To change your culture change your problem: a tale of whoa!

A company culture change programme will not solve your problems, unless you change the problems as well. Changing the problem changes the focus, the context, the paradigm, the energy and the attitudes all in one hit. But have you the self awareness, spiritual intelligence and courage to dig deep and transcend the obvious and reasonable?

I have recently been working on transformational leadership with the UK division of a household-name FMCG company. They are looking to improve their current profitability - about £30 m p.a. – through leadership development. It is a tale of whoa - about how trying to solve obvious problems totally halts progress.

Their problem first manifested as ‘lack of engagement with vision and values’ (boredom, anxiety and discouragement, in other words), a fairly common plight of large corporations. After various very successful, well-received, transformational leadership interventions - comprising workshops and coaching skills development integrated with Horse Assisted Transformation work – we dug down deep and uncovered an even more insidious problem lurking beneath the obvious.

Their ‘corporate self-concept’, marketing manager’s mantra and generally accepted belief, could be described as ‘we are the number 4 player in the market’. This was true. There was a mountain of current and historical evidence to support this. Logically and reasonably, one way for them to increase revenue and (hence, hopefully) profitability would be to ‘beat brand X’, the number 3 player in the market. And this had been their belief, paradigm and strategy for well over a decade. Strange, then how they never could find a way to achieve this goal. This stasis was a major contributory factor in the initial business culture change problem.

Looking at their leadership development strategy from the outside, I could immediately see how, while this was all ‘true’ it was absolutely not ‘the truth’. I also got very excited on their behalf because it was also obvious that if they could shift this one piece of erroneous thinking it had the potential to be the lever for a new company wide transformational leadership paradigm.

I was doing intensive leadership development coaching with the Marketing Director; so the level of resistance and hostility I met when I attempted to open up his perspective, was a key indicator to me of how crucial this shift could be. In the most sensitive, empathetic way I could find, I suggested that ‘We are the no.4 player’ was not ‘who you really are’ as an organisation, any more than ‘I weigh 3 stone more than my wife’ is not ‘who I really am’ as a human being. It was merely a statistic, a piece of information on an arbitrary scale. Not only that, to focus all your energy on the ‘competition’ is to take your eye off the ball and deal with a major distraction to aligning your own energies. All championship sportsmen know that to really win, they must let go the ‘need to win’ and play the ball, not the opponent. Playing the opponent tightens you up and steals precious focus away from the very performance you need in the moment.

From a company culture change perspective, imagine the negative energy quality of 4000 people all focusing on the problem of ‘how to beat ‘brand X’ because they feel bad about only being number 4?’ Versus, I suggested, the delicious problem of ‘engaging the enthusiasm of 4000 people into feeling good about who they really are (i.e. the truth) as a company. This would involve getting deeply in touch with a personally winning purpose and vision that inspires authentic success and achievement’. A goal guaranteed to generate high-performance, totally independent of unpredictable competitive moves and the vicissitudes of market forces.

After a few leadership development coaching sessions with him on this one, he came back to me for another of our sessions. “You know what, Paul” he says, “I’ve spoken to the team and we felt you’re absolutely right. We should not be focusing on beating ‘brand X’….we should focus on beating ‘brand Y’ (the then number 2) !!!”

Of course, he was just teasing. A seed had been planted. And the company culture change now had a clear and simple focus. Of course that was not the only problem. But in cracking that one, many of the distractions and erroneous issues are falling away in its wake. A new philosophy of continuous transformational leadership as the fundamental tool for company culture change is now under way.

About the Author: Paul Hunting is a Director of the Natural Leadership Centre and a leading business development coach. He has worked with many of the UK’s top companies helping their executives develop transformational strategies and sustainable cultural change programmes. www.horsejoy.com

Paul is the author of Why talk to a Guru? When you can whisper to a horse, a best selling book on Natural Leadership.

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