Everyone we know who has tried to change their organization’s strategies sooner or later runs into the same problem: To realize the full potential of these new strategies, they usually must also change their organization’s culture.
While writing our book, The Secret of Culture Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization, we asked business leaders how they went about changing their culture. From our conversations, we discovered that the leaders who were most successful engaged in story-building.
That is, they purposefully, consciously, and deliberately engaged in actions to build stories that exemplified the culture they wanted to create—stories that would rapidly spread throughout their organization.
These stories are examples of what they used to change the culture of the companies they led. They were shared to inspire leaders like you, to build your own culture-changing stories. So, where do you begin? What attributes are needed to build a successful story? Here’s what we discovered from the leaders we interviewed:
Successful Culture-Changing Stories Share Six Attributes
1. The Actions That Build These Stories Are Authentic
To be credible, the actions taken by leaders that build culture-changing stories must reflect their deepest personal convictions—about who they are as people, what they value most in an organization, and how they think about the relationship between an organization’s culture and its ability to perform. In other words, to be successful, your commitment to culture change and the stories you build to facilitate this change must be authentic.
2. A Successful Culture-Changing Story “Stars” the Leader
Culture-changing stories are not about someone else. They are about you—the business leader. If you are going to build stories to change your organizational culture, you have to “star” in these stories. The only way that the stories you build can reveal your irreversible commitment to culture change is if your actions are central to building these stories.
3. The Actions That Build a Story Establish a Clean Break from the Past Along with a Clear Path to the Future
The story you build has to be based on actions you take that clearly violate the values, beliefs, and norms that currently dominate your organization’s culture. These actions must be intentionally, even emphatically, radical. You will also have to create a clear path forward. You don’t want to force-feed a new culture down your employees’ throats, but your story does have to show a path forward to a new culture that will differ in some important ways from the current culture.
4. These Stories Appeal to Your Employees’ Heads and Hearts
A culture-changing story must demonstrate a clear connection between a new culture and the financial performance of your firm. It must be built on the assumption that culture change is not a passing fancy but is a rational, hard-nosed requirement for a firm’s survival and economic success. That is, culture-changing stories must appeal to your employees’ heads. But because changing culture is also about changing the way employees and other stakeholders feel and think, a culture-changing story must also appeal to their hearts—to their emotions and their highest values. In this way, your efforts to change a culture must not be a purely economic play, they must also be a call for your employees to join in a noble enterprise.
5. The Actions That Build a Successful Culture-Changing Story Are Often Theatrical
These stories are entertaining. They are dramatic—they have good guys and bad guys. The actions used to build these stories are striking enough that the stories will be repeatedly discussed around the firm—just like a good movie or game gets discussed. Building stories often involve business leaders doing things that are not typical and may seem unprofessional—dressing up in costumes, singing songs, acting in comedic plays, and so forth. For these reasons, it is personally risky. Sometimes a business leader can feel pretty foolish getting involved in these theatrical efforts, but these are theatrics with a purpose—to exemplify a new culture in a public and engaging way. It also sends a message about just how seriously a leader is committed to culture change.
6. The Stories Are Told and Retold in an Organization
Culture change is not done in private or in back rooms. It engages most of a firm’s employees and other stakeholders. And so, stories that are built to facilitate cultural change must also be public. Great culture-changing stories are retold frequently, and thoughtful leaders will find many opportunities and venues to retell these stories. Retelling these stories also enables your employees to build their own stories. This helps create the story cascade that ultimately will help transform your culture.
Our research shows that these six characteristics of culture-changing stories will dramatically increase the probability that the business leaders who build them are able to lead their organizations through a culture change. Remember: It takes a lot more than one story to truly break from a culture that is deeply entrenched, but if you use these six attributes as a guide, you will eventually find success. Each story you build will lead you one step closer to the culture change you want to achieve.