Attitude And Your Corporate Culture?

No one person can change corporate culture. No one person can dictate that this is the way our corporate culture is going to be. You can forget the "you need a visionary leader to change the culture" crap because that doesn't work either.

Culture change has the highest failure rate of all types of major change at over 80%. Lots of energy, money and reputation is invested in change with a 20% chance of success. Here's why it won't work: you can't build a new 2000 sq ft house on an old 1500 sq ft basement foundation. It doesn't fit. You've got the wrong foundation to build your new house on.

Too many companies are trying to "change" their corporate culture by thinking that it, in and of itself, is what needs changing. But corporate culture is the RESULT of the workplace. Corporate Culture is the collective ATTITUDE of the organization. If you don't change every single one of the individual attitudes within the organization, the collective attitude only changes slightly and therefore, you have wasted time, money and effort and will be right back looking at the same problem this time next year.

Let me explain. Time-management is not a problem by itself - it is a "symptom" of a self-discipline problem. You don't fix self-discipline with a simple time-management course no more than you fix a severed arm with a band-aid. The problem lies deeper than what you might see on the surface. In the same way that organizations attempt to shift the corporate culture by addressing the results of their current culture, they are simply addressing the symptoms, not the root cause. If you don't address the root cause, you won't fix the problem. You will simply mask it for only a short while.

Middle management, although they may feel powerless to change something so big, can in fact be the biggest influences and facilitators of change of culture. But it is going to take some work. Middle management needs to make it a priority to get everyone's gripes, comments, perceptions and whining out on the table and address each of them, publicly. Even Dr. Phil says, "you can't fix what you don't acknowledge."

Once each of the issues have been addressed and satisfied, you will begin to shift the attitudes of the employees. Once you begin a mass-shift by the employees you begin to shift the culture.

Culture is not top-down. Culture is not decided by management. Management may want to influence the culture but they don't necessarily create it. It is always bottom-up. The employees drive the culture. Whatever they bring to work each day (perceptions, attitudes, power-struggles, dissatisfaction, etc - and yes, management can influence how employees perceive their workplace) will become part of your culture if you don't address it. It is always the employees' collective attitudes that determine your culture. And that always starts at the bottom.

In fact, in case you missed it, I recently created a video Blog post on Corporate Culture. Here' is the link to my YouTube Corporate Culture video and my YouTube Channel.
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