In my own work and research, I have identified eight best practices for culture change:

1.    Engage people in the process.

People commit to what they help create. The most successful changes happen when leaders actively engage people at all levels in all phases of the process and when there is a constant feedback loop between people on the front line and the leadership team.  Rather than hinting at the culture you want to see – be explicit about what changes are needed and collaborate with your people to implement the next seven practices.

2.    Describe the current and desired cultures.

What aspects of the current culture do you want to keep?  What do you want to tweak or shift?  What needs to change entirely? Many efforts to change a culture fail because change is described too vaguely and is interpreted in many different ways.  Being specific and descriptive is imperative.

3.    Focus on a few key behaviors.

Because culture is an outcome of thoughts, feelings, and actions, the best way to change a culture is to focus in on a few key behaviors that, if changed, would significantly impact the overall culture. Again, be specific about who needs to do what differently. (see my post Want Change? Get Specific)

4.    Communicate.

To drive a culture change, you must communicate a compelling case for change, along with your vision, and clear expectations. And, you have to repeat yourself. A lot. If you are introducing a change, you’ve probably been working on this long before you unveil it to the people who are going to need to execute the day-to-day details. If it’s your initiative, your project, by the time you say “let’s go” you are thinking that everyone should be right there with you. They aren’t. They time to catch up.  (see my post on The Marathon Effect at Work)

5.    Lead by example.

Research consistently shows that culture is largely top-down.  It is imperative for the leader to not only talk about – but also demonstrate desired behaviors.

6.    Empower and equip employees.

Once you have engaged people, you need to ensure that they are empowered to take action. Empowerment as it is used here means giving people what they need in order to take action, including access to information, authority, and equipment, as well as the knowledge, skills, and ability to demonstrate the desired behaviors.

7.    Recognize progress.

Think about your organization’s reward structures—both the informal and the formal. Which behaviors are getting reinforced and rewarded? The new ones you want to see or the old behaviors you want to do away with? If the answer is “the old behaviors,” you most likely need to take involve the right people in revising expectations and reward structures. Remember the old adage: Only behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated.

8.    Maintain momentum.

Research shows that many culture change efforts fail because attention is only paid to the launch or kickoff.  All too often change loses momentum and becomes “flavor of day” to people on the front line. Be sure to identify a team who is responsible for maintaining momentum, refocusing energy, and revitalizing the effort when the initial attention starts to wane.

Culture change isn’t impossible and it doesn’t have to take forever — but to be successful it requires ongoing focus, energy and engagement.

The reality of change hit home for me over the holidays.  In the quieter time between Dec. 24th and Jan. 3rd I finally made a change I had put off for a long time.  I switched from Window XP to Windows 7 and from Office 2003 to Office 2010.  Not a big deal, right?  Wrong!  I hated it!  I couldn’t figure out how to do the most basic functions anymore.  I struggled for days to access old Outlook emails and I still can’t figure out how to get Word to show the screens I want it to.  I almost gave up and went back to my old software and operating system.

As, I reflected on my own little experiment, I realized that I was embodying some of the principles of change management.  I had delayed making the change for more than 2 years because I knew it would be a lot of effort. Researchers from the Boston Consulting Group, Harold L. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson wrote about the role of effort in change in their 2005 Harvard Business Review article, The Hard Side of Change Management. In fact, effort is one of the four elements of their DICE model (Duration * Integrity * Commitment * Effort).  As they describe it, the more extra effort the change requires from an already busy workforce, the less likely it is to succeed.

In my case, having a higher level of C  – commitment and a lower level of D – duration helped to overcome the pain of the additional E – effort of making the transition.  I knew that if I could spend concentrated time over the holidays, I could get through the learning curve faster than normal.  My commitment was higher than ever because more and more of my clients had already converted to Word 2007 or 2010 and I couldn’t use their computers when visiting a client location.  I got committed to the change, because I felt the pain of not changing.

In the end, I found the DICE model an excellent lens for helping me make my own change and one that I will share with clients who are trying to make change happen both personally and in their organizations.

For me, these three situations were powerful moments.  None of the leaders blamed the audience for their lack of understanding.  Each had the guts to share openly that they a) were surprised and b) recognized that they had to do a better job at communicating.

What helped each of these leaders was learning about a concept known as the Marathon Effect.

If you have ever run (or watched) a large marathon you know that at the start of the event the best runners are right on the starting line. Where are the first-timers? Way at the back! Think about one of the big races with thousands of runners—like the Marine Corp marathon in Washington, D.C. It can take about an hour for someone at the very back to even get up to the start line. By that time, the ones who were at the front are halfway through the race!

William Bridges, a renowned expert on organizational transition, recognized that a similar phenomenon occurs during organizational change.  If you are rolling out a new compensation system, reorganizing your company, or introducing a new product, you’ve probably been working on this long before you unveil it to the people who are going to need to execute the day-to-day details. If it’s your initiative, your project, by the time you say “let’s go” you are thinking that everyone should be right there with you on the starting line. They aren’t. They are way at the back and they need time to catch up.

