Thinking-Ahead Insights: Culture Change: John Kotter's perspective

Culture Change

1. John Kotter's perspective.
1. Definitions
1. "Culture" refers to norms of behavior and shared values among a group of people.
2. "Norms of behavior" are ways of acting that persist because they are rewarded and the group teaches these behaviors to new people, sanctioning those who do not conform.
3. "Shared values" are important concerns and goals held by most people in the group: they shape group behavior.
2. In Kotter's model, changing the culture is the last of eight steps, not the first.
1. "Even when there is no personality incompatibility with a new vision, if shared values are the product of many years of experience in a firm, years of a different kind of experience are often needed to create any change. That is why culture change comes at the end of a transformation, not the beginning."
2. Culture is not something you can directly manipulate, as if by decree. Culture change occurs after you have successfully altered people's actions and their new behavior has produced success, which can be traced back to the new actions and behaviors.
3. An adaptive culture, one that benefits the four main constituents: shareholders, employees, customers and management, while minimizing layers of management and bureaucracy, as well as counterproductive silos.
3. Anchoring change in a culture.
1. Culture change comes last, not first.
2. Lasting change depends on results. You must show new approaches work and that it's worthwhile to change.
3. Requires a lot of dialog.
4. May involve turnover of key people who block change.
5. Promotion practices need to be changed to be compatible with the new practices. New leaders should be compatible with the new culture and champions of it.
4. Shallow roots require constant watering.
1. Kotter uses an example of a technology-oriented company to illustrate the point. As long as the new general manager was around to focus the organization constantly on speed to market and the customer, progress was made substantial progress. When the GM retired, because the underlying cultural belief that "good technology will solve all our problems" had not changed, the company quickly regressed over two years.
5. In an organization, the less visible shared values and group norms are, the harder they are to change.
6. Culture is powerful for three reasons.
1. Individuals are selected and indoctrinated to support the existing culture.
2. Culture propagation occurs through the actions of hundreds or thousands of people in the organization.
3. This reinforcement happens without much conscious intent and is therefore difficult to challenge or even discuss.
7. There are different culture-change scenarios, some much harder to accomplish. For example:
1. The core of the old culture is not incompatible with the new vision. The challenge is to graft new practices onto old roots, while eliminating inconsistent practices. This is least difficult to do.
2. The core of the old culture is incompatible with the new vision. This is a much more difficult situation to cope with.