An organisation’s culture is ingrained in the business DNA. Culture is created through consistent and authentic behaviours, which is built on people’s values and attitudes, not with press releases or policy documents. It is the glue that binds your people together and makes your organisation unique as great culture is achievable—but it takes a committed team of Leaders that are focused on building culture to make it happen.
When your organisational culture aligns with your business strategy, it accelerates your growth, improves employee engagement, reduces risk, and builds your brand. But when it does not, it is a definite factor that can stand in the way of success. Without cultural alignment with cross-functional collaboration, an innovation mindset, or agility, then achieving your business goals becomes difficult, if not impossible.
For example, your Senior Leaders have mapped out a new change initiative and, in the execution process, start focusing and getting themselves excited about the future but only to find that the rest of the organisation does not share their enthusiasm. This resistance begins to manifest in numerous ways and yet, in trying to overcome resistance to change, your Leaders often make structured but logical arguments for why the change initiative is needed – arguments that fail to persuade.
What does “leading through Change” mean?
Change offers uncertainty, but also unique opportunities.
When leading your team through organisational change, you function as the intermediary between the Executive Management Team where commercial decisions are being made, and your team, who is affected by those decisions. You become “the voice of the company” in this instance and it is a delicate position to find yourself in.
Leading through change means mobilising and motivating people toward a new direction. It sounds simple enough in theory. Ensuring they have all the information they need to understand the change, and as well as the guidance they need to adapt to the change challenge. Because people do not always respond well to shifts in their daily routine.
Several factors can determine your organisation’s culture, such as the following three (3) principles:
1. Inspiring Culture with Leadership principles
Leadership principles are the foundation and guiding rules that Leaders follow to shape an organisation’s culture. Great Leaders are honest, open, and accountable as they encourage open communication and value different ideas (other than theirs).
Additionally, great Leaders believe in the strength of a culturally diverse team and the blend of personalities to develop robust opinions with the direction for change. They simply inspire and empower their teams (and members), by setting an example of continuous learning and adaptability, which in turn promotes a culture of growth and resilience.
2. Shaping Culture based on business type
The type of business influences its organisational culture and direction for change. In hindsight, the company’s values and practices shape the culture by influencing how employees interact, collaborate, and innovate within the organisation. Examples include the following:
- A tech startup often fosters an innovative and AGILE culture that encourages experimentation and risk-taking to push their business boundaries for growth.
- In contrast, a more traditional, established company may prioritise stability and hierarchy with less emphasis on selective risk-taking in a market competitive environment.
- Similarly, service-oriented businesses often focus on customer-centric cultures and excel in making customers “happy”, with alignment to marketing their products and delivery performance.
- While creative industries (e.g., advertising) emphasise individuality and creative expression with their business model and how these ideals transfers into the environment for employees to reach their full potential.
3. Influencing Culture with work values by clients and employees
Clients and staff significantly impact work values.
Clients influence organisational culture by shaping products, services, and communication based on their preferences. Positive client experiences foster excellence and innovation for their engagement with business partnerships, while challenges can prompt cultural shifts with alignment to commercial decisions and support.
Employees directly contribute to culture through values, ethics, behaviours, and collaboration. Leadership plays a key but strategic role with engaging employees, thereby creating a culture of teamwork and dedication. Prioritising employee well-being is at the centre of cultivating a culture of empowerment and growth for organisations.
How to uncover and overcome resistance to Change?
Few Executives or Leaders can deal with change without thinking about resistance; it is only a natural process.
Change in the techniques and organisational structure comes at regular intervals. However, with pre-existing methods, individuals become reluctant to learn and implement the new techniques, thereby highlighting resistance to change. The Executive Management Team, Senior Executives and Managers must execute initiatives in managing resistance to change and during the process develop a gradual adaptation to change – thereby ensuring productivity, efficiency, and resilience.
The key aspect of effective Change Management is the use of Change Management tools and strategies. These tools can help Leaders to identify and address sources of resistance, while also providing a Strategy Roadmap for direction on change initiatives. By employing these tools and strategies, Leaders and Managers can minimise the negative impacts of resistance to change and ensure that the trajectory of their organisation transformations moves towards success.
Implementing key strategies for ‘Emotional Resilience’
How your leadership deals with change resistance will define the outcome of the change initiative. Whoever leads the change initiative, needs to be able to withstand strong internal pressures (e.g., milestones, timelines, budget) and the emotionally charged situations (e.g., employees and teams reactions) of change resistance.
Change leadership is all about the people because we must confront the intricacies of human behaviour and emotion. The most successful Change Leaders are, therefore, the individuals who communicate with, set priorities for, and listen to the people who embody their organisation. An important skill for supporting effective organisational transformations and change initiatives is ”emotional resilience” – which is the ability to recover quickly from change and return to the original state of nature.
Organisational acceptance of key strategies for Change
For change to be accepted by all stakeholders, there are key strategies that will need to be implemented and include:
- Strategic vision – Provide a strategic vision of the ‘future’ state and its benefits for the broader organisation and at the same time as driving toward a new future.
