Defining Company Culture
Culture has been described as the norms, behaviors, attitudes, and values of an organization—a collective, group approach to how an organization works and acts as a whole. As your team’s leader, it’s important to have the tools necessary for effectively leading company culture change. While company change can be difficult, having these tools can make organizational transitions smoother for the team as a whole.
As a key component of major organizational changes, company culture change can be viewed one of two ways:
1. The organizational change will cause the culture to change, or
2. You must change the culture before you even consider being able to make major organizational changes happen.
In my humble opinion, company culture needs to be addressed first and foremost. I come from the change management school of getting organizations ready for the change first. You can’t develop a strategy your organization doesn’t have the leadership, tools, hierarchy, and systems to properly implement.
Successfully Leading Company Culture Change
You need to mentally and emotionally prepare team members to work indifferently. That way, employees are prepared and capable of adopting changes quickly—and with a lot less resistance. By leading company culture change and preparing your team members in advance, changes won’t be such a big culture shock for employees as they occur.
For example, an organization can’t suddenly decide that they want to implement “Agile” enterprise-wide within one year. It’s difficult to implement Scrum teams, standups, and retrospectives when the company culture has been organized in a waterfall-style approach for many decades. By now, your teams have learned to work in uncollaborative silos. You have to make sure the culture can handle new changes. Teams will also need to be capable of learning new mindsets and practice new behaviors, which will develop a new culture of collaboration, innovation, and communication. Leading company culture change by teaching a new mindset and behaviors first—instead of expecting the Agile implementation to organically change cultural behaviors, habits, and mindsets without resistance or challenges—will benefit your company in the long run.
Transitioning
When implementing Agile, it helps to educate leaders on having an Agile mindset and how to teach that mindset to their teams. Teach leaders how to model Agile behaviors and build Agile habits every day. It also helps to show leaders how to create an Agile environment that enables their teams to feel free to innovate, make mistakes, take accountability, and self-manage. Then, move to the scrum practices.
Anyone who’s grown accustomed to a siloed, waterfall-style approach to working will tell you that being thrown into their first scrum standup is very unnerving. Many will also admit that they feel vulnerable, feel that they’re being judged, or feel that they’re under pressure. This may happen because they’re at an older legacy company with a company culture of keeping their head down and getting their work done. It’s possible they’re not comfortable telling others, especially those in leadership positions, exactly what they’re doing and what challenges they face. They’re afraid to admit challenges and mistakes, and often don’t comfortable sharing and collaborating. Guiding these employees, however, will improve their mindset and make them more comfortable to discuss the challenges they’re facing.
Building a New Company Culture
The organization must build a new culture that celebrates making mistakes, innovation, communication, collaboration, and accountability. As a result, team members can stand up amongst fellow teammates in a scrum and feel comfortable. You can’t implement major organizational changes that will impact how people work together without making the development of an effective company culture your priority.
The Human Aspect of Company Culture
Putting the human aspect of culture before implementing the Agile systems, processes, methodologies, and tools will get a lot of pushback from technically-focused leaders and teams. In the past, these personalities typically resisted this approach. They wanted to see tangible, linear details of how this change process would work. However, I’ve seen a shift in recent years that shows organizations are more open to creating a new culture first. Companies have seen how even perfectly planned implementations of organizational changes fail over and over when you don’t make sure the people are ready to implement the change.
I’ve witnessed multiple Agile implementation consulting practices bring in technically brilliant consultants who are focused on implementing the new Agile practices, procedures, and tools. However, these consultants have all told clients to prioritize the human side of change, especially for the technical implementations to have a chance of success, particularly with leadership and culture.
From my experience, if you want to look at culture change as an expected, organic byproduct of making system-wide changes in a company’s technology, processes, and systems, you should prepare for a lot more resistance, moral issues, longer adoption time, and multiple attempts for the change to really take, which could cost more time and money as a result.