Change the Culture, Change the Game

Either you will manage your culture or it will manage you. That’s the key premise of our new book, Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results, which will be released on January 4, 2011.

In simple terms, culture is the way people think and act in an organization and it is either always working for or against you. In fact, culture ultimately determines whether an organization succeeds or fails. So, how do you manage your culture? You begin by becoming more conscious of the experiences you are creating for your people that contribute to their beliefs about what they should pay attention to and how they should do it.

Whether an organization’s leaders realize it or not, they are creating experiences for their people everyday, experiences that combine together to shape the organization’s culture. These experiences provide the basis for people’s beliefs, which, in turn, determine the actions people take. The collective actions of people in an organization are what produce an organization’s results. We capture these connections that form culture in a model that we call The Results Pyramid. It’s really simple—experiences shape beliefs, beliefs determine actions, and actions produce results, all of which form the organizational culture—and it’s happening in your organization every minute of every day.

To manage your culture so that it produces the results you are looking for, you must learn how to align experiences, beliefs, and actions. Doing so is an essential management imperative. The most successful leaders know that changing the culture can mean changing the game to their organization’s advantage—i.e., growing faster than rivals, beating a bad economy, revolutionizing value propositions, innovating new products or processes, and a host of other competition-beating achievements. Manage your culture so it works for you, not against you.

Over the next few weeks, we will be talking about how you can manage your culture, create accountability and impact results. Stay tuned.

Whether your organizational culture is a robust and healthy one, or one that needs to change, learn how to make sure your culture is working for you to produce better results and create greater competitive advantage. For more information on Change the Culture, Change the Game, go to www.partnersinleadership.com.