Changing the culture of an organisation can be one of the most difficult tasks leaders face. Leaders must see that chronic culture problems are rooted in human beings and the choices they make, and acknowledge that their sole job as a leader is to influence behaviour.
By recognising and engaging the various sources of influence that determine others’ behaviour, you’ll be far more successful at creating rapid and lasting change.
The need to change an organisation’s culture is increasingly cited as the root cause of most organisational problems.
Consider public services, where phrases like ‘target driven’ and ‘form-filling culture’ are commonplace. We hear about the ‘bonus culture’ in banks, and in society the ‘culture of drink and drugs’, or of an increasingly ‘litigious culture’.
We need to recognise that to solve culture problems of this nature, you are taking on human beings and the choices they make. In essence, you can define culture as a collection of behaviours, or more specifically, the collective impact of humans’ behaviour at moments of disproportionate influence.
Within this definition, there are two words that provide the key to successfully bringing about culture change: ‘behaviour’ and ‘influence’. Chronic organisational problems almost always have behavioural causes. Leaders need to see themselves as influencers of human behaviour, and those who hold anything short of this view will fail.
To go about the task of getting lots of people to change their behaviour, it is first necessary to look at what often goes wrong. Managers and leaders too often bet all their money on a single solution rather than overwhelming the problem with a wide combination of influence strategies.
For instance, you want to build a culture of safety in your manufacturing plant, so you introduce a new safety training programme. But it doesn’t work because people already know the risks and the safety procedures to prevent those risks; the problem is they just don’t follow them.
Or, perhaps your software development group is always delivering projects late, so you introduce a new PMO function to drive compliance with project procedures. That just introduces more forms for the overworked software developers, and projects are still late. You want to improve customer experience in your restaurant chain, so you introduce a new training programme for your customer-facing employees. This works for a while, but then things tail off.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Our research published in MIT Sloan Management Review shows that the main variable that determines the success of organisational change, is not which influence strategy you choose to adopt; by far, the most important factor is how many.
Successful influencers succeed because they know that persistent problems and people’s resistance to change are rarely fed by a single cause, but rather a conspiracy of causes. Our research shows that the vast majority of leaders trying to bring about change only use one source of influence. A handful, fewer than five per cent, used four or more sources of influence in combination. The difference in outcomes was astounding. Those who used four or more sources of influence were 10 times more likely to succeed in creating lasting change.
The Six Sources of Influence
The real success behind any culture change effort is identifying and altering the Six Sources of Influence that affect people’s behaviour: values, skills, support, teamwork, incentives and the environment. Each plays a role in human behaviour selection.
Motivation and ability make up the backbone of this model which is then subdivided by three domains: personal, social, and structural.
The first two domains relate to sources of influence within an individual that determine their behavioural choices (motives and abilities). The next two, Social Motivation and Ability, relate to how other people affect an individual’s choices. And the final two, Structural Motivation and Ability, encompass the role of non-human factors, such as compensation systems, physical space and technology.
Source 1 – Make the undesirable desirable
Many of the things we want employees to do in our organisations are considered boring, stressful, repetitive or even painful. Reasonable people resist things that are uncomfortable or stressful, which is why most culture change efforts fail. When this happens, leaders often try and use other motivators to get people to comply.
If the task is horrible, they offer more money or perks, or threaten financial penalties if people don’t comply. Leaders will often ask peers or managers to use social pressure. While these extrinsic motivators may well have a place in your influence arsenal, when tasks are painful or boring, try and find a way to make them more desirable.
Help people see how a job, although not particularly interesting, is intimately tied to customer satisfaction or safety. If you can, people will start to find real meaning in doing a task they currently don’t enjoy. Personal motivation is powerful, it is rarely enough to bring about behaviour change. Leaders need to engage personal motivation, but then combine it with the other sources of influence.
Source 2 – Surpass your limits
When individuals fail to change or aren’t doing what we ask them to, we assume it is because they didn’t want to do the task. In truth, many problems stem from a lack of ability.
Often, people simply don’t know how to do what’s required, and successful influencers understand that new behaviours can be far more intellectually, physically or emotionally challenging than they appear on the surface.
The best performers aren’t smarter or faster, they are, however, better trained.
Source 3 – Harness peer pressure
Effective influencers understand that what shapes and sustains the behavioural norms of an organisation are lots of small interactions with other people. They realise that unless they positively align social actions, their chance of influencing change is slim. As adults, we often ridicule teenagers because they are so vulnerable to peer pressure, yet much of what we do every day, we do because that particular behaviour receives praise or avoids the criticism of others.
Therefore, start every change intervention by first identifying opinion leaders. Ask others who they listen to – not just formal line leaders, but anyone across the organisation. Then, involve these opinion leaders in the change process, through training, sitting on project teams and supporting communications efforts.
Source 4 – Find strength in numbers
If you focus only on the motivating power of the people around you, you limit your own influence. The reality is that people around you don’t just motivate, they can enable behaviour as well. Often, we struggle to change and adopt a new behaviour because those around us don’t provide us with the information, materials or support we need. This is particularly true in organisations that have deep silos or infighting.
So when you need people to change, enlist the help of those people who provide the information, help or resources others need to complete the required behaviours. Reward people who pitch in when others need help to make the most of this social capital and collaboration. Such efforts will help you create a culture where providing social support is both taught and rewarded.
Source 5 – Align rewards and demand accountability
If you want to understand people’s priorities, look at the formal or informal reward systems. If managers talk about creating a ‘culture of quality’ and actually reward productivity, staff will notice.Chronic problems such as lack of accountability, poor productivity and low quality can often be traced to poorly designed incentives that reward the wrong behaviours.
People won’t support change if the behaviour management wants to encourage doesn’t make their lives better. Leaders often use this source of influence first (for example financial incentives to do the right behaviour, or threats and punishments for doing the wrong behaviour). However, our advice is to use incentives third, not first. Otherwise, you might actually undermine people’s intrinsic motivation. Begin with personal and social sources of motivation and then reinforce them with well-designed incentive systems.
Source 6 – Change the environment
Finally, don’t forget the power of the environment as a key way to influence behaviour by making good behaviours easy and the wrong behaviours hard. For instance, space determines who collaborates. The closer people are to one another, the more likely they’ll collaborate, and break down silos.
To change an organisation’s mental agenda, you need to change the data that routinely crosses people’s desks.
To improve your ability to influence, start by focusing on the fact that problems will only go away when humans change their behaviour, and as a leader, you are the person responsible for orchestrating that change.
Overcome those resistant and persistent ‘culture’ issues by identifying and making use of six different sources of influence. When you tap into the power of all six, you’ll increase your chances of creating systemic culture change ten-fold.
Richard Pound is Business Development Director from Grahame Robb Associates, who consult and work with business leaders across the globe. More info at gra.uk.com/influencer.asp
This was first published in issue 75 of CMW. Any comments? Email Zoe Vernor
