Leadership & Culture

Organizational Culture Transformation—A Journey, Not a Destination

May 19, 2021April 24, 2024 by Ashley Munday

Imagine a workplace culture where excitement fills the air, where everything is done to enhance the customer experience, where innovation thrives and teams easily adapt to unforeseen circumstances, where your senior team works toward a shared vision of success, and where people genuinely care for one another, feel recognized, and receive support within the organization.

Cultures like these are not created overnight. They aren’t formed by policy, procedure, and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). High-performance business cultures have values alignment, mission alignment, and low levels of fear. These are cultures where employees can bring their beliefs and values to work and where there’s a shared belief, throughout the organization, that they have a high-performing culture. So how do you create a high-performance culture?

Our intention for this series of articles is to introduce the concept of cultural transformation in larger organizations, those with more than 1,000 employees. We’ve seen organizations transform their cultures and ignite success time and time again. This article series includes three brief culture change case studies, an overview of the concepts and key learnings about transforming culture, and exercises to help you get started.

Our hope is that this paper will give you the confidence and the tools to begin one of the most important and catalyzing journeys in your organization’s history.

Why Transformation?

While culture change involves engineering a process and managing the moving parts, transformation takes place on the inside. Cultural transformation involves human beings and all the feelings, beliefs, and values that motivate them.

It’s about working with people’s motivations to create something bigger and better than you could have imagined alone. It takes time and needs to be cultivated, like a plant or any living thing. While change is a process from “this” to “that,” transformation unleashes the best of what can be. Transformation frees human potential and accesses our collective wisdom.

Culture Is A Journey, Not A Destination

Throughout this series, we refer to the culture change journey. Leaders on a transformational path need to respond to market conditions as well as to the needs of their internal teams. You will create visions and then reshape them. Culture is not a place you arrive at but a way of being that you will develop and evolve over time.

In 2017, Ashley Munday, Former Director of Thrive by SweetRush, and Tor Eneroth, Director of Cultural Transformation at Barrett Values Centre, wrote an eBook as a resource and workbook for leaders to get started on the culture journey in a meaningful and tactical way. To accommodate as many leaders as possible, we have converted the content into a series of articles that can be read piece by piece and will be publishing them on a weekly basis. We invite you to consume the material at your own pace and welcome your feedback and questions along the way. Thrive by SweetRush is now known as Transforming Leaders and Culture (TLC) by SweetRush. Please reach out to begin transforming your organization today!

If you’re reading this series, we know you are a leader who understands and cares about the way your organization’s culture supports its people and its purpose—for that, we thank you! Check out the other articles in this series:

Culture Change in Organizations Begins Within
Organizational Culture Transformation—A Journey, Not a Destination
Culture Change Case Study: Volvo IT
Changing Corporate Culture Case Study: Old Mutual Group
Cultural Change In Organizations Example: Unilever Brazil
Key Learnings in Culture Transformation
Growing Your Desired Culture: Leadership Commitment
Growing Your Desired Culture: Roles for Supporting Culture
Growing Your Desired Culture: Defining and Growing Your Culture
Growing Your Desired Culture: Structural Alignment
Growing Your Desired Culture: Follow-Up and Learning

Culture Change in Organizations Begins Within

May 18, 2021April 24, 2024 by Ashley Munday

I have traveled around the globe and have eaten a simple rice dish while sitting on the dirt floor of the home of an Indian brickmaker, a woman who lived in abject poverty and had many reasons to be unhappy but was not. Ironically, some of the most miserable people I have met are managers and knowledge workers in North America, people who seemingly have many reasons to be happy. This fact is part of what makes culture change in organizations so fascinating and important.

Aon Hewitt defines employee engagement as “the level of an employee’s psychological investment in their organization.” In its 2017 Trends in Global Employee Engagement report, the company noted that North American engagement rates have dropped to 64% and that only 59% of employees are committed to stay with their organizations. Have you simply accepted attrition or “churn” as your new normal?

We have lackluster engagement amid rapidly changing market conditions that require companies to innovate and adapt quickly. We live in critical times of change, with economic, geopolitical, and environmental factors influencing business decisions each day. Despite the need for rapid change, 70% of change management initiatives fail. Is it any wonder given the engagement levels? It seems we are doing a poor job engaging the hearts and minds of employees. When was the last time you experienced a top-down mandate or one-way communications inspiring change and action?

