Changing culture means changing values
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Your company culture, in the broadest strokes, is defined by the shared values of the population of the organization. These values have to be much more than what is plastered in the posters on the walls, but must guide every decision that every worker makes. So if you are unhappy with your culture and wish to change it you will have to examine your values, your REAL values not the ones to which you aspire.
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Changing culture means changing values
- 1. The business of sustainability © Copyright 2017 by ERM Worldwide Group Limited and/or its affiliates (‘ERM’). All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of ERM. Culture Change Begins with a Change in Values Michigan Safety Conference 2018
- 2. The business of sustainability Introduction ■ Housekeeping ■ Who is this goofball and why should I listen to him?
- 3. The business of sustainability Values 3 “You always have time and money for the things in life that you truly value” —Greg Gerweck
- 4. The business of sustainability Values and Leadership Values are more than slogans on a wall. Values are our most deep-seated and cherished beliefs; they are statements of what is right and what is wrong. Values are difficult to compromise, they guide our decision making and are our collective morality as a company. 4
- 5. The business of sustainability Philosophic Values Versus Cultural Values Philosophic Values • Fit nicely into people’s world view • Are what you think people want to hear • Often our vague • Considered in a vacuum • Often confused with priorities Cultural Values • Tend to be aspirations • Shape all your decisions • Are obvious without being stated • Deep-seated, a part of who you are 5
- 6. The business of sustainability Top Down Leadership Top Down 6 • Top down leadership is a key element for culture change • Leaders must embrace the values and act in alignment with them both publically and privately • Leaders must “walk the talk”
- 7. The business of sustainability Engagement • Engaged workers do what is right because it is the right thing to do. • When corporate values conflict with personal values worker turnover rises and workers become more difficult to manage Bottom Up 7
- 8. The business of sustainability Message Filtering • Too often executives send mixed messages • What you do always sends a stronger message than what you say • Middle managers, often faced with conflicting priorities will sometimes filter the message inappropriately Executives Middle Managers Front- Line 8
- 9. The business of sustainability 99 T A B We are mired in the belief that we have to change the way people think so that we can change their behaviors BehaviorThought Action = New Model of Thinking A Flawed Way of Thinking
- 10. The business of sustainability Developing Safer Habits 10 AA B Habits are formed when we behave in a repetitive/automatic based on cues, routines, and rewards A New Vision Behavior AssimilationThought =
- 11. The business of sustainability Vales and Culture A culture consists of… • Shared values • Common goals • Expectations of behavior 11
- 12. The business of sustainability Culture Change 12 Culture change comes when the corporate values are aligned with people’s personal values
- 13. The business of sustainability It Starts With You 13
- 14. The business of sustainability For more information ■ Follow Phil @philladuke on Twitter ■ Read Phil’s blog www.philladuke.wordpress.com ■ Email Phil @ phil.laduke@erm.com ■ Call Phil @313.244.2525 ■ Read Phil’s articles @https://www.entrepreneur.com /author/phil-la-duke ■ Order Phil’s book I Know My Shoelaces Are Untied…Mind Your Own Business
Editor's Notes
- Phil La Duke is an internationally renowned executive consultant, safety expert, speaker, blogger, trainer, and business author. He has over 240 published articles in print. La Duke speaks extensively on organizational change and worker safety. He frequently guest lectures at universities including presentations at Tulane, Loyola, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and Wayne State Universities. Mr. La Duke is the author of a popular weekly blog on performance assurance topics www.philladuke.wordpress.com. He also guest blogs on the popular Australian blog www.safetyrisk.au.com and the prestigious www.monsterTHINKING.com. Phil La Duke has over 225 published works in print and has contributed content to numerous notable magazines and is published on all inhabited continents. Mr. La Duke’s take-no-prisoners style garnered him positions on Industrial Safety and Hygiene News (ISHN) magazine’s Power 101 (a list of the world’s most influential people working in worker safety) and its list of Up and Comers in Safety Thought Leadership. Most recently La Duke has focused his attention on business improvement topics. Mr. La Duke’s first book, I Know My Shoes Are Untied. Mind Your Own Business.