- Effective communication – Clearly communicate the reasons for the change by leading and influencing across functional Business Units, varying teams levels, and time zone boundaries. Balancing the need to ensure organisational performance in the ‘current’ state.
- Change Agents – Identify and empower Change Agents within the organisation that can influence, inspire others, and deliver the change initiative. Additional external Consultants or resources may need to be identified.
- Change engagement and participation – Involve employees in the change process and the active participation in change initiatives. By always encouraging feedback, suggestions, and listening to employee concerns, this increases the change engagement process and the willingness to adapt to change.
- Education and training – Ensure that employees have the necessary skills to adapt to the change and by providing training programmes, coaching, 1-1s, and additional Change resources to help them adapt.
- Address concerns – Actively listen, reaffirm and understand employee concerns, and address them promptly by providing consistent information (timing!) and reassurance with adopting new change (and practices).
- Rewards and incentives – Offer recognition to individual employees and communicating success to their peers. Link a Rewards Program for the individuals / teams to recognise the support with embracing the change initiative. This incentive recognition creates the cultural motivation for supporting the change.
- Gradual implementation – Implement changes incrementally to minimise disruption, change fatigue, and allow adequate time for adaptation and responses.
- Transparency and alignment – Be transparent and conscious about the progress and challenges of the change. Sharing both the successes and setbacks with a Communication Plan builds team collaboration and ensures focus on the strategic vision.
- Clear leadership and role modelling – Leaders must exemplify the desired behaviours, focus, purpose, and show their commitment to the change. Leaders must demonstrate self-awareness by adapting their leadership and change style to “speak into the listening” of the people they are leading.
- Lean into every phase of change – Leadership is almost always several steps ahead of everyone else in the organisation. So, it is therefore essential to thoughtfully (and patiently) bring people along for the change journey, from the Discovery Phase to the Planning Phase to the Implementation Phase and ongoing Business Process improvement phases. Sometimes you must go slow to go fast!
Embracing new Change (and Resistance)
In the complexities of the dynamic business environment, embracing change is not a choice or distraction but a crucial necessity for organisation growth and resilience. Organisational change must cause disruption, but managing change is crucial to the outcome and how much value it provides. Manage it well, and changes will be positive and stick!
Whatever change initiative is executed and put in place, there will be change resistance. Change resistance is a natural reaction to uncertainty and disruption that can be caused by both internal and external factors. Understanding the sources of resistance for change, such as “fear of the unknown” and “loss of control”, is crucial for Leaders.
For a change initiative to be successful, it requires effective leadership commitment and employee involvement. Overcoming resistance involves – clear communication, involvement, education, addressing concerns, feedback, and Change Agents. These AGILE Change Agents facilitate change adaptation and help their organisations thrive in the face of constant change.
AGILE Change Agents vs. Resistance to Change
Change Agents understand the need for change. AGILE Change Agents have the competences and commercial experience necessary to effectively support people (and teams) in implementing both new and innovative solutions. This broad network of Change Management personnel makes new change transitions more effective, who can initiate and deliver change initiatives, and functionally support change processes.
These individuals come from different levels and across the enterprise organisation, performing different tasks daily A Change Agent understands naturally occurring resistance and can offer support to those employees experiencing change (and disrupted change) – they include C-Suite Executives, Leaders, Heads of organisational Business Units, Domain experts, Change specialists, Project Team members, and Consultants.
Responding to periodic states is the new discipline
The crucial role of the AGILE Change Agent in preparing people to deal with these periodic states is invaluable. It is precisely why this attitude and working atmosphere enables many organisations to adapt and adopt change more effectively. This builds an internal discipline (with focus and commitment) in response to the pressure of frequent changes in the organisation’s environment.
Successful Change Agents must be familiar with engaged Change learning concepts and methodologies, as organisational change can continually force participants (customers or colleagues or teams) to adapt to new situations and continually learn new ways of working. This involves stepping out of their “comfort zone”, and this challenge gives rise to a periodic sense of decline in effectiveness and confidence levels.
Summary
Organisation culture helps to determine your business success. It influences the perception of other internal stakeholders about you and your team. Good culture starts with focus and commitment as building organisational culture takes both time and dedication—but a good culture can enable your team members to do their most impactful work!
Culture’s value is easy to overlook, especially in times of change. When employees feel positively about their organisation’s culture, they feel more connected, committed, and driven to work together to drive high performance. The vision for strong culture comes from Leaders with intentionality driving the objective and ethos, rather than simply letting culture happen (well, it will not!).
Begin developing organisational culture and your approach as soon as possible. Take the time to nurture your desired culture since your culture will develop with or without you or intervention. The difference being that without actively developing and guiding your company culture, you risk having a disorganised and ambiguous framework; with difficulties to reverse.
So, start with anticipating the employee resistance that your change initiatives may encounter and embrace this new challenge. It can only be a great revelation!
Need some guidance on your next steps? Let’s start a conversation…
