Posters Alone Won’t Promote Culture Change

Posters Alone Won’t Promote Culture Change

S. Chris Edmonds is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. He’s the founder and CEO of The Purposeful Culture Group, which he launched in 1990. Chris helps senior leaders build and sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Amazon bestsellers Good Comes First (2021) with Mark Babbitt, The Culture Engine (2014), and Leading at a Higher Level (2008) with Ken Blanchard.

Imagine walking into work and seeing new posters promoting revised organizational values. You open your email, and there’s one supporting these values with an updated servant purpose statement. A communications campaign such as this can certainly help build awareness across the organization. Awareness, alone, though, won’t change your culture.

How often have you seen change efforts fail? It happens all the time. If your change effort isn’t gaining traction, I’ll bet you’re missing a key element – senior leaders championing and modeling the change, daily.

The greatest temptation is for senior leaders to assume that communicating the change – your servant purpose, values and behaviors to your people – ensures they will embrace the change. They’ll align to your desired culture.

Imagine walking into work and seeing new posters promoting revised organizational values.

CHRIS EDMONDS

Senior leaders must invest the time every day to demonstrate, validate, and redirect your desired culture.

Demonstration – senior leaders must be role models of the change.

They must demonstrate your defined valued behaviors in every interaction. When senior leaders embrace the new behaviors, that shows the rest of the company that senior leaders are “all in” on the new approach. It builds creditability for the change.

Validation – senior leaders must pay attention to others across the organization, looking for players who model your company’s defined valued behaviors in daily interactions.

Every time they see aligned valued behaviors, senior leaders must stop, explain the valued behavior the player modeled, and specifically celebrate the player.

Redirection – senior leaders must notice when others’ plans, decisions, or actions are inconsistent with the company’s defined valued behaviors.

Every time they see misaligned behaviors, senior leaders must engage that person, explain the possible values conflict they observed, and redirect the player to align to your valued behaviors at all times.

Senior leaders alone have the greatest impact on shifting “awareness” of your desired culture to “demonstration “ of your desired culture.

Don’t leave the health of your work culture to chance. Demonstration by staff throughout your organization won’t happen without senior leaders investing time and energy daily reinforcing your company’s valued behaviors.