Culture Renovation: 18 Leadership Actions to Build an Unshakeable Company by Kevin Oakes

Author:Kevin Oakes [Kevin Oakes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2021-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Master Craftsman

In nearly all highly successful culture change efforts (89 percent), the CEO made a commitment to the future vision by dedicating the necessary resources and time toward the renovation. This included both organizational resources and the CEO’s own personal resources—most importantly, time, attention, and action. At organizations that report a highly successful culture change, this often translates to a regular cadence of communication events, such as CEO-led all-company (town hall) meetings to discuss the vision for the future. Good CEOs typically lead meetings about change in different company locations and with a variety of functional levels. They also meet with senior-level cross-organization teams to transparently share feedback gathered from different regions, units, and so on.

Pat Wadors of Procore shared with me one day how, in a previous role, the company’s CEO regularly brought up anecdotal stories about the why and what of the change when visiting customers, spending time with employees at various sites, or just walking around the office. “Eventually, it becomes part of your mantra,” said Wadors. “It’s woven in. Whether [the CEO] was having a fireside chat with our sales or engineering teams, our ongoing transformation is what he wove in every single time.”

“The premise for acknowledging your roots, your history, is really based on the emotional science around grieving,” Wadors explains. “You can’t move forward from grief unless you acknowledge what you had to do to get to the next chapter. And the stories that you tell yourself, and the impact that person or that thing had on you and your life—you’ve got to be able to celebrate it, understand what it is, and then put it to bed to get to the next chapter. And those people that don’t give that nod have a really hard time transitioning. And have a hard time accepting a new reality.”

“It’s the same with culture change, because often employees feel that if new leaders come in and just paint a new picture, they feel it’s disrespectful,” Wadors told me. “Like, you’re standing on the shoulders of other great people. You wouldn’t have this privilege if it weren’t for what we did in the past. They’ll keep defending their history until you acknowledge the history. As a leader, you’ve got to acknowledge the history, but also acknowledge that what got us here may not necessarily get us to where we want to go. You’ve got to paint a picture of the future that others can see themselves in. And the only way they’re going to see themselves in that picture is if they helped create it.”

Helping guide the workforce toward that vision is often more art than science.

“Really great craftsmen do that well,” observed Wadors. “They bring people through a facilitation, and they have some of the guardrails already in place, so people get to paint within the lines. There are lines drawn, but the facilitator doesn’t make those lines so obvious to others. So, they feel like they have more freedom than they probably do. But it’s like almost a presumptive close.

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