To Change Your Company's Culture, Don't Start by Trying to Change the Culture

Culture change is probably on your leadership agenda. You may want (or feel forced) to increase diversity and inclusion, create a post-pandemic culture, or become more collaborative, innovative, or aggressive. 

But most companies fail in this because they try to change culture directly—through speeches, training programs, or direct intervention in meetings. Twitter is a perfect example. Concerned that Twitter’s “nice culture” held back innovation, Dantley David, the new vice-president of design, asked employees in a meeting to critique each other. The idea was that tough criticism would help. Instead, people ended up feeling insulted and angry. But Twitter hasn’t backed down from the idea and has even promoted Davis. Employee dissatisfaction, the company said, is sometimes the cost of shaking things up.

Pain is part of the cost of successful knee surgery, but that doesn’t mean banging someone on the knee with a hammer is successful knee surgery. Culture is how a group does the things it does. It changes because people start doing things differently or start doing different things. The causality does not go the other way.

So, in a company, you first need to change how the company is organized, managed, and led in light of its strategic goals. The goals themselves may need to change. A new culture then emerges as a byproduct of these changes.

Consider Vince Forlenza’s experience, as former CEO of medical technology maker Becton Dickinson, in developing a more innovative culture to meet the changing competitive landscape: “The barrier that was most difficult to change was our culture—our lack of constructive conflict and engagement.” Still, he didn’t think much of the “culture committee”:

I was very frustrated with the culture committee…I thought it was a waste of time…We ultimately did away with that committee…Culture gets changed by doing real work in line with the new strategy [my emphasis]—a new governance model, business processes, or performance management systems. Not much happens from pure culture conversations because they don’t result in a clear idea of what needs to change and how it will be changed to reinforce key strategic priorities. 

Harvard Business School professor Jay Lorsch and investment analyst Emily McTague interviewed current and past CEOs who had led successful corporate transformations and came to the same conclusion:   

[These leaders] say that culture isn’t something you “fix.” Rather, in their experience, cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges like reworking an outdated strategy or business model. The culture evolves as you do that important work.

Lorsch & McTague, 2016, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 94, No. 4.

When Allan Mullaly took over Ford in 2006, he faced a culture of competition between units rather than cooperation on strategic goals. Instead of chasing shadows by trying to change attitudes and culture directly, Mullaly created cross-unit meetings to identify and solve major business problems. Focusing on changing the way work was done to solve concrete business problems inevitably changed the norms for collaboration—that is, the culture (Lorsch & McTague, 2016, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 94, No.4).

My colleague Dr. Russ Eisenstat and I, in collaboration with senior executives at Becton Dickinson, developed a powerful way to change culture by first coming to an agreement—in very practical terms—about what the company should be doing and how it should be done. Our Strategic Fitness Process (SFP) results in a “conversation” that is honest (the whole truth is on the table), collective (key people across the organization are involved) and transparent (nothing is hidden—neither the process nor what senior management learned and plans to change). 

Vince Forlenza describes the SFP he led at Becton Dickinson in 2010:

I think SFP certainly builds openness, because people are asked for their opinion and what is going on. Secondly, it leads to the formation of teams that involve people in fixing the issues they are involved in and in which they have a stake. Thirdly, it involves high-potential talent in identifying and solving problems and develops them at the same time…Task force members working in a given function or business are asked to interview people in functions and businesses they are not working in and to be involved with people from other activities to solve them. So, they develop a [general management] perspective about how to think about and solve problems. It’s very positive from a cultural standpoint.

SFP has proven a powerful tool for changing culture not only because it changes how work is done and with whom it is done, it increases trust and commitment to change dramatically.

SFP has since been applied in hundreds of organizations. Consistent with the research cited above, our own rigorous evaluation of these applications shows that changing how the business is organized and managed results in dramatic and often rapid changes in culture—and that’s what boosts performance (Beer, M., 2020, Fit to Compete: Why Honest Conversations about Your Company’s Capabilities Are the Key to a Winning Strategy, Harvard Business Review Press).