Culture change is hard. The conventional wisdom is that it takes years to change a culture, defined as the assumed beliefs and norms that govern “the way we do things around here.” This may be true. However in most family businesses and business organisations I meet, few if ever come to realise that it is their present culture which is draining everyone and in having a change in culture lies the key to use culture as a way to drive business performance.

The logic usually works the other way — make specific changes in processes, and then hope that, gradually, the culture will change. It never works that way. The first changes need to happen in Culture and in plotting the Business’s Strategy and ensure that Culture and Strategy are aligned.

From where to start? Starting at where you stand and where you would to go is usually the best way to start. To do this you need to provide solid replies to the below:

• Vision: Where the organisation wants to go together – The goals you want to achieve
• Mission: What you do or will do together as an organisation, to achieve your goals
• Guiding behavioural principles: How you expect everyone to behave – the culture you need to achieve your goals

This means that there must be a clear connection between the overarching strategy of the business and the culture we need to support that strategy. With a clear understanding of the culture and behaviours needed, business leaders can then consciously and more effectively influence employees with their behaviour and by how they “ARM” (Allow, Reward, and Model) the targeted behaviours of team members. Hence if we have no targets and no strategy, it will be difficult to model the culture we need to have.

To get people to adopt a culture change and hence adapt their behaviour many businesses launch training for team members, whilst business leaders “walk the talk’ and demonstrate themselves the behaviours as leaders and spend time training & preaching to emerging leaders. This way team members start taking ownership of the new culture and they start thinking about how they could improve their work, rather than just doing their work. This will then likely result in improvements related to increased productivity.

Intrigued? Try running an experiment to see if you can change your own organisational culture. Many businesses get started by simply having a culture discussion in every business leaders’ meeting. At first, that discussion has a lot of listeners. As the leaders begin to feel more comfortable and confident talking about culture, they get engaged. Eventually leaders will likely start creating plans to drive a winning culture.

Leaders and managers typically don’t think of cultural change as a lever for achieving breakthrough business results. That is a big mistake!