Last month I discussed the COAST model for culture (Commitment, Openness, Accountability, Safety and Trust) and promised some techniques for moving the culture. First, lets explore why you might want to move the culture in your organization.

A key reason to move the culture would be that it is inconsistent with or less supportive than desirable of your Mission, Vision, Strategy and Values. For example, perhaps your company strategy is to grow topline by improving margins, yet your sales and marketing functions are volume-oriented. Maybe your vision is to be the most operationally excellent supplier, yet your manufacturing plants have a high rate of quality and safety issues and dont seem to care enough about it. Or perhaps you want to be first to market with new and differentiated products, but your marketing and technology functions are slow and ponderous. In such situations you are likely to find that it is not sufficient just to state and restate your vision or strategy; you need to focus on the culture as well in order to move the dial in the right direction.

In my experience a culture change must start with the clearly stated intentions of the CEO and senior officials of your company. They need to present to the organization a picture of the current state of the culture, a compelling picture of the future culture, and why the change is needed. They need to be committed to the change and model the change for the organization. They also need to hold their teams accountable for the change. It is helpful to ensure that the change can be measured, such as through some sort of employee survey at the start, and at reasonable intervals (probably annually) along the journey.

In addition to surveys, special focus should be given to the key metrics that will demonstrate progress. In the examples above, such metrics could be average unit margin and total margin, error rates and safety incident rates, and speed to market and successful new product launch metrics. You may find that you need to set up new or better systems to measure these metrics, and improved reports to ensure that these metrics are visible and available across the organization. Be sure that everyone is calculating the metric in the same way.

As discussed last month culture is embodied in artifacts, values and tacit assumptions. If you want to move the culture, it is important to look at these aspects of culture and make clear and visible changes. With regard to artifacts, think about these useful tools: physical office environment, company presentations and meetings, newsletters and bulletin boards, awards and recognition, reports and alerts. If you want to encourage faster and more innovative product launches you may want to break down physical office barriers and encourage a more open office environment and higher degree of collaboration. If you want to move toward higher standards of operational excellence you may want to establish a safety award system for groups or plants and a safety alert system when an injury occurs anywhere in your company. If you are promoting a margin focus you may want to publish an internal newsletter highlighting margin successes and how they were achieved.

With regard to values you may want to consider writing them down, if you havent already done so. If they are already written down, I suggest you modify them by adding one new value that supports the culture change you are trying to make. You may want to hold smaller group meetings that focus on the new value and how it will be reflected in the daily or regular activities of the group.

Tacit assumptions are of course the hardest aspect to address. Have your management teams discuss where these assumptions might undermine the culture change. In the example of moving toward operational excellence, perhaps people assume that production schedules always trump safety and if a decision between money and safety needs to be made, then financials always win. This will have to be discussed openly and addressed by the senior management or nothing will actually change.

In the case of moving the organization to faster and better product launches, perhaps the tacit assumption is that the company wont spend anything or change anything in order to achieve the results. Be sure to have an open discussion on these questions: What are the rate-limiting steps in the process? What processes and procedures need to change in order to make a step change in our product development speed? What are the key barriers to the change and who can remove them?

Be aware that in a culture change process all eyes are on the leaders. People will be watching for signs as to whether the leadership is serious or not. Leadership really needs to walk the talk and be prepared to be challenged on specific actions or decisions that seem inconsistent in some way with the culture change. Dont embark on a culture change journey with an expectation that it will be done in a year; such changes will take several years to embed. Make sure that new entrants to the organization, especially at the leadership level, are aware and supportive of the culture change initiative. You should also be extremely selective about the culture change and not try to make too many changes at the same time. Finally, be sure to reinforce those aspects of the current culture that are to remain.

Sara Lefcourt of Lefcourt Consulting LLC specializes in helping companies to improve profits, reduce risk and step up their operations. Her experience includes many years in marketing, sales and procurement, first for Exxon and then at Infineum, where she was vice president, supply. E-mail her at saralefcourt@gmail.com or phone (908) 400-5210.