Why is Transforming Organizational Culture Important?
Culture is what makes strategy happen — so there needs to be a clear link between an organization’s culture and an organization’s strategy.
A culture reboot can equip your current culture to support more innovation and collaboration, remove barriers to success, and overcome culture-based challenges.
Here are steps to consider when transforming your organizational culture.
Identify the gaps between your current and required leadership culture.
Step 1: Use predictive analytics to prioritize investments.
Data about your workers and your business will allow you to drive more effective investments in your human capital. Predictive analytics can inform smart decisions about investing in your culture and in your workforce.
Start by setting priorities around your business challenges and opportunities that are identified by your executive team, from increasing customer satisfaction to improving worker productivity. Next, gather data, including business metrics related to those priorities and people data such as employee experience and engagement.
Analyze your priorities and data to identify the people factors that benefit or get in the way of your key business goals, and let that analysis inform your decisions to take action. With predictive analytics, you’re empowered to take evidence-based steps to strengthen your return on investment in leadership and talent development.
Step 2: Ensure your leadership strategy is cohesive with the business strategy.
Too often, there’s a gap between an organization’s strategy and its execution. Culture may be the problem, as you may not have the culture you need to enact the business strategy. Research shows that superior-performing organizations display a clear connection between business strategy and leadership strategy.
There are certain elements to bring into focus when examining leadership strategy:
A defining characteristic of executive teams at high-performing organizations is the collective ability to lead strategically. These senior executives pay attention to leadership strategy along with the business strategy to help the organization reach its full performance potential.
Step 3: Identify your organization’s leadership culture.
Leaders must understand the organization’s culture and recognize their responsibility in creating — or changing — it. Leadership culture is the way things get done in an organization, and it’s directly connected to leaders’ beliefs, both conscious and unconscious. But how do you know what kind of leadership culture you have — and if you have the culture required for the strategy you’ve set?
If the culture isn’t helping the business strategy, leaders need to get serious about changing themselves — so they can change the culture. It’s crucial to note that executives have to do the change work first. Expect them to lead by engagement and example in the organization’s cultural transformation process, modeling the desired new behaviors before engaging other leaders in the same process.
Step 4: Focus on evolving new mindsets to transform your organization.
This is crucial particularly among senior leaders and calls for a clarification of the organizational vision and priorities. Too often, organizations have focused on new skills and individual leader competencies in order to manage change. But executives should work to advance individual and collective leadership mindsets when transforming organizational culture.
Encourage bigger minds to keep up with quickly changing reality. New thinking and new ways of working together will allow organizations to keep up and thrive in the face of disruption.
If senior executives want to see organizational change, they, too, are required to change. Their commitment to personal change will help them take on the management challenges of change for a sustainable future. Senior leaders who move the needle toward organizational transformation also experience significant personal transformation.
How CCL Can Help
Senior executives will find that Leadership at the Peak is a program that helps them address the challenges of leadership at the top. Those challenges are far-reaching and complex, and it’s essential to handle them the right way.
Among other benefits, participants will get:
Best For: C-level and senior executives in the top 3 tiers of an organization, and those with more than 15 years of management experience and leadership responsibility for 500+ people.
Determine the business drivers that will guide long-term success.
Step 1: Envision a “future perfect” state.
This image will drive your leadership culture, so create a leadership strategy that helps leaders execute business priorities. Keep in mind that, to impact organizational performance, the entire organization needs to change, in addition to individual leaders.
To see new results in organizational performance, start to change the way work gets done. Engage the whole system in the development process as you work toward a future-perfect state for your leadership culture. Aim for the kind of culture you would have if business was hitting peak efficiency and meeting targets. Consider the leader behaviors and shared beliefs that would help you get there and implement them.
At the same time, motivate your leaders to support a culture of continuous improvement and to be open to training programs as well as taking risks in the name of innovation.
Step 2: Kickstart a well-planned leadership culture change.
A well-executed organizational culture change takes time, and requires that you:
Step 3: Conduct ongoing measurement of the impact of your culture change initiative.
Don’t wait until your culture change initiative is completed in order to evaluate its impact. Since leadership culture change is about beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes, change doesn’t occur quickly or easily. Make learning integral to the change process by strategically collecting, analyzing, and using data along the way. Practice ongoing evaluation and plan to make adjustments as necessary.
This will help you clarify your goals and align with other stakeholders about what matters. Let these insights shift your organization’s beliefs and practices, guiding you toward long-lasting organizational change.
Ready to evaluate your initiative? Consider the big questions to ask, the necessary mindset shifts, what you need to measure, how and when to measure, and how you’ll use and apply these results.
How CCL Can Help
Partner with us for Organizational Leadership Culture Change, where we focus on connected, aligned leadership development to transform your organization’s leadership culture. With our analysis process, we can help you determine the culture that your organization’s strategy demands. Then we can help you develop the beliefs, behaviors, and practices to build a culture that can support your business strategy. We can also assist with getting key influencers to adopt new mindsets to help you scale your culture change enterprise-wide, as well as measuring progress.
Best For: Organizations that are disappointed with the results of their culture change initiatives, or that have recently shifted their strategy — because when the strategy changes, culture must change too.
Engage leaders at all levels.
Bring diverse teams together and move beyond one-size-fits-all talent development by evolving your approach to organizational culture change. Scale leadership development to promote collaboration, connection, and coordination rooted in common leadership language, vision, and behaviors. In this kind of agile workplace, employees throughout the organization hold each other accountable to engage, change, innovate, and move forward.
To scale, create a strategy at the outset. And make sure that, once it’s in place, the processes and talent are readily available to support the initiative. Be clear on the varying needs, like investments, at different levels when developing your leaders.
Consider the fact that you may need an external partner for assistance, after which you can engage your internal team.
Your efficient approach to scaling leadership development will help your organization rapidly execute its strategy and achieve its goals, generating revenue and innovation, and developing market agility.
Step 2: Equip your people to create direction, alignment, and commitment across boundaries.
Collaboration must span vertical, horizontal, stakeholder, demographic, and geographic boundaries. Leaders who reach beyond present boundaries can create innovative solutions and evolve to thrive in today’s interdependent, complex world. Know the types of boundaries:
Acknowledge these boundaries and reach beyond them. The benefits of boundary-spanning leadership include increased organizational agility to respond to a dynamic marketplace, advanced cross-organizational innovation processes, and flexible, cross-functional learning capabilities to solve problems and adapt to change.
How CCL Can Help
Access our Boundary-Spanning Workshop Kit to work on buffering, which defines boundaries to create safety; reflecting, to understand boundaries and foster respect; transforming, to cross-cut boundaries and enable reinvention, and more.
Best For: Internal HR, training and development professionals, business unit leaders, team leaders, and project leaders who want to increase collaboration, tear down silos, and mitigate turf wars on their teams.
The Big Picture
Organizational leadership culture change can be the key to achieving the goals within your business strategy.
Get started:
Make the right investments in talent and strategy, you’ll transform your organization’s culture. Get ready to meet your goals.
Want to talk through it with us?
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