In a previous article, we described how organizational culture influences behavior, performance, and results. In every organization, people have beliefs and values that define their reality. These beliefs and values shape attitudes, which in turn drive behaviors we actually observe. In that article, we gave examples of ways culture can sabotage achieving the goals of important initiatives. We also gave examples of common cultural patterns – Career Builders (“I’d better do it or someone else will ;”) Turf Protectors (“whatever it is if it touches my turf it can’t be good ;”) Vince Lombardis (“win at all costs ;”) and NIH Experts (“if we didn’t Invent It Here, it can’t be any good.”) Finally, we described three steps to shift culture from negative to positive: increasing awareness, creating alternatives, and making & keeping promises.
Your reaction to these three steps might be “easy to say, but how do you actually go about doing this?” This article describes a workshop model we have used to cultivate culture change. Culture does not change quickly. However, sometimes a critical mass is frustrated with current culture and knows it has to change for the organization to survive or grow. In these cases, the Culture Pyramid Workshop can help foster the necessary changes.
The Culture Pyramid Workshop
This workshop focuses attention on the specific beliefs and values people want to change and what they want to encourage in their place. Culture can be tough to discuss openly, since it’s easy for people to be defensive and shut down when beliefs and values are on the table. Also, managers want to make sure activities lead to business results and time is well spent. The “Pyramid Workshop” avoids these potential obstacles by using methods that make it easy for people to share their ideas and perceptions. It links beliefs and values to specific actions people commit to in order to make change happen.
Goals: The workshop goals are:
- To define a culture that is recognized to be better for the business and its people, while also identifying differences in views and the reasons behind them.
- To identify the behaviors that people need to stop, start, or continue doing, and commit to action to make this culture become real.
Core Beliefs and Values. At the beginning of the workshop, groups of 4-6 people are formed. Each group is given a deck of the same 50 cards. Each card contains a belief or value that is important to the way the company wants to conduct business in the future. (The deck is assembled before the workshop from a standard list of 200 beliefs of values, as a result of interviews or focus groups with organizational members). Examples of these cards are the following:
- Everyone understands the vision and priorities for the organization.
- Collaboration across organizational boundaries is rewarded and not punished.
- Everyone knows their customers and their requirements.
- We know and measure how well we’re doing in satisfying customers.
- Innovation, risk-taking, and learning from mistakes are valued highly.
- Roles and responsibilities are defined.
- People communicate to anyone they need to, regardless of title or function.
Building Pyramid 1 – Beliefs and Values: Each group then works to identify the 10 cards that best describe the culture they want to create. They can modify the wording on the cards and use blank cards to identify additional beliefs or values. After agreeing on the 10 cards, each group arranges the cards in a pyramid shape, with the most important card at the top. Perfect consensus is not required. The pyramids can be formatted so disagreements can be shown along with the reasons behind them.
Building Pyramid 2 – Behaviors: Next, within each group, each member writes on post-its at least one behavior that relate to each desired behavior or value in order for it to become common in the organization. They pick behaviors from one of the following:
- Things that people need to stop doing;
- Things that people need to start doing; and
- Things that people need to continue to do.
For example, for the value “Innovation, risk-taking, and learning from mistakes are valued highly,” an individual might write the following:
- Stop: No one should ever blame or punish anyone for taking a calculated risk that produced valuable learning, even if the project fails.
- Start: Every time we see an associate doing something innovative that involves some risk, we should provide some positive recognition first before we ask about their plan or analysis, and we should end the conversation with more recognition.
- Continue: The support we give to our lab people for being innovative.
The ground rules are that each person must write at least one but may write as many as three statements for each of the 10 characteristics their group has selected.
Making It Real: Next, each group creates a “Making It Real” flip chart displaying the post-its on a separate pyramid, in a way that makes it easy to see how the behaviors relate to the 10 beliefs and values on the original pyramid. They make sure they have at least one “stop”, one “start”, and one “continue” post-it for each characteristic.
Putting it all together: As the final activity, each small group presents their vision of the future culture – both pyramids. While the groups are presenting, a facilitator records the data on a template that can be used to display the overall results.
Finally, after all the groups have presented, everyone discusses the following questions:
- Where do we have the greatest areas of agreement between the groups? Are there any significant differences of views? If so, what are the reasons people give for their views?
- What are the “stop, start, and continue” behaviors for which there is most agreement? What would we see people doing and what would we hear people saying that would show us we have made the changes?
- What commitments are people willing to make right now to make these changes? (Go around the room – each person has a chance to speak). People write their promises on post-its and place them on the flip charts.
- What other important conclusions can we draw from this work?
Culture Change Is Difficult, But Possible
Beliefs and values don’t change overnight and they don’t change because leaders tell people to change how they think about things. It can take months or years for new patterns to be established so they are truly “how we do things around here.” And leaders do have a critical role to play – walking the talk, recognizing people for doing the right thing, and holding each other accountable to their promises. Although it can be a challenge, we’ve seen culture change happen; and every time we’ve used the Culture Pyramid Workshop, people report that it’s helped. Using the pyramid method makes it easy for each group to quickly grasp how others see things. Typically, there are many similarities across the groups, which create a strong sense that “we are in this together and can make this happen.” The differences between groups provoke meaningful dialogue about the reasons choices were made to select specific beliefs, values and behaviors. This dialogue deepens the entire group’s understanding of their business, desired culture, and what it will take to create it. The workshops are then remembered as pivotal events for making needed change, and the business results become self-evident.
Do you have a critical mass in your organization – frustrated with how things are today and wanting to make change happen?
