This document outlines five critical success factors for ensuring successful organizational culture change: 1) Define urgency and a compelling reason for change, 2) Define the current and desired future cultures, 3) Build a culture change roadmap with measurable milestones, 4) Translate the desired culture into specific behaviors, and 5) Have leadership authentically model the desired new behaviors. Ignoring these factors risks losing momentum, prolonging the change process, or achieving fragmented results.

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Culture Change: The Five Key Factors That Ensure Success
Is the culture of your company an accelerator or a barrier to your strategy and value
creation? Contrary to popular belief organizational culture can be shaped to optimize
strategy – as long as top leadership goes after this goal with the right tools and methods.
So often ignored or forgotten by the top team is the fact that the culture is constantly
being shaped – in every leadership behavior – from major decisions to subtle
communication patterns. The choice for top leadership is not: Should we shape the
culture? but rather, Do we shape the culture deliberately, or accidentally?
Over the course of numerous culture change engagements we have found consistent
evidence for five critical success factors – without these the effort may lose momentum,
take longer than anticipated, or simply drift off into fragmented efforts that do not
produce a result:
Ignore these five Culture Change Critical Success Factors at your peril! We have rarely
seen a culture change without all of them present.
©2009 Dawson Consulting Group
cdawson@DawsonConsult.com www.DawsonConsult.com

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Success Factor #1: Define Urgency & A Compelling Reason to Change
Anyone can change, but without a reason – why would they?
The top leader in the culture must define the ‘why’ of the change and create the
‘motivating reason’ for what no organization ever wants to initiate on its own:
changing comfortable and familiar behavior patterns. The ‘legacy’ culture is a
powerful anchor which should never be underestimated as an obstacle to successful
culture change. Think of it as a ‘life force’ that wants to continue its existence and
will fight any attempt to alter it.
The day-to-day business operations of the organization exert a second opposing force
to culture change, as do other ongoing initiatives. Only the CEO and top team can
evaluate the alignment of strategy and culture, and then set the right priority, and by
doing so, create a compelling rationale for making the investment in culture change.
Success Factor #2: Define the ‘As Is’ and ‘To Be’ Cultures
Culture change is always a journey - one made possible only when you know where you
are starting and ending.
There is always a gap between the ‘culture we require’ and the ‘culture that we have’.
Defining this gap is the second critical success factor, but one that many companies
oversimplify by simply defining an ‘ideal’ culture that does not take sufficient
account of the ‘required’ and ‘actual’ cultures.
©2009 Dawson Consulting Group
cdawson@DawsonConsult.com www.DawsonConsult.com

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 The Ideal culture – What We Would Like To Be - is the image of values,
behaviors and capabilities that we would like to see in this organization. the
culture change process – at least not by itself.
 The Actual culture – What We Actually Are - is the legacy and current culture
as they really are, i.e. as seen through objective eyes that are not biased by the
distortion of ‘looking good’ or ‘not looking bad’.
 The Required culture - What the External Environment Needs Us to Be in
Order to Produce Value for Stakeholders - is the culture that is demanded by
internal and external reality – or the stated business strategy of the company.
 The Vision culture – What We Have Committed to Become - is the integration
of these three ‘shadow’ cultures; a vision of the future that pulls together who
we actually are, who we would like to be, and who we are required to be into
a mature and realistic vision of what we are actually going to strive for.
When Ideal Culture is not grounded in the reality of the Required and Actual Cultures,
you have the ‘laminated placard’ syndrome – homilies posted in the lobby and
conference room. When the Required Culture is not modified by the Ideal and Actual
Cultures, it creates an unattainable, or lifeless target that no one is excited about. These
‘Shadow Cultures’ must be vetted and integrated to create a realistic target culture that is
linked to the strategy and value creation.
Critical Success Factor #3: Build a Culture Change Roadmap
Outline the journey from here to there with measureable milestones
This third critical success factor should be familiar to anyone who has tried to
coordinate enterprise activity in organizations large or small. The Culture Change
Roadmap is the ‘master planning document’ of the initiative which ensures focus on
achievement of key milestones. There are numerous ways to go about this, but a
strong Culture Change Roadmap should always include:
 Delineation of the key activity tracks along a timeframe, e.g. general
human capital levers such as alignment of performance management and
©2009 Dawson Consulting Group
cdawson@DawsonConsult.com www.DawsonConsult.com

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rewards; or other unique initiatives related to the Vision Culture, e.g.
creation of an ‘internal venture board’ to spark innovation.
 Observable, and when possible, measureable milestones and outcomes
 Clearly assigned responsibilities
 Communication and scheduled evaluation of progress
Success Factor #4: Translate the Vision Culture into Behaviors
The journey map from the 10,000-foot view is useless when you’re on foot
The roadmap is an important tool to set outcome targets over a longer timeframe.
These must be translated to more specific metrics and behaviors so that key elements
of the ‘to be’ or ‘Vision Culture’ can become a new ‘common language’. These then
form the new ‘culture DNA’ that will serve as the basis for implementation in all the
‘human resource levers: performance management, leadership development,
succession and promotion, formal and informal rewards. The Vision Culture might
call out a focus on moving toward greater innovation – but what does that really mean
in terms of how people should behave in new ways? Without such specificity, there
cannot be the focus on behavior change which is always the necessary basis for
culture change.
Critical Success Factor #5: Make It Real
Without authentic executive modeling of expected new behaviors, the culture will not
change
The well-intentioned CEO and top team might diligently and artfully achieve success
in the first four critical success factors – yet ultimately fail in their overall objective to
change the culture if the top leadership team does not consistently model the
behaviors of the Vision Culture in word and deed, explicit and implicit behavior. In
our experience, this requires, without exception, the objective input of an outsider
who can speak truth to power, and is unbiased by day-to-day involvement in the ‘as
is’ culture. Executive authenticity in a culture change demands balance between a
receptive state of mind with confident determination to create the new culture.
©2009 Dawson Consulting Group
cdawson@DawsonConsult.com www.DawsonConsult.com