Bridges coined the term “Marathon Effect” to describe the fact that change leaders and those involved in planning change are often out ahead of everyone else. In my work with organizations, I frequently find myself reminding clients of this fact. Since they are accountable for getting people committed, they can easily be frustrated when everyone doesn’t get it as fast as they want them to.

Former GE CEO Jack Welch reminds leaders that we have to be patient. He warns that, “The vision becomes boring to the person who came up with it.” It’s tempting to keep changing your message—making it flashier, making it new. Don’t. To get people on the same page, you can’t keep giving them new pages.  Focus instead on slowing down enough to get people caught up to where you are in terms of awareness, understanding, and support.  Then, you can all move forward together.

Any of you who have worked with high-tech companies know that the best way to kill an idea is that say that, “corporate says we have to do it this way.” How in the world could we get 7,000 “techies” to not only comply with the brand guidelines, but to want to? We knew that we needed every person to understand at a gut level why brand consistency, and therefore guidelines, were needed. So we started our program with a visual tour of some great brands—Apple, Starbucks, Ann Taylor, and Disney. We got people interacting and talking about why each brand was so recognizable. Time and time again, the audience saw that deliberate, consistent use of fonts, colors, and shapes helped to create a strong brand.

Next, we showed slides that compared and contrasted all of the advertising and marketing this company had been doing. Without us having to say a word, the audience members realized that their old brand was in complete chaos. We ran more than 70 of these sessions, and every single time, this was a pivotal moment. You could watch people sit up and almost immediately become willing participants in the change process instead of prisoners in a training class.

As a change leader and communicator, ask yourself how you can help people feel a sense of urgency and get “it” at a gut level.

In the past, most good leaders would focus on articulating and repeating their points of view.  The idea was, “I am the leader, I know what the issues are and what we need to do.  I will explain it to you so that you understand and follow me.”

In a 3.0 world, this approach no longer works. According to Rod Collins, author of Leadership in a Wiki-World, leadership in the digital age is not about deciding and directing, but rather it is about leveraging collective knowledge.  Collins asserts that conversation is key to accessing this collective knowledge and that conversation is the catalyst that will drive the corporation of the future.

Michael Hyatt, Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, recently blogged about how the new model of leadership is about initiating conversation that brings out the best thinking of the team and/or tribe.  He shared several techniques that he personally uses to initiate conversation with and among his own team.  Read Hyatt’s post: Leading Powerful Conversations.

The next time you want to achieve shared understanding, use conversation – not persuasion to get there.

His post reminded me of a point that I made in an earlier blog post, “If we want to see it, we need to say it.”  In other words, often our expectations aren’t met because we haven’t communicated them in the first place.

He also shared the story below – and while you may have heard it before – I think it is a good reminder:

A CEO was getting very frustrated with one of her senior managers. She was so fed up, she was about to fire him. But before she did, she felt she should give him one last chance and hired an executive coach to work with the manager at a cost of $20,000.

So after explaining the situation to the coach, the coach asked her to write down a list of expectations that she had for this manager. Basically, the same exercise you just did. He thanked her, and said he would do his best, and left an invoice for 50% of the total bill.

The first thing the coach did when he met with the manager was to give him the list. The manager was amazed – he had never seen anything like that before. He was able to figure out what he was doing wrong and what he needed to do to please his boss and be successful. He thanked the coach and went on his way.

Three months later, the coach met with the CEO to review progress. The CEO was ecstatic with the manager’s performance – a complete turnaround. She asked the coach – “how did you do it?” The coach told the CEO he simply gave the manager the list of expectations and gave her an invoice for the rest of the bill.

To read McCarthy’s full post, click here.

Interestingly, there are several new books and articles on this topic that are hitting the market right now.  In May 2010 Forum corporation released their new book, Strategic Speed.  The book addresses these critical concerns for leaders:

• What role does speed, or lack thereof, play in the high failure rate of strategic initiatives?
• What are the barriers, or traps, to execution?
• Do faster companies financially out-perform slower companies?
• How can I engage people in accelerating our strategy?

The book’s authors found that many change efforts fail because leaders act so quickly that they ignore the people factor.  Conversely, efforts that succeed are characterized by the presence of three people factors: clarity, unity, and agility.

Watch the the video below to see  Ed Boswell, Forum CEO and one of the book’s  co-authors talking about key findings:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In a May 2010 HBR article, Need Speed? Slow Down,  Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson, also of Forum Corporation highlight the differences between strategically slow companies and the more successful strategically fast companies.  Among their findings:

• In strategically slow companies, groups move on to new projects without taking time to debrief whereas in strategically fast companies, groups make it a point to capture and communicate lessons learned.
• In strategically slow companies, time is rarely made for training and education whereas in strategically fast companies, even experienced employees receive training when initiatives are launched.
• In strategically slow companies, people work at cross-purposes due to competing objectives whereas in strategically fast companies, objectives and systems are aligned.

