February 2008
Link Behaviour to Culture Change
Welcome to the HPS newsletter.
Welcome to the February 2008 edition of our newsletter.
We at HPS Behaviour Change want to provide you with a light read, on easy to
use initiatives to immediately increase your teams’ performance and profit.
This
Edition:
Linking behaviour and culture change to
increased results
Next
Edition:
Performance Management Book of the Month
This month’s book is The Seven-Day Weekend : Changing the Way Work Works by Ricardo Semler
Linking Behaviour to Culture Change
How do the best organisations link changing their culture to distinct changes in people’s behaviour?
If we look back across 2007 at so many of the experts we worked with, in
industries as diverse as Financial Services, Insurance, Printing, Publishing,
Oil etc, there are some things we find in common with those organisations and
business units that have an ability to reform cultures and change behaviour.
What are these things and why is this?
These things include:
1. Often when culture change is needed in
high performing organisations the
masses are consulted, that is, the people on the ground who are
the best at what they do, are spoken
with at length and their techniques are leveraged across the organisation
internally.
Change happens when
people feel like they have a voice.
Any successful business or group in the world will include consultation at some
level. Often in organisations when change does not work, you have one or two
people voicing what they “know to be right” and then the results become just a
few people doing what is required and the others become disillusioned and
morale remains low etc. The importance of understanding current expectations and changing results
going forward is paramount.
2. The ability to successfull internally knowledge share
is becoming more and more important.
By being able to understand
what it is the very best people in any population are doing, you are more easily able to change behaviour.
There are some amazing forms of technology that only a few years ago cost
millions to use in this space, today cost no more than a product like Microsoft
word.
By using this kind of technology you can formulate
specific roadmaps of the strategies your best people use in
their roles, and produce a simple way people underperforming can change. High
performing organisations tend to believe they never know all the answers and
are always looking for
more and better answers. We see this day after day.
Note: It’s hard to make a space for people to share new ways of doing things
when going outside the square hasn’t been encouraged in the past, however you
are well advised to do this in the hunt
for faster results and a more empowered ‘High Performing’ culture.
3. In many of these high performing organisations the heads of
department often know as much about the product or ‘widget’ as the person on
the shop floor. This is not to say they micro manage, in fact quiet the
reverse, but that they know exactly what it is that makes the best
people the best and are able to then live and breathe this extensively.
The reason this can help so much is that often people assume far too much. Knowing ALL of what it is
that the best people do, seeing
the right things about what makes your best people operate so efficiently
and codifying these
so that your internal population can simply
and effectively role them out to the masses, enables everyone
to improve, and fast.
Ownership of change
and interventions is designed so that they are used internally
to create change,
from the top down.
4. The CEO and executive team set one core focus and stick to it –
Not to say things don’t change but that the teams are very aware of the direction
and what’s expected.
By doing so, teams are
able to understand, that what is said, will be carried out.
Like families where dysfunctions occur; when you have adults or parents saying
one thing and then doing something completely different, the children loose
trust and get confused and can in fact rebel.
Organisations are a
similar system, in that when people leading organisations are
continually changing their focus, team members become confused.
The creation of alignment
between words, actions and directives builds trust and is
common place in high performance cultures.
5. The messages
received by clients also are found to be consistent with the focus of the
organisation.
One example of this was an organisation who had a message on their electronic
machines telling customers their aim was to excel in customer service at all cost.
This inspires team
members to ensure they’re excelling in this kind of
environment.
If you have one organisation and many differing messages, either that you
yourself are portraying to your team, or that your executives are portraying,
confusion can be the result. By keeping
messages simple and consistent, people come to understand what
it is you consider most important and will rank this right there as number one
also.
There are many reasons
why cultures change. Some of this work has now been documented
in HPS’ first publication – the book Replicating Expertise to
Win.
In the following months we will discuss some of the things we have been doing
inside organisations in order to create changes in behaviour fast. We
look forward to working with you in 2008.
We trust you’ve gained
valuably from this newsletter and have shared in the simple and concise attributes required
to build your successful
business in today’s market. We continue to encourage our clients to
learn, share, change, succeed, profit and win in your market.
HPS Behaviour Change thanks you for the opportunity to share this information
with you, our clients, and we look forward to when we next speak.
It’s a pleasure as we continue to work with more and more leading organisations
seeing the significant results
being achieved. Some of these case studies have now been published on the web access
via http://www.behaviourchange.com.au/articles/
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