Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Peter Drucker’s famous observation is true.
To adapt to a changing world, teams and companies must be able to rely on the right attitudes, balancing between agility and rigour, autonomy and collective intelligence, audacity and risk management.
And how difficult and time-consuming it can be to stimulate a change in mentality when that mentality is fed by the company’s history and by the beliefs and behaviours of colleagues.
So where and how should you start?
Our approach to transforming your corporate culture is based on
- MEASURE – Describing your corporate culture with your employees, through a survey or focus groups, because it is their own feelings and their own sincerity that count.
- FORMULATE – Identifying with your employees the winning behaviours and those that are not. It is both the tacit and the explicit behaviours that reflect a corporate culture and illustrate – or not – the true potential of a company’s values.
- SPREAD – Exposing and training the leadership to new attitudes. Their example is essential to success.
- COMMUNICATE – Putting the emphasis on everything that embodies the new attitudes (storytelling, rewards,…)
It’s all about the story
Corporate culture feeds on what has been, what is and what will be. Being stuck in the past is the biggest risk a company can take. It is therefore necessary to analyse its DNA and to understand it, in order to accompany it into the future. This often involves changes to both your own commitment and your employees’. But if done correctly, these changes can be a real lever of growth.
Corporate culture as competitive advantage
What used to be the prerogative of large companies has now become indispensable for every company, regardless of its size. Corporate culture has become an important criterion for employees and potential candidates, but it also plays a role in distinguishing oneself from the competition.
The values that are advocated, the social responsibility of the company as well as its good management are all strong-impact factors that can influence all internal and/or external exchanges and help it stand out from its competitors in other ways than just its products or services.
Leadership, that key success factor For a transformation to succeed, its message needs to be carried by people with good leadership skills. A person capable of uniting other people around him or her, of accompanying them by explanations and example, helps save time and gives credibility to the project.