Culture is often believed to be a magic ether that permeates the right organizations or prescriptive rules that dictate an ideal model. Leaders are left to their own devices to work with culture. Top teams often create a list of values without understanding how to integrate them in a meaningful way, or they develop ad hoc promotional materials, trainings, or initiatives that don’t create cohesive change. So how can corporate culture be changed?

Questions about meaning, motivation, and culture have defined my life’s work. Corporations are some of the most powerful systems on the planet, and I have witnessed and facilitated true transformation among teams and across large organizations in my previous role at Barrett Values Centre. Nedbank in South Africa, for one, turned its organization around completely, going from near bankruptcy to thriving revenues, high engagement, and extraordinary cultural health measures. I continued this work as an independent consultant to national and global organizations until I had my own personal transformation when my son was born and I took time off to be with him.

What excites me about our work at Thrive by SweetRush is that this company has always put “engaging hearts and minds” front and center. The first time I saw the recruitment video we produced for Cisco engineers, I wanted to apply to be one! Paired with deeper culture work and a true understanding of how change can be successful, SweetRush can now impact employee performance in ways that our clients have not seen before, and this, to me, is so exciting. We have the ability to affect culture change in organizations!

In 2017, Tor Eneroth, my former colleague at Barrett, and I wrote an eBook as a resource and workbook for leaders to get started on the culture journey in a meaningful and tactical way. We realized it can be difficult for executives to find the time to consume an entire book at once, so we converted it into a series of articles that can be read on a weekly basis. It is directed to leaders in larger organizations, but the lessons are applicable to anyone who manages a team.

Work with culture change can be done at an executive level as well as within a small group. Aligning culture with strategy is a powerful enabler for any team.

My hope is that you will use this series of articles to identify your next steps in fostering a vibrant, high-performing work culture. Please reach out if you have any questions or if I can be a resource to you as you embark on this important journey.

Cultural capital is a fundamental driver of financial performance. Building it is good for the bottom line and for humankind.

For Leaders Navigating COVID-19, SweetRush Now Offers Coaching Support

April 16, 2020October 22, 2020 by Heather York

Thrive by SweetRush helps business leaders to address current challenges related to COVID-19 and develop stronger, higher-performing remote teams. Exceptional coaches offer support for each company’s unique needs.

During these unprecedented times, as COVID-19 continues to impact humanity and cause loss, our hearts go out to those of you touched by it. As leaders, you are managing “new normal” issues with your remote teams: lack of connectedness, fear and stress in the face of uncertainty, and lower productivity and morale.

Action is the antidote to uncertainty and the negative impact of unexpected change. It’s vital to uncover, grasp, and address core concerns to make your people, your teams—and your company—more unified, higher performing, and more resilient.

As a 100% virtual company for 10 years and 200+ people strong globally, we understand the challenges of leading remote teams and how to be successful. We’ve mobilized our Thrive by SweetRush team to provide its unique expertise, including remote team building coaching and change management consulting, to leaders like you.

These practical sessions are facilitated by world-class coaches—seasoned specialists with MBAs, ICF certification, and Fortune 500 leadership experience—with rich insights in:

Team Alignment & Team Building
Change Management
Developing Empathy
Agility in Complexity
Difficult Conversations
Focus and Prioritization

Our goal is to help you and your teams achieve quick wins to build trust, momentum, and morale—and make you more agile in responding to complex challenges. Reach out to schedule a free, 30-minute consultation by writing to us at [email protected] or call 415.647.1956. We’re ready to get started immediately helping you and your team succeed.

3 Elements of a Powerful Vision for Organizational Change

May 7, 2018June 28, 2023 by Ashley Munday

We’ve all heard the statistic that 70 percent of change management initiatives fail. Often it’s because team members aren’t motivated by the vision for organizational change. When writing our change story, it’s easy for us to assume that others see the importance and share the urgency. However, the change story is the critical first step. Here are three elements of a powerful vision for change:

Create a Sense of Urgency – As Kotter shares, “Your top leaders must describe an opportunity that will appeal to individuals’ heads and hearts and use this statement to raise a large, urgent army of volunteers.”Your change story must address a real business need. It should describe what’s
possible as a result of the change and the consequences if it should fail. It should
connect with top-level strategic priorities. You will need the support of a senior-level
sponsor to convey the urgency.
Define Clear Expectations – Let team members know what will be expected of them and what training and knowledge will be required to effect the change. Engage stakeholders to understand what this organizational change will mean to them. You will need a master vision for change, and various iterations based on the roles within your organization. The researched-based Prosci ADKAR model identifies “knowledge about how change” as one of key steps in a change management process. “Knowledge is the goal/outcome of training and coaching.” If people clearly know what’s expected, they are able to rise to the expectations.
Enlist Your Champions – Champions are folks who see your vision and are fully on board. They understand the vision’s value and are excited to see it come to fruition. When champions come from up, down, and across the organization, they exponentially increase engagement around your vision. From the Chief Learning Officer article “A Simple Guide to Effective Change Management,” champions must have the following three qualities:
- They must exceed performance expectations.
- They must have an aptitude and a desire for training.
- They must be change adopters. The earlier change adopters enter the change curve, the more likely they’ll be out of the change curve by the time they need to start training people.

