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YES, CULTURE CAN BE TRANSFORMED

As we discovered in interviewing some of the top CEOs in the world, successful CEOs and senior leadership teams can and do nurture and reinforce new mind-sets. Individuals, teams, and entire organizations can adapt, mature, and increase preparedness to deal successfully with current and future challenges. They learn to transform successfully what they do and how they do it. As a result, they create and sustain a “think different, think big” culture that is matched only by a “do different, do big” culture. The magic is not in espousing a bold vision or executing an untargeted strategy, but in the match.

Take a client of mine, Claro Colombia, the America Movil subsidiary in Colombia. America Movil has operations in 18 countries throughout South and Central America, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States as well as in eight countries in Europe through its Austria Telekom operation. Partly as a result of a corporate-wide initiative to laser focus on enhancing customer experience but also to sustain its leadership position, Claro required a game-changing think-big vision and strategy to ignite its cultural change initiative. Led by Claro Colombia CEO Juan Carlos Archila (see his interview in Chapter 11), Claro started its transformation journey by leveraging its considerable corporate people strengths – an unwavering focus, discipline, and flawless execution in such areas as product development and work processes – into a laser focus on the customer, including building customer relationships based on rapport and trust, creating memorable customer experiences, and building and sustaining a culture based on customer advocacy. Claro's new value proposition emphasizes an almost maniacal focus on enhancing a customer's experience and providing instantaneous turnaround on most services and products, delivered with consistent quality by an entrepreneurial and engaged staff. In conjunction with these transformations, the company launched a new, far simpler business model geared to growth. While still early in its transformation journey, these measures have brought new energy to the organization and inspired a stronger and more vibrant culture of leader and individual contributor capability, commitment, and alignment that is driving impressive operating results. Again, Claro Colombia's shift was big, but the shift required a laser focus on fewer levers – not more – enabling leaders and all employees to focus on what really matters.

Organizations that want to adapt during turbulent times cannot force these transformations purely through programmatic approaches such as restructuring and reengineering. They need a new kind of leadership capability – one that can reframe dilemmas; reinterpret options; and reform, revitalize, and renew operations. They must achieve all of these capabilities at once.

Transforming organizational culture is not for the weak or the quick-change artist. Real, serious, sustained transformation requires real, serious, sustained leadership.

What Is Culture? Let's Start Here

Your organization's culture represents the collective character, values, thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors of your leaders and individual contributors. Your organization's culture is a product of such factors as its history and how your leaders and individual contributors ascribe meaning and value to it as well as leadership style (legacy and current), which is then reflected in the creation and implementation of your organization's values, vision, mission, purpose, strategy, structure, and roles. Ultimately, your overall culture and the relative health and vibrancy of your culture comprises five cultures as shown in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The Five Cultures of Culture

Capability Culture “Can Do”

To what extent does your organization develop the inner core (that is, values, character, thoughts, beliefs, emotional makeup) and outer core competencies and skills of employees and leaders at all levels? Is there a passion and diligence displayed on the part of the senior leadership team to equip leaders and individual contributors with the skills required for individual and organizational effectiveness now and into the future, skills that increase people's learning agility, change/transformation agility, and people agility? To what extent is your organization creating a culture of can do, in which people truly believe they have the skills and capabilities required to be successful and help the organization be successful?

Commitment Culture “Will Do”

To what extent do your organization's vision, mission, and purpose excite and motivate leaders and employees? To what extent is authority and responsibility delegated to those who have the best and most up-to-date information to make the best decisions? To what extent do people truly believe that they can impact the business in a positive way and add value for customers and society? Are people motivated, passionate, and inspired to do great things for the organization? To what extent is there a reasonable risk-taking culture in place in which people believe they can take risks and failure is seen as an opportunity to grow and become better?

Alignment Culture “Must Do”

To what extent is there a clear vision and strategy for the organization? To what extent do different parts of the organization and different levels share the same vision for the organization? To what extent is cooperation and consensus possible when different parts of the organization and different levels work together? To what extent are leaders visionary and possessed of a long-term view? To what extent has the vision, mission, and strategy been translated into a structure with key roles identified so that all employees know their roles and the link between their contributions and the contributions of the whole? To what extent are people so connected and aligned with the vision that they feel they must execute at a high level?

Individual Performance Culture

To what extent is there a culture of individual excellence and execution? To what extent are leaders and employees truly role models? To what extent does everyone “walk the talk”? Does everyone operate with strong character and values? Are they effective leaders in how they go about their work? Are employees effective in how they go about their work? Are leaders and individual contributors open to receiving feedback from others – including customers? Are leaders and individual contributors actually listening to feedback and making needed adjustments?

Team Performance Culture

To what extent is there a team and collaborative approach to getting things done in your organization? To what extent is there real involvement by everyone in helping shape the organization's vision, mission, purpose, strategy, structure, roles, and key responsibilities associated with those roles? To what extent do you have a cooperative, nonsiloed approach to getting work done? To what extent is there a passion and inclination to work hard to achieve win/win solutions when conflicts and disagreements occur?

Why Is Culture Important?

Your organization's current and future operating success is tied to the health and vibrancy and overall maturity of your culture. Regardless of your unique transformation challenge (for example, the need to be more innovative, collaborative, global, more responsive, more efficient, execute better, become more customer-focused, or even integrate or merge with another organization), your culture and how strong and vibrant it is will determine whether you succeed or fail.

Why Transform Culture?

As we discussed in the Introduction, organizations have no choice but to transform. The business world is shifting fast; progressive CEOs and senior leaders see it, know it, and feel it. Attempting to cope, they apply their best thinking to the structures, systems, and processes they need to compete. Conventional wisdom says that the right business structures will provide the right efficiencies and agility (learning, change, and people) that organizations need to succeed and achieve meaningful longevity. Behind closed doors, however, senior leaders and CEOs are speaking a different truth. Conventional wisdom? Throw it out the door.