Change Small Things, Not Your Entire Culture

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When people don’t achieve company goals, senior managers often declare that it’s time to change the culture. But sweeping, large-scale culture change efforts rarely cure what ails a company. Managers get better results when they start with a few smaller successes. Start with one problem, for example a performance challenge. Get some people to run a couple of modest experiments that might solve the issue. Pay careful attention to what works and how. Incorporate the successful ideas into subsequent steps. Keep advancing an increasing number of performance improvements based on those early wins — and continue to learn from each subsequent experiment. Eventually you’ll have changed the culture by taking it one problem at a time.

Adapted from “To Change the Culture, Stop Trying to “Change the Culture”” by Robert H. Schaffer.

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