Culture describes the behavioural patterns which are lived and experienced within a social community. Be it family, friends, a corporate division or a project team, how members of social community behave is based on a small number of rules and/or shared values.
Changes in behaviour do not take place at the intellectual level because new values are identified as a bench mark for specific behaviours. You have to work hard on yourself and others to achieve change.
There are two mechanisms which can be used to work on a culture – i.e. the behavioural patterns which we actually experience. These mechanisms are training and socialisation.
Once a group has been “trained” to behave in a new way, in other words once the behaviour has been genuinely established, then subsequent new group members will simply be socialised.
When a new member who has not previously been used to giving open feedback joins a team in which this is common practice, then it won’t be long before they are giving open feedback – they will have been socialised.
Before behavioural patterns, such as open feedback, can be socialised in this way, drawing others into their orbit so to speak, they must first be trained.
The mechanisms provided by ProgressMaker® enable you to define together with your team which specific behavioural patterns (so-called phenomena) you want to see more strongly emphasised. This is done by identifying the corresponding values and desired degree of change respectively which patterns should be stopped, both in order to consistently establish the culture you would like the relevant team to adopt.
ProgressMaker® provides a tried-and-tested procedure based on modern behavioural research to change the culture of an entire organisation or of individual teams.
If the problem is not ability to change but instead desire to change, then this will trigger a consistency mechanism which has been clearly defined in advance.
Use ProgressMaker® to systematically describe and define what exactly the next success plateau for your teams and organisations will be like. What has changed and what effect has this had? Generally speaking, the unpleasant things are the ones which move us forward the most quickly, both in terms of organisation and also personally.
Changing a culture, in other words the team’s lived and experienced behavioural patterns, does not necessarily have to take a long time! The extent of the team’s willingness to experience discomfort also always plays a role, because change is always involves discomfort. If this was not the case, then we would have done what needed to be done long ago.
To change a culture, in other words lived and experienced behavioural patterns, it is, on the one hand, necessary to specifically describe what exactly should be changed on the basis of a jointly developed meaning (“Why do we want to change this at all?”) and, on the other, work must be carried out to crystalise how progress will be identified. If the target is to show employees in a warehouse more appreciation, then corresponding progress could be linked to whether those employees perceive any change in appreciation.
Using the desired changes in behaviour and corresponding mirroring as their starting point, the teams embark on a continuous improvement process (CIP) which they use a pre-defined offering to select which measures they wish to use to train themselves to adopt the new behavioural patterns. Mirroring is carried out every one to two months to establish whether the CIP measures which have been introduced are bearing fruit.
Many people would like to be part of a system such as an innovative error and debate culture or a constructive learning culture, in which the first reaction after an error has been made is not to look for the guilty party. But what happens if individual players do not behave in the desired way? When, after eight CIP cycles and one year, the mirroring values for the phenomena still identify the same old deficits? The answer is that you must be consistent. In this context, consistency should not, however, be confused with severity! ProgressMaker® can be used to define the parameters of your consistency mechanism for changing a culture, so that, unlike many others, your change project doesn’t get stuck in the quagmire.
