BOTTOM LINE:
The first draft of our new book, Culture Change Made Easy, is done! And some of the insights we developed are pretty cool, like the need to put culture change tools in the hands of all your employees, and some of the nonobvious ways to overcome the four big culture patterns (e.g., focusing on employee needs is a big piece of being transparent). We’re trying to advance the conversation on culture; join us! Sign up here to be notified when the book comes out.
THE DETAILS:
Apologies for the lack of blog posts lately, but this is what happens when you are neck-deep in writing a book. The good news is, the first draft is complete! We’re really excited about this book, so we’re going to push hard through editing and layout to make it available (starting with the Kindle version) ASAP.
One of the best parts about writing a book is that you don’t know what the most important parts of it will be until you are done. We obviously know many of the points we’re going to make when we outline the book, but it’s exciting to watch what insights emerge along the way as well. Here are a couple of the big ones from this book:
Culture change needs to be in the hands of everyone.
We do a lot of work with organizations who decide they need to do culture change and engage us to help them with the process. We LOVE this work, and we wish more organizations would get intentional about culture like that. But it’s not enough. Having a centralized culture team develop culture change action items and then roll them out across the organization is awesome, but the pace of change requires that everyone has the capability to sense the friction, spot the culture patterns, and fix them within their own span of control.
You need to be nonobvious to overcome your culture patterns.
As we did our case study research with organizations who had overcome the culture patterns of heavy agility, awkward collaboration, incomplete innovation, and lagging transparency, some of the things they were doing were somewhat expected. Like to overcome lagging transparency, our case study invested in a “transparency architecture,” rooted in a strong intranet, that put information in people’s hands before they had to ask for it. Not a surprise. But they also had a huge focus on meeting employee needs and making things easier for them. We didn’t expect that to be a key to transparency (but it was).
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! Make sure you sign up to get notified of the release, which will be in a matter of weeks, not months. This is the first book where we are releasing the results of our original research, and we think it is going to advance the conversation on culture.