fast-paced environment, they either choose not to prioritize it or sometimes just prioritize the more measurable metrics of top-line revenue and sales and profitability and new product mixes and trying to figure out a way to stay relevant.
We have a saying in the SEAL teams, the saying is don’t run to your death. Meaning when you’re on an enemy target, you’ve got to take it slow. People just assume that we’re flooding a target running around like crazy people. You’ve got to take it slow. You assess risk and you use speed and aggression when necessary. But the problem in today’s environment, as many organizations and their leaders are racing to their death, they’re racing to that transformation finish line of the vision they think will take them to better profitability, better growth, better competitive advantage, but they’re skipping all these fundamental transformative steps. And a lot of those steps are culture focused. Organizations though, oftentimes fail to do four things: defining culture, and clearly articulating that across the organization, managing that culture, aligning that culture with their strategic vision, especially if it’s a vision for transformation and then leveraging culture during times of transformation and trying to lead change using the positive aspects of that culture.
Employees are the key levers of change.
According to recent McKinsey and Company data and research, about 70% of organizational change and transformation efforts either fail or fall significantly short of meeting their initial goals and objectives. There are many reasons we could get into, but a lot it is due to a lack of engagement. And for any organizational transformation effort to be successful, you have to have the participation and engagement of as many people in the organization as possible.
You’re going to have your engaged, who are going to be your change and transformation evangelists and really helping drive that mission forward. You’re going to have your large group of disengaged. And those folks are very hard to identify because oftentimes they’re happy, but they’re doing the bare minimum. They’re not necessarily going to go above and beyond and engage in any additional activities that align with the transformation because they’re going to kind of want to wait and see what happens, and then maybe they’ll get on board. Some of those people can be transitioned over to the engaged and then some will just stay disengaged or eventually become disengaged.
And then you have your actively disengaged who are what I refer to as naysayers in the book. Those people who will actively voice their opinion and stand in the way of that transformation effort. And unless you can really define that clear and concise vision and communicate it and communicate the progress and the quick wins and continually get people on board, you’ll never get those naysayers on board. They will continue to voice their opinion against that mission narrative. And oftentimes those people, as we’ve all experienced, can be highly influential. Maybe they’re subject matter experts, but they’re also a toxic element to an organization. But they’re kept around because they’re so good at what they do. But they’re also going to voice opinions and can have a significant amount of influence over others simply because they are a subject matter expert.