How do you change organizational culture?
Welcome to Hero TV today.
I'm Nate Woodbury this is Sydne Jacques, she's definitely the hero of this
episode. She's going to teach us all about that.
Hey everybody it's Sydne Jacques. Today we are going to talk about how to change
an organizational culture. It's a big job but you can do it. The first thing is, you
have to be able to have a pulse on the people to be able to know when things
need to change. So hopefully, as a leader, you have established what you want your
culture to be like. You need to be intentional and think about what I want
it to feel like? what I want people to be like? how do I really want people to work
together? and represent our company.
So you have to be intentional, and you have
to think about that and then you have to have different ways to really keep a
pulse on what's going on. Maybe it's through interviewing your employees,
maybe it's through interviewing your client to see what culture your
employees are taking out to the clients that they work with. Sometimes we use
online surveys. It's real simple for people to just fill out an online survey
and they can be anonymous. There's different things that you can do. One of
my favorites is we have a two-question survey and actually today, it's
fascinating. We passed out a piece of paper, has two questions on it. The first
question is, what is working really well right now?
And the second question is,
what should we be doing different? And it's an opportunity for employees to not
have to talk in front of everybody. I have to put their name on it
but to just pull it out and tell us, what's working really well right now? But
what do they think needs to change? And so as we get that feedback then we begin
to understand, okay these are some of the things that we should focus on and maybe
these are areas where we should, be changing our culture. So I grew up on a
farm in Montana and every year we like to take our kids back to Montana. Just
beautiful up there. So one year we were up there. My son was about five years old
so we're driving on the country roads, I'm close to where I grew up and so my
five-year-old, my son, he says, hey how come dad is usually the driver of the
van except when we're in Montana?
and then mom drives everywhere.
So my husband just said to him, well because
mom grew up on the farm she knows all of these country roads it just makes more
sense for her to drive because this is where she grew up with Grandma and
Grandpa.
And it was one of those times when it
clicks and he can just almost hear the gears in his brain going and he's like,
wait a minute Grandma and Grandpa are her mom and dad?
And he said yeah and we kind of laughed because the connection was made. But
that's not the end of it. His next phrase was even funnier. After
that he said, hey wait that's not fair! She got way better parents than we did.
So unfortunately for my kids that's true. I got way better parents than they did.
But I like to share that story because there are a few things in life that we
don't get to choose. Who our parents are, who gives birth to us, that's one of them.
But ultimately, there's so many things that we can choose and as a leader of an
organization, you get to choose what your culture is.
So I've put together a way
that I can share with you how to do this. I really like to create models from the
experiences that I have so that I can put them step by step, being an engineer
to help you be able to take this and have a better organization. In this case
by changing your culture. So let's look at the model. You want to change your
culture these are the steps that we need to take. The first thing is, you do need
to be intentional about it. You have to figure out what kind of, what kind of a
culture do you want to have at your company? and if it's not exactly the way
you want it, then you need to identify what is it that's not quite right that
you want to change?
And in doing that, you have to have a really clear message
about what it is.
Is it that people are to wax and they're coming and going and
you want that a little bit tighter? or is it that you want more open communication
and you want to find new ways to do that?
You have to figure out
what is the
message that you want to share with your employees in
orders to start the change in your culture. After you do that, then you have
to be really clear, why do I want to change this? Is this going to just
benefit me? will it benefit everyone? will it benefit our customers? You have to be
clear about why you're doing this because that helps you to bring the
passion to it. Who do you want to share this with? is this a message that you
want to share maybe just with your management team? maybe with all of your
supervisors? or is this a message that you're going to share to all of your
employees?
Those are the things that you need to figure out before you can put
this model into place. After you figure out what your message is, why it's
important, and who you're going to share it with, the next step is you need to
figure out how to spend time with them.
So probably the first thing that you
think of is let's call a meeting then we can spend time together.
Well, that is one
way that we can spend time together but we can also send our messages out
through our newsletters .
Again the same principles apply whether you're trying
to influence internally within your team, your culture, or externally the culture
you create with your clients. So you can use your newsletter to share this
important message that's very clear. You could also use emails. You could use your
website, you could use a blog, you could use social media to spend time in two
different ways to share this message. So spending time is so important and you're
going to need to share it more than once just like the old adage that you know, as
consumers and they say that it takes seven exposures before we're willing to
buy a product or a service. You're going to have to have multiple ways that you
spend time in order to really get your clear message across. And then you have
to remember to ask. This stands for, what's in it for me?
So if I'm an employee and you're asking me to change something in order to
change the culture, I'm going to be asking that consciously or
subconsciously, I want to now, what's in this for me? So you need to
think far enough ahead that you're sharing that with them. And then what
you're going to do is you're literally going to teach them how to think. How do
you want them to think about this message? and what is a specific challenge
that you want them to take? So as we look at this and try and figure out, how to
change our culture I just want to share with you where this model came from
because the same principles apply, we can use it externally with our clients that
we can change the culture that we have with our clients we can also use the
same principles internally.