When carefully crafted with all stakeholders in mind, your organizational change story can be one of the most powerful motivators for transformation. It brings everyone on the same page, and provides consistent messaging for all involved. Going slowly to develop a relevant change story enables a faster process for change.

Interested in crafting your own change story? Visit the TLC team page to learn how we can help.

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The Secret Sauce in Organizational Change Management

March 6, 2018April 29, 2024 by Ashley Munday

6 Steps to Building Trust in Organizational Change Management

Change done well builds trust. Change done poorly erodes trust and your organizational culture. Each new project and initiative creates change, whether it affects the entire organization or just one role or team. Think of organizational change management as the salt added to a dish. The salt is not the main dish, but it can dramatically enhance and improve the dish (your project).

Many changes that we face are due to things beyond our control—market conditions or mandates from the top. Even when we don’t choose the change, and especially when people around us may be resistant, these six steps for organizational change management will bring people into the process and build genuine trust.

Your vision doesn’t have to be lofty, but it should always state the business case, the reasons senior leadership supports the change, and the expectations during the change.

Team members typically want to hear from two people during change: (1) the CEO or top team and (2) the person to whom they report. A written vision statement will create consistent messaging and enable each manager to create a strategy to align with the vision.

if you can get a statement from the CEO or other top team member endorsing this change!

Create a list of all departments potentially affected by this change, and invite one person from each department to a meeting to identify roles that will be affected by the change. It is easy to overlook those who are not directly in our sight line. One of your most powerful tools is to let people know that you are considering them.

Identify a Change Champion who will guide the human side of change. This involves communicating, listening, coaching, and realigning the strategy as needed. This person should be well respected among the stakeholders, empathetic, and someone who carefully tracks the stages of change.

if you have the time and resources to interview a sample of people in different roles about their views on the upcoming change.

Identify the stages of the change and what will be expected of each affected role. Decide what needs to be communicated, when, and to whom. Research the best channels to share your messages. Reinforce the compelling vision statement each step of the way.

if you are humble, funny, and honest. Don’t inflate the vision. You can name challenges, but stay upbeat and focused on what you want to, and can, create.

These next three steps are the “secret sauce” of organizational change management and are often neglected.

One of the most powerful ways to build trust among team members is to collect and act on feedback. This does not mean that you will act on all the feedback or do exactly what’s requested. It means that all feedback is considered in light of the vision and constraints.

Feedback can come through one-on-one interviews, town hall meetings, webinars, or digital surveys. When you request the feedback, be specific to find out the impact of the change on stakeholders, their fears, their hopes, and any suggestions they may have. Just the act of listening alleviates some of the stress of change. When you request feedback, let people know what you will do with their feedback.

if you provide a report of the feedback to all stakeholders.

Trust is based on what you do, not what you say. Take a long, hard look at the feedback, and think about the vision and constraints of the project. Was there a paramount concern for a group of stakeholders? Is resistance due to lack of clarity in communication or a threat to a genuine need? There is wisdom in crowds, and sometimes a team member can be the canary in the coal mine. Bring together a team to analyze the change plan and see how you can adapt based on the feedback. Prioritize the actions and make it happen.

if you involve stakeholders in creating solutions and an action plan.

Let people know that you’ve heard them, and tell them about the actions that you’ve taken. Again, be humble, and share the vision, considerations, and constraints. Remind them that while you can’t act on everything, you hope that actions taken will create more buy-in. Let them know that they are important and that your door is open for ongoing feedback.

if you can get a statement from senior leadership that shows their commitment to collaborative change and that names one action they will support based on the feedback.

Organizational change management is like the African proverb “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” It’s not always the fastest route to garner feedback along the way, but it is the best insurance against dissent and disengagement, which erode performance. Take the long view, engage the right people, and create positive and lasting change.

Category: Leadership & Culture