It is very rare these days to meet a manager who hasn't been involved in at least one attempt to change an organization's culture. If you have, then you'll realize that it isn't as easy as many executives think, and there are readily available guidelines to help us through the process that are often ignored. This short article outlines one guideline that is often a missing and very important piece of the puzzle.

Let's start with a two part question; part one is "How long does it take to change an organizational culture?" Part two is "How long is a piece of string?". What both these questions have in common is that they are impossible to answer without lots more information. The time it will take to change a culture depends on the breadth and depth of the desired change. It depends on the size of the organization. It also depends on a judgement of when has the culture has actually changed. Is it when a critical mass of employees have adopted the new culture, or when every single employee does? Since the world is always changing, so too is the need to change culture, so is there ever a point at which you can say, we've reached the ideal culture?

For those who have been through an attempt at changing culture, one thing will have become obvious. The transition will come quicker and easier if management know and follow the well-tested principals of culture change. Experience has shown that successful change can take one of two paths. Management can take the long path to change, which is to dive in without careful planning and background knowledge, take a lot of missteps, but persist long enough and eventually make the transition. Or they can take a shorter path, which is to use the principals of change that we have learned through many years of such initiatives, make fewer mistakes, and arrive at the destination far earlier.

This article is more relevant to those taking the shorter path. Suppose the organization takes the time to develop clear, realistic transition goals. Also suppose they are fortunate enough to have an executive group with experience and knowledge of the transition process. They may use a consultant to guide them, but the executive take full responsibility for the success or failure of the process. Even in such a positive scenario we often see a piece of the transition puzzle missing, and it's an important piece. Let me describe a typical missing-piece scenario.

The executive team identifies the costs and lost opportunities that are a result of elements of their existing culture that haven't kept pace with the changing world. They make a firm decision to change, and identify specific elements that must change. They develop change goals and a vision of what things will look like when the change is successful. They develop a strategic transition plan that is well thought out and based on success stories in other organizations. They communicate the plan for change and start implementation by, amongst other steps, aligning organizational systems and processes with their change goals. They then start to push the plan down the organization, level by level. So what have they missed?

We call the approach described above the "cascade down" approach to change. It consists of a transition plan made by senior management and cascaded down the organization from one level to the next. The problem with this is that cultural change just doesn't happen that way. Change progresses in a "pockets of success" way. Some individuals and departments adopt change readily and become early pockets of success. Some procrastinate and require convincing while others resist. So if you accept this rationale, then it follows that change happens more efficiently if the focus becomes finding ways to quickly build pockets of success. And this will happen if individual managers take charge of the process and start their own transition, one guided by the overall direction developed by senior management.

Now we come to the missing piece. Departments will more readily become pockets of success to the extent that middle and first level supervisors and managers know the steps of successful culture change. Very few organizations even attempt to pass this knowledge down; senior management believing that "they don't need to know this, because we're responsible for the change process".

We've been fortunate enough to work on several culture change projects in which we've convinced clients to give all managers the knowledge required to plan change at their level. We've found it benefits in two ways. First, middle and lower levels of management, rather than blindly following management direction, have a greater understanding of why senior management are taking the steps they're taking. Secondly, these managers can go back to their departments and become mini-engines of change, and early pockets of success.

For those interested, Touchstone publishes a book entitled "Make Change Work" which is designed for middle and first level managers and has been successfully used as pre-reading for Culture Change Workshops designed for these employees.

For more information contact Bob Power