June 22, 2023 | By David M. Wagner

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” goes a popular saying.

While management guru Peter Drucker may never have said those words, the sentiment rings true: in a battle between prevailing habits and careful planning, people’s habits will win out every time.

I joined a leadership team that set ambitious goals for growing our organization’s impact. But that growth required our 50+ staff to exhibit a trait that was not, frankly, a uniform attribute of the culture: proactiveness.

We faced a common leadership dilemma: how can you successfully execute a strategy that the current culture can’t support?

Plan for Change

We recognized that the only way to reach our other goals was to encourage the team to be more proactive. So we made changing the culture part of our strategy.

We could have tried to instill proactiveness as an explicit value for the organization. But rather than leaving it to staff to interpret what “be proactive” meant, the leadership team chose instead to set new, clear standards of behavior.

Set the Standard

We started by establishing new expectations for first line managers.

For example, we changed the agenda for routine meetings with project managers. These meetings usually consisted of reviewing project budgets, staffing plans, and previous month’s expenditures. When issues were identified, project managers would be tasked to follow-up after the meeting.

Our new agenda was streamlined: we only looked at staffing and funding shortfalls and budget deviations, identified in advance by an analyst. Project managers were told to have explanations and strategies for addressing these issues – before coming to the meeting.

We communicated other specific behavior expectations, but raising the standard for first-line managers had a cascading effect. To be better prepared to answer the leadership team’s questions, managers started insisting that their teams, in turn, communicate issues with them more proactively.

Reinforce New Patterns

Had the leadership team stopped at identifying a new standard, the culture would not have changed.

We had to reinforce the new expectations by, first, demonstrating those behaviors ourselves. We chose to err on the side of sharing too much information rather than too little. We came to team meetings having already reviewed the relevant data so we could focus on asking (and answering) critical questions.

We also emphasized new standards through continuous feedback. We rewarded team members in front of their peers for demonstrating urgency. We promoted staff who took the initiative and highlighted those attributes in promotion announcements. Individuals who weren’t meeting the new standards were coached on ways they could improve and removed from influential positions if they failed to embrace that feedback.

This team helped lead the organization to substantial impact growth. We overcome barriers by making cultural change a deliberate goal, setting specific expectations for new behaviors, and reinforcing those standards through demonstration and feedback. If problematic culture is standing in the way of your strategy, schedule a free consultation to discuss how we can get everyone back on track with a culture uplift.