- We play a lot of games with values. We tend to express values that don’t really exist? We say we believe one thing but we act in a very different way. We see this in church, we see it in the community, and we see it in the workplace. A friend of mine, Greg Gerweck said it best. He was a manager whose one brief respite during the workday, was going to a fast food restaurant where he would eat a value meal. He would be harangued by the sarcastic mumblings of his staff. “I wish I could afford to go out to eat every day.” One day he pointed out that if the two-pack a day chain-smoker quit smoking he could easily afford to got out for lunch every day. To the other who sucked down 80 ounces of Mountain Dew and polished it off with a bag of chips before 9:00 a.m. every day that he would also have plenty of money. As he related the story to me, he finished by saying “You always have time and money for the things in life that you truly value”. How do you feel about that? If you SAY you value safety, but you’re willing to risk safety in pursuit of anything else than how can you defend that value.
- Many management system certification require a Quality and Vision Statements, Values, and sundry other cultural elements and that has resulted with a cornucopia of poetic statements developed by marketing and put on the lobby walls. These items are designed to comply with a regulation but have little connection to the shared beliefs, or operating principles of the company. They might as well be plaid wallpaper.
- Sometimes we have leaders who believe in safety from a philosophical standpoint, but haven’t really thought about how that looks operationally. Your values and your culture define you, and that has to define you in a way that drives how you do business. Recently I was in a Panda Express. The food was mostly gone and looked like garbage. When I spoke with the manager she said that food quality was a value. What do you think? What values were they exhibiting?
- Top down leadership is essential for most culture changes. They have to have values that embody how they think, what they say, what they reward and what they punish. We know what the leaders’ values are by the way they behave, by what they tolerate as acceptable behavior. When they walk the talk, it is the single greatest indicator that they truly possess the values they express.
- Motivated workers will work for a reward, but when that reward is received its power to motivate the worker diminishes and the worker will work less and less hard to receive the reward. An engaged worker do things because they align with their values and their personal values align with the company values. When corporate values conflict with personal values worker turnover rises and workers become more difficult to manage. Moral goes down and people may even deliberately sabotage the company’s goals through malicious disobedience. Engaged workers are essential for achieving a values-driven culture.
- So you have senior leaders who want safety and say and do all the right things. You have a highly engaged front-line workforce and yet things fall apart. That’s because the MOST critical group in a culture change is middle managers. Executives see the value in a high performance workplace, engaged workers just want to get the job done and go home unharmed. So why do we end up with such a mess? Because middle management filter the messages both coming down and going up the org chart. Sometimes they don’t even realize they are doing it.
- Part of the problem is a flawed way of thinking about why people behave. It has been taught in many management classes that people think about something, act on those thoughts and the result is a behavior. Under this mode of thinking all one has to do is to change the way people think (through awareness campaigns, children’s poster contests, behavioral observations and feedback) or act (through disciplinary action or feedback) and you will change people’s behaviors. I feel sorry for the many people who have ascribed to this thinking for many years only to be frustrated because those idiots would behave the way they are supposed to…
- Instead consider a slightly different model. The actions and behaviors are linked to values. I once worked for a faith based healthcare system with a very strong values system. It included a list of guiding principles and behaviors that were non-negotiable. Something like 25% of new hires quit before the first year because the values were so oppressive. While all of them were extremely positive and life affirming being called out for not behaving in a certain way was very difficult and demanding. Ultimately, however, even I became assimilated to these expectations of my behavior. Thinking and behaving in a way that was demanded---even if I didn’t believe in the specific behaviors---eventually cause me to adopt these values and my behavioral change took root and became part of who I am as a person. Even five years later I am still practicing these values, although it was easier to do so in an environment where so many people reinforced my behaviors and supported me when I struggled.
- A culture consists of… Shared values Common goals Expectations of behavior And the stronger those three elements are the stronger the culture, and unless you are able to build a foundation on true values you can’t change a culture, in fact, more likely than not, the culture will change you.
- So how do you change a culture. It takes surprisingly small percentage of people to change the culture or an organization if it is built on a foundation of strong values. It starts by looking at the values on your walls and challenging leaders to provide evidence that those values are real. Do you value safety? If I were to walk through your facilities how would I know that you truly value safety. Would it be because of all the posters? Or would it be because I was walking with my nose in my phone and a stranger came up to me and assertively intervened, telling me that “we don’t do that here because it puts you at risk of a serious injury. Let me take you to someplace where you can do that in safety?
- You have to BE the change. Starting your meeting with a safety moment doesn’t mean beans if you then skip critical safety steps. When you change your own actions---the only things you really have any control over---then you can change the culture. It takes work, and every molecule in your body will scream and rage against the change, but eventually the change will take hold.