Cultural transformation: a precursor to digital transformation

What is culture?

Culture drives people’s behavior, innovation, employee and customer experience. Culture is often defined as the behaviors, rules, beliefs, and values of a group of people working on a common cause. A lot of these attributes impact the behaviors of individuals without them thinking much about their actions. It is a lot of unwritten rules that define the various shared interactions, learning and experiences.

Culture has become a competitive advantage and a key indicator of whether organizations come out successful or not in their transformation journeys.

Why don’t we have the culture we need?

Given all the hard work and investment that organizations make, a majority still feel that despite all their efforts they don’t have the culture they need. This lack of visible focus has left most leaders with a sinking feeling that their investments are not paying off.

Some of the reasons or barriers that are negating success according are listed below:

• Resistance to change — “old habits are hard to break”
• Lack of Consistency — “if he/she doesn’t follow, then why should I?”
• Employees not seeing the value — “what’s in it for me?”
• Lack of follow-through — “I will wait and ride this out”

What is the right culture for us?

There is no “right” culture as no one cultural type has been a consistent predictor of organizational performance. It takes a lot of attributes to be present and prevalent to build the “right” culture that will help in guiding behaviors that lead to exceptional business outcomes.

The top 3 attributes that are most critical and organizations should focus on are:

• Collaboration — Leadership, Respect, Integrity, Transparency, Safety
• Innovation — Continuous improvement, New Energy / Passion, Out of box solutions
• Performance — Outcomes vs output orientation, Employee focused, Experience focused

How do we get there?

We first need to determine what is the culture we want and need. It is important to understand the culture they have today and measure the strengths and weaknesses that their current culture is enabling in their organizational performance.

We must invest in people-focused strategies. Pocket strategies will not work, we need to ensure that we change the minds and hearts of all our employees. We need to make this a continuous process so that we help our employees make new habits that help and empower them in their journeys.

In conclusion, the best results are achieved when we focus on behavior, mindset, and knowledge simultaneously to drive the right culture alignment for any organization.