Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch

No matter how great your strategy is, unless you get the buy-in from your senior management as well as your front-liners, there is no way your strategy is going to be implemented. Culture manifests itself in different shapes. It could be the “contrarians” who reject an outside idea and influence the thinking of their peers. It might be the “bullies” who are usually the loudest persons in the room and who can get people to just agree with them to make them shut up. Or it could be the “lazy” who found their niche in an organization and they would try their best to protect their fiefdom.

So how do you overcome culture barriers? You could always use the short-term fear technique such as “there’s a new sheriff in town, either you’re with me or you’re not.” A long-term solution though is implemented via a combination of leveraging facts and instilling passion.

Leveraging Facts: Most people use anecdotal metrics to defend their stance. This method is hard to break unless you have facts on your side. By doing so, you engage them to help you explain these facts. For example, somebody might say “my sales associates are idiots, they do not understand how to sell our products”. Well, if you bring a survey showing that proper training was never performed and that sales associates are behaving in line with their compensation plan, suddenly you engage people in “fixing” the situation, thus owning the solution which in turn make them more committed to implement a solution.

Instilling Passion: By nature, people hate change. They get comfortable and fight for what they spent time building. On the other hand, many people volunteer their time for their hobbies and passions, and they continuously want to improve on their work. When Carlos Ghosn took over the reins at struggling Nissan, engineers were running the show and were stubbornly comfortable in their approach to market cars. By resuscitating the Z model, which was a source of pride at the company, people got passionate and worked hard on changing and implementing the new concept. This helped create the new successful lines such as the Murano. Today, Nissan is the most profitable and growing car company

So instead of confronting culture, work with it using facts to help people understand that your opinion is not based on your gut feel but on hard numbers. then get them to work on a project they are passionate about. You would be amazed by some of the results that can be achieved by those same people that seemed to be barriers for change.