Lean & Profitable

Changing your organizational culture and influences are not an easy thing. Cultures are complicated systems created and influenced by processes, mechanisms, and leaders’ actions. So how do you begin changing something so complex?
Start by changing the stories that people tell. Stories are the fabric of a culture and communicate what a company is all about. Do something that represents the culture you want to create. For example, if you want to reduce a culture of perfectionism, admit your mistakes and openly share your failures. If you want to create a culture of communication, leave your Black Berry at your desk when you go to important meetings. If your actions deviate from the norm, you can be sure people will tell stories about them.
What does your culture of your office or business say about it is viewed by both employees and consumers.
This tip was adapted from “A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture” by Peter Bregman.

1.       Motivate Your People. Statistics state about 97 percent of people resist change. Change upsets their daily routines and makes them nervous. The first things is to inspire your employees one at a time to buy into your change plan. Be willing to work alongside your front-line supervisors, work with employees in small groups or be available for one-on-one meetings to explain how the change benefits the organization and the individual. Be patient with employees as they adapt to their new circumstances.

2.      Be Specific. Help each employee team member understand his or her new role in the company.

3.      Use Multiple Channels of Communication. Use every communication tool at your disposal including : internal newsletters/memos, e-mail blasts, division meetings and possibly even a blog.

4.      Listen. In order for employees to buy into change, they have to share in it. Invite and listen to team members’ suggestions. Let the employees show you how they feel they can align their jobs to your needs. After all, who knows a job better than the employee doing it? While this isn’t an “everyone gets a vote in the final decision, it is “everyone’s involved” consensus team building.

I believe there are four important lessons that can be learned from the remarkable turnaround at McDonald’s.

1. How you grow matters as much as that you grow. The financial services industry would have benefitted from a focus on “growth by quality, not by quantity.” Clearly, the “growth at any cost” credo of some led to exactly that: any cost.

2. Changing your business model may not be needed, but belief in it is. Start by asking yourself what business you are in and whether customers still have a need for it. If they do, commit to it — fully. At McDonald’s, we knew that people still “deserved a break today” and we were willing to let go of all other initiatives (many of them very exciting) in order to demonstrate unwavering commitment to the core business.

3. None of us is as good as all of us. It’s the system, stupid! Understanding that you are leading a system, not a company or a person, is a critical insight if you want to successfully change something large. McDonald’s is extremely good at this. To some people (me included), it is a frustrating process. It takes time. It requires buy-in and plenty of patience and tolerance from everyone. It also requires adequate policing, oversight and incredibly detailed measurement systems. This is tedious work, and intimidating to those being measured. But it’s needed.

Large systems work best with a hard-wired operating system in the hub that enables innovation, entrepreneurship and decision-making in the nodes. The Internet would not have happened without HTML. Our country would not have prospered without the U.S. Constitution. But it is worth all the pain. And it must start with the humility that you are in the service of something larger than your own institution. As we say at BE-CAUSE — the company I founded — a purpose bigger than your product.

4. Plan your work, and work your plan. At McDonald’s we created a “plan to win.” Some would argue that it wasn’t perfect. Perhaps it wasn’t, but we decided that it was. And we haven’t looked back. Even through tragic circumstances — losing two CEOs in less than one year due to tragic deaths — the plan stayed intact and is still central today to the focus and alignment of the organization.

Information as per http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/07/what_mcdonalds_can_teach_us_ab.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-TOPICEMAIL-_-JUL_2009-_-STRATEGY2