Cultural transformation is about changing behaviours

Cultural transformation is more than an idea or company mission; it is about changing behaviours on a consistent basis to create improved metrics and outcomes determined as essential for long-term success of an organization. 

“Corporate culture is fundamentally the sum total of what everybody does,” says Phil Geldart, author and chief executive officer of Eagle’s Flight, a global training company. 

“It's not what the executives wanted to be. It's not what you put on the wall. It's not what you aspire to be. It is what the people do.” 

Therefore, he says, if you want to get a sense of an organization’s culture, “you actually have to go in and watch how they work.” 

As an example, Geldart uses an organization that wants a ‘safe’ culture. “When we watch how they perform, we see if employees and management pay attention to safety metrics. Do the leaders refer to safety frequently? When the executives show up for a site visit, do they interact with the Union around safety? Or do they just simply put people through incredibly boring courses on health and safety and hope that people do something about it?” 

Clients go to Eagle’s Flight with policies and procedures in place, but their workers don’t follow them. They want to know how to build a culture where people commit to those policies and procedures. So, for example, if an organization wants a safe culture, how do they build a culture where people are actually committed to safety? 

Geldart says the goal could be safety, quality, innovation, or customer service. “We have all these aspirations to provide great customer service and deliver high standards around various aspects of a business. But when you get right down to it, people don't really do what we want them to do.” 

He adds that to create a corporate culture, organizations must take measurable steps to get buy-in and conviction. He offers a series of steps to get the culture from an idea to a reality. 

Steps to building corporate culture 

The first step is ensuring executives are seriously engaged in driving that culture.  

“I don’t mean executives articulating the desired culture,” says Geldart. “It’s about executives modeling the desired culture, talking about it, referencing it, driving recognition around it. They must make it a priority.” 

“Let's say that we want the culture to improve around customer service. When an executive talks to people, are they referencing customer stories? Are they talking about customer problems? Executives need to regularly refer to the customer metrics or workers are not going to think they are committed to those metrics.”  

The second step is to train the organization on the desired behaviours, which Geldart says can be difficult to do. “Simply saying we want different behaviours or results isn’t going to do it.”  

Instead, this step might look like implementing policies and procedures that enable workers to live up to the standards the company is working towards.  

“The behaviour does not originate at the front of the house where the customer and the employer interact. It starts about three steps back, where whoever wrote a policy about a customer service made a rule that is not customer centric.” Those policies need to be aligned with the desired culture. 

As for changing people’s behaviours to align with the desired culture, “you cannot change behaviour unless you first build conviction,” says Geldart. “Conviction is what you determined you are going to do, not because of what someone tells you.  

Eagle’s Flight uses experiential learning to help build conviction. In a purposefully constructed experience, the worker will go through an activity, which can be fun, and they draw conclusions for themselves. They can learn that their existing behaviours are not producing the results they want and discover new behaviours that will get results. These activities can also be used to train workers on desired behaviours.  

Managers must model the culture 

The next step is to train the managers and leaders. Geldart says that even with executive buy-in, the managers and leaders are the people employees interact with most often. Workers will be influenced by the actions and words from their managers, so the managers need to be trained to model the culture.  

“Managers must demonstrate they are committed to the culture. In practice, on a day-to-day basis, the manager is the one who brings the culture to life. The managers model the behaviours and the executives reinforce them.  

“When we do a culture transformation, we put a lot of effort into training the leaders. We train them to model the desired behaviours, we show them how to coach those behaviours in their employees, and we let them know this is not negotiable.” 

Another step is communication. “Organizations have a massive number of things going on all the time such as product development and launches, acquisitions, divestitures, layoffs, firings, market changes, COVID, and supply chains. If you do not constantly communicate throughout the chaos what the culture is and how to behave within its framework, the culture will not seem to be relevant.”  

Once these steps are in place, the organization must measure the results. “You must link the impact of the culture to the benefit to the shareholder. The shareholder has to get a benefit, otherwise you shouldn't be spending time and money. In fact, if you don't have a link to the outcome, then the new culture will die very quickly.” 

The measurements can also motivate staff. If customer service scores or market share goes up, people feel good about what they are doing.  

Geldart says the final step is to sustain the culture. “When you begin a culture transformation, the first thing you see is a significant impact and it looks like you're really making a difference. You must sustain the focus on that culture transformation until it's embedded in the organization.” 

This can be done by regular communication about the culture and the impact it’s having on the business. By maintaining an emphasis on the culture, employees will realize that it is here to stay.  

Geldart aptly sums up the benefits of a cultural transformation is his book, Culture Transformation: Purpose, Passion, Path:  

“The exact nature of a culture transformation is simply that the people within the organization are behaving differently in some fashion, on a consistent basis, and that different behaviour is being supported by each manager. The results of adopting those new behaviours will result in improved metrics, or outcomes consistent with what has been determined as essential for the long-term success, and maybe even survival, of the organization. The transformation will be achieved when the desired results or metrics have been achieved. A transformation is therefore a process whereby, over time, people behave differently and the organization benefits in some fashion as a result. If these benefits are required, then a transformation is necessary.”