So I have worked for many years as a consultant. I
have an engineering firm and I decided that I really wanted to start to provide
training. Well nobody knew me as a trainer or a speaker they knew me as
this person with an engineering firm.
So what I did was, I developed a very clear
message. My clear message was that we provide training and that we have a
four-hour workshop called bridging the gaps where we focus on the gaps of
communication, engagement, and generations.
So I have these clients many that I've
worked with for multiple years and I thought I worked with them long enough
that I know that this should be a good fit for them.
So what I did was, I set up
some appointments to go visit with some of my clients. So I went to visit the
public works director of one of the cities that I've done a lot of work for
and he was nice enough to accommodate my appointment and we sat down and I had
one of my project managers with me and we just chatted about the work that
we've done for him that year and what work was coming up next year that you
know we might be eligible to go after.
And then I just said to him, I said, now
you know our company for the work that we do for our engineering firm and we
really enjoyed the relationship that we've had with you in the past but one
thing you probably don't know is that we've launched a new division in our
company. Okay so I have to tell you, my project manager who is sitting next to
me kind of looked at me like, what we launched a new division? And yeah I
launched it right now when I had the idea. We launched a new division in our
company specifically to provide training for our clients. And in our training, we
focus on communication skills and we have a four hour training called
bridging the gaps, where we focus on communication engagement and generation
gaps. And so I showed him the flier and he looked at it and he asked some
questions and I just said, you know we have this workshop coming up in Salt
Lake I'd love it if you wanted to just send a few of your people to attend our
workshop.
So he looked at it and then he said to me, well I had 35 people on my
staff so why would I want to just send a few people to your workshop? I want you
to come in and train everyone.
Well, this is fantastic news. This is great. So we
got our calendars out we set up the date and I went to about two weeks later I
went to that office and I had the opportunity to train all of his staff.
This is the important part. He stood up in front of his whole staff and this is
what he said, now all of you know, most of you know Sydne. She's done a lot of work
for us and her firm has done a lot of work for us over the years and we really
enjoyed that but what you probably don't know is they have launched a new
division in their company to provide training, specifically communications
training and training on bridging the gap. As I was driving home that day I
thought, how cool is that? I literally taught him how I wanted him
to think about me and about our company. So look at the steps. I was very
intentional, I had a very clear message that I wanted to share, I knew why
because I wanted to launch this new division, I knew who I wanted to talk to.
He was a client, we had a trust and a good relationship
and I knew he had people that could probably use training. To spend time with
him in that situation I had the opportunity to be face to face. And the
what's in it for me, I know having worked with these technical people all these
years, that almost all of them could use a little help in their communications
training. And if they were better communicators and they were more engaged
that would help him as the public works director to have more efficiency on his
staff.
And so then the next part teach them how
to think, this is what really clicked in this situation is I was able to
literally teach him how to think that he knew and he trusted our services in the
past but now we have a new division. I taught him how to think that, he stood up
and said that to all of his employees. And then I gave him a specific challenge
that this is the training and it would be a great training and he accepted that
challenge. So as you think about how to change culture whether it's in your
organization or the culture that you have with your clients, think about this
model and think about the ways that it can be applied. The very last piece of
this is that, I believe that you can change your personal brand. Are you even
intentional about it? As I've given speeches and I've talked to people, I
have so many people especially my engineers and contractors that, say I
never thought about that I have a personal brand but yes you do and the
way that I like to challenge you to do this is to think of three words that you
would like people to use to describe you. My words are happy, high energy, and value adder.
Okay, more than three words. But you get the meaning. Everywhere I go, I want
people to know that I'm happy, I love what I'm doing, I love life, I love
meeting new people, I'm high energy, I will never be the one in the room the
dregs the energy that people don't want to be around. I'm going to bring the
positive energy, I'm going to bring joy to your team, to your project, your event.
And then the third one is I add value in any way I can. Whether you're paying for
me are not paying for it I'm going to bring you content and bring you value
that will help you to be better.
So what are your three words? how do you want
people to describe you?
I was having lunch with the client one day and he
told me about two different project managers that he was working with. They
were contractors. He described one as a bulldog. He said, he just is always in my
face meeting things it just literally won't ever let me go. I just feel like
he's a bulldog that's just attached to me.
And he said the other project manner
that were working with on a different project
he said,
I would call him the problem-solver. I was so excited to know
he was coming to our job because whenever there's a problem I know he can
figure it out.
He just has a way of working with people, working with
solutions and I drove home that day thinking Bulldog? problem solver.
How would he describe me? Hopefully he would describe me as happy, high-energy,
and a value adder. Think of your three words and figure out how you can change
your culture today.
Thanks so much for watching Hero TV today and thanks to
Sydne for everything you shared in this video. Got a lot of details and
information about Sydney and other things in the description below. Be sure
to subscribe, likes always help us out. And remember to
live on purpose,
make a difference,
and be the hero!