What about your own firm?  Is overdrive causing you to be strategically slow?  Is it time to slow down in order to speed up?

Spring is very different at an altitude of 8700 feet in Colorado.  Two weeks ago our aspens and lilacs barely had buds.  Today everything is gloriously green and the lilacs are literally unfolding their flowers right before our eyes.

The difference in the two springs has me thinking about speed and urgency.  The trees and flowers here know that they only have a few weeks to execute so they make the most of every minute.

Earlier this spring, I volunteered on a committee that organized a large community event in less than 6 weeks.  Initially, I and others in the group felt stressed and overwhelmed with the short time frame.  In the end, not only did we pull off a great event, but I learned that the short time frame actually helped.  We knew would couldn’t just meet and talk endlessly – we actually had to act . . . fast.  We kept meetings short and focused. We each committed to action items and we followed through.  We acted with urgency.

Change expert John Kotter has written extensively about how leaders need to instill a similar sense of urgency in order to lead change successfully. Urgency is a sense of pressing importance.  As Kotter writes, “A real sense of urgency is a highly positive and highly focused force.”

The challenge, I believe, is finding the right balance between urgency and overdrive.

As I’ve written about previously, overdrive is the state of dysfunctional momentum caused when leaders put extreme pressure on their people to get things done faster and with fewer resources.  Researchers have found that overdrive ultimately causes individual and company performance to suffer.  In my work on change initiatives, I find that overdrive causes leaders to miss or ignore key problems, to skip the critical communication and engagement phases, and to plow over resistance.

So how do you create a sense of urgency without pushing your organization into overdrive?  Kotter provides many specific guidelines and suggestions in his book, A Sense of Urgency.  It’s a quick and enjoyable read and one I highly recommend for all leaders.

But if you don’t have the time to read the book just yet, start by staying focused on no more than one to three specific and clear goals.  Every day communicate the importance of the goals, ask what progress is being made, reward progress and proactively investigate problems, listen, and address barriers.

In addition, I recommend having explicit conversations with your people about the speed with which you and they are operating.  One technique that works well is to draw a long line on whiteboard.  Label the far left with the word, “complacency”.  Label a middle/right point with the word “urgency” and the far right with the word “overdrive”.  Invite people to place a dot or an X with where they feel the team or organization is.  Talk openly about the results.  Doing so will help you and your team and/or organization operate in a state of energized alignment.

For more on this topic, see my previous posts on Avoiding Overdrive and Is Your Team Psyched Up and In Sync?

In his books, Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith uses the term “criteria” to get at the concept of being specific.  For example, when coaching an executive who wanted to spend more time with his kids – Goldsmith pushed the executive to be specific.  Exactly how much time with which kid? When?  Committing to spending 4 one-on-one hours with each child allowed this executive to track his progress and truly change.

The authors of Influencer present a similar idea in their book – claiming that for change to succeed, we need to get specific about who needs to change which exact behaviors.  They use the term “vital behaviors” to describe the concept and share scores of examples where change succeeded because the leader got specific.

Most recently, Chip and Dan Heath provided support for the need for specificity in their book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.  The Heath brothers use the term “black & white goal” and argue that a concrete goal of zero defects, zero safety incidents, or zero snacks results in much more real change than a vague goal like reduce accidents, or calories.

There you have it – three books from the experts – saying the same thing (albeit a bit differently).  If you want change, you have to get specific.   So NO sweets for me until I lose the pounds I gained eating BBQ all week in Austin!

I use the term “Overdrive” to describe this tendency.  Overdrive is basically the overuse of the “get it done” style. Many business leaders I work with move into overdrive without even realizing it and recognizing its consequences.

It so happens that two premier business publications (HBR and the MIT Sloan Management Review) addressed the issue of overdrive this month, using different terms.

In Harvard Business Review, Heike Bruch and Jochen Menges write about a phenomenon called “The Acceleration Trap.” They argue that the constant pressure that executives are putting on their people to get things done faster and with fewer resources  ultimately causes company’s performance to suffer.  Sample grab:

The MIT Sloan Management Review article written by Michelle Barton and Kathleen Sutcliffe is titled, “Learning When to Stop Momentum.”  Barton and Sutcliffe, both from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, studied the connections between teams that fight wildfires and business teams.  They found that groups in both situations often fall victim to “dysfunctional momentum” – which occurs when people continue to work toward an original goal without pausing to recalibrate or reexamine their processes, even in the face of cues that suggest they should change course.

Both articles provide suggestions for overcoming the traps associated with moving too quickly.  While all of the suggestions are good, I think the success companies will have with implementing them will depend on the support of the most senior level leaders.  The very people who have a tendency to go into overdrive themselves must realize that sometimes we all have to slow down in order to speed up.