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Ungagging the Organisation - a Client-Centred
Approach to Culture Change.
2 years ago I was fortunate enough to meet a
chief executive who not only described his own style as "empowering"
but who genuinely wanted managers throughout the organisation
to work in a similar way. Not only that, but he went on to
say that there was no point fiddling around with the structure
of the organisation without first embarking on a culture change
initiative that really changed the way that people work with
each other.
Out of this conversation emerged one of the
most exciting projects I’ve ever been involved with.
We decided that in the Consulting Skills Programme we already
had a vehicle with a proven track record of changing people’s
behaviour, giving leaders the skills they need to work in
a new culture.
The organisation itself is an international
one with operations in more than 100 countries throughout
the world. This added a further dimension. We were endeavouring
to change an organisation with a fairly traditional culture
which itself existed within many different national cultures.
We all recognised that real culture change
requires much more than writing and publishing a set of organisational
values and then prescribing that henceforth everyone should
behave accordingly. Rather people
need the opportunity to identify the behaviours required by
the new culture, and then create and live that culture in
a controlled environment. If we can make it work during
the programme there is a chance that we may be able to take
the new culture back to work.
The programme itself started with some work
on relationship building that was followed by the distribution
of 360degree feedback profiles which had been prepared in
advance. Some people took this in their stride while for others
it was quite a shock. For everyone, however, it formed a solid
basis for their personal learning contract.
Next came the group contracting phase during
which we agreed ground rules for the way we would work with
each other during the programme. They
were asked to produce a set of behavioural ground rules that
not only described how they needed to behave during the event,
but also reflected the culture which they believed the whole
organisation should be working towards.
Most groups committed themselves to:
- Giving each other personal
feedback
- Working in a non-prescriptive
way
- Making it legitimate to share
feelings
- Confronting difficult issues
- Combining support and confrontation
- Being genuine and authentic
- Practising skills by being
clients and consultants with each other.
If that sounds like what the Americans would
call motherhood and apple pie, those of you have attended
"Client-Centred Consulting" will recognise that
it is in fact a very difficult contract to live up to. It
requires a set of behaviours that are largely counter to the
current culture of many organisations.
Having agreed the contract, the group than
started to acquire the skills of working non-prescriptively
– Acceptance, Catalytic, and Confrontation, while at
the same time working hard to deliver on the group contract
and receiving a lot of valuable feedback from their colleagues.
Towards the end of the week the commitment
to the new culture was put to the test with the arrival of
the CEO for an evening visit. We feared that there would be
an immediate reversion to the old culture with people disappearing
to don suits, then returning for a pep talk from on high.
To our delight that never happened. The
groups recognised that the CEO was in fact a client
and they took responsibility for helping him feel comfortable.
They then invited him to join them for for what often turned
out to be quite a hard hitting discussion around the issues
involved in really changing the culture of the organisation.
By now the group members were all pretty well
committed to changing the way they worked and were able to
demonstrate this in the way they managed their new client.
They were committed to changing their leadership style but,
quite naturally, were looking for a similar commitment and
guarantee of support from the CEO. What
was happening over a series of programmes was a significant
re-negotiation of the working contract between the senior
management team and the people responsible for driving the
aims of the organisation throughout the world.
The series of programmes have created enormous
energy and personal commitment to change. Of course this is
not the end of the process. Like all change initiatives, the
biggest challenge is the implementation phase. Having created
a new, more effective, culture in a controlled environment,
people will need a lot of support while they transfer it to
their own work groups and continue to behave in a way that
is consistent with their original group contract.
It is important to recognise that this new
culture is not a "pink and fluffy love-in" where
nothing is achieved. It is indeed one in which people
feel valued and supported but it is also one where difficult,
uncomfortable issues, that get in the way of task achievement,
get surfaced, discussed and dealt with. One member
of the Senior Management Team said it felt like a process
of "Ungagging the Organisation"
The most important learning point for me from
this project is that if you really
want to change the organisational culture, people need to
really experience what that culture is like and what it means
in terms of their own behaviour and what can be achieved within
it. Only then will they be sufficiently committed that
they will be prepared to change their own behaviour and live
by the new organisational values on a day to day basis.
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