People don’t experience your values; they experience your behaviors. They experience the way things happen, implicitly and explicitly, inside an organization. And culture represents the soul of the organization. Cultural change is one of the most challenging aspects of an organizational transformation to execute—and sustain. We strongly believes that people and culture determine a company’s success and failure as much as strategy, if not more.
Five simple, commonplace habits are best to promote this change. Our experience working across multiple organizations is that the challenge is your organization itself to some extent—your ways of working, how you collaborated, the silos in the organization, the trust factor, and the willingness to work across the departments. It became very evident that organizations have to transform the way they work together to help unlock your potential.
Behaviors are things people can control as individuals. There are no “aha” moments relative to these habits. They are powerful in their simplicity:
- The first habit is being respectful, which is about being inclusive, communicating transparently and authentically, even when it comes to feedback.
- The second is about being responsive, both to your clients or customers and inside the organization, and making decisions at speed and taking risks.
- The third is about always communicating—with stakeholders inside the organization and with customers, as well as sharing bad news quicker and faster.
- The fourth is about demonstrating stewardship. It is about having a strong mindset, having a ”can do” attitude as opposed to a cynical attitude, and sharing your best people and helping other parts of the organization, even if there is no benefit to yourself.
- The last one is about building trust across the aisles. The last habit, the element of trusting people before you know them, is incredibly important to getting things done in a collaborative manner.