Cultural transformation has been identified as one of the biggest drivers of growth in organisations. However, cultural growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum and can’t be restricted to the boardroom.
When considering investing in cultural change interventions, I recommend starting with a Systems Approach to Culture.
In mid-2022 I was approached by Matthews Australasia, an Australian leader in intelligent product identification solutions. Facing fast growth and coming out of the ‘COVID Hangover’, Matthew’s Senior Leadership Team had identified a need for changing their culture in order to achieve their vision and goals. At first, my stakeholders addressed this with the idea of conducting leadership workshops with the Senior and Leadership Teams. Instead, I suggested a systems approach.
What is a Systems Approach to Culture?
It’s a bit like achieving symphony in an orchestra: The inner passion and mental focus of each musician (internal, individual) combine with their visible performance (external, individual), while the ensemble’s shared sense of purpose and harmony (internal, collective) is expressed through the collective, audible performance (external, collective). This metaphor illustrates how both the seen and unseen, individual and collective efforts are crucial for achieving organisational harmony and effectiveness.
We must first recognise that all systems are always interrelated. Changes in one system can affect other systems. For instance, an organisational restructure (bottom right) will affect how individuals feel (fear or thrill, but generally fear, top left) and how they behave and communicate (top right). If this transformation is poorly handled and fear drives collective behaviour of making mistakes, avoiding taking risks, or backstabbing and playing power games, the organisation’s culture is shaped. Changes on the bottom right affect all quadrants.
In my client’s instance, this meant that they needed to begin by investigating their beliefs and values (top left) that were driving harmful behaviours (top right). We also needed the Senior Leadership Team to have an agreement on what constitutes ‘excellent leadership’ (bottom left). So, we began with a SWOT and Culture Foundation Workshops in order to refresh their value statements (bottom left and right) and identify which top behaviours the collective agrees to demonstrate (top right) to the culture (bottom left), resulting in a revised charter.
Only after this groundwork with a systems approach was done, we designed and delivered full-day leadership workshops over 12 months to equip team members with the skills and tools to make a real change to the cultural transformation.
