Behaviour Change from the Top-Down, the Middle-Out and the Bottom-up: How to Drive Culture Change at All Levels – And why it’s so Important 

By Andrew Saffron

The only reason to focus on culture is to determine whether it will help you achieve your goals or get in the way. Many culture change programmes fail because they neither recognise this nor appreciate the important of driving culture change from every direction in the business. 

Many struggle to understand what organization culture is. And they find it even harder to understand how to change it. It feels like an ethereal subject – one that you can’t put your arms around in order to understand the levers to pull in order to change it. However, getting a good grip on your culture is business critical: the bottom-line is that your organization’s culture will either enable you to achieve your strategic goals or get in the way of it. It is a key determinant of whether your organization has the ability to deliver results. 

Many also accept the conventional wisdom that it takes years to change their culture.  But this is not true. 

So, what is culture? Essentially, it’s the unwritten rules for how we behave in a particular organisation. That sounds incredibly simplistic. But whilst the definition is short, it’s vital.  The fact that these rules are unwritten, makes it difficult to readily grasp what they are.  And the fact that they’re ‘rules’ tells us that people do abide by them – probably unconsciously. So what? Why does behaviour matter? Because those behaviours dictate how decisions are made, whether continuous performance improvement is even possible, whether unifying dots can be joined across the organisation, whether you can retain talent, whether you’re able to move at pace and whether you’re able to focus on what’s important to your customers. All of which tells us we’re grappling with something that will have a life of its own unless we’re willing and able to get a good double-handed grip on what’s going on. 

Culture can be changed rapidly if you follow these rules: 

1. Don’t treat culture like it’s a ‘soft’ subject.
   Ensure that everyone understands that the only reason to look at your organization’s culture is to determine whether it’s going to help you achieve your goals or get in the way.  E.g. if your organization is bureaucratic, silo-ed and hierarchical, it’s likely that you don’t move at speed, you’re missing opportunities, you’re wasting money and duplicating effort.
2. Drive culture change from the top-down AND from the middle-out AND from the bottom up
   Many culture change efforts fail because they start at the top and then hope that it will trickle its way down to the bottom of the organization (perhaps by sticking posters on the walls stating your ‘Values’). It won’t. Partly because the messaging becomes increasingly dilute as it cascades down and partly because, at about middle-management level you’ll hit an obstacle. Middle managers don’t know why you’re doing this or what’s expected of them. Which means they do nothing. And commonly, keep their heads down because they know this kind of organizational initiative will go away after the initial fanfare launch. Which means it never reaches the bottom (which is, of course, where most of the people in your organization’s hierarchical pyramid are).
3. Recognise that culture = behaviour + infrastructure
   Culture isn’t just about behaviour, it’s also about the processes, procedures and protocols that either enable or prevent people from behaving in this way. I worked with an organization a little while ago that needed their call centre agents to behave in a more empowered way. I.e. being able to resolve customers’ issues quickly and without having to escalate for a decision. So, they sent several hundred call centre agents (over the course of a year) on a one-day training course called “You’re Empowered!”  And the next day they got back to their desks, plugged-in their headsets and within about 2.5 seconds bumped into rules that wouldn’t let them make the decisions they wanted to make and systems that didn’t allow them to do the thing the customer wanted.You’ve got to change the infrastructure to enable behavioural performance. If this is now starting to sound like a bigger body of work than you first envisaged, good. That means you get it. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.
4. Ensure that performance is consequential
   You have to be willing to apply positive and negative consequences for performance.
   There’s no point defining the required behavioural standards and then saying, “if you meet those standards, we’ll do nothing; and if you don’t meet them, we’ll do nothing.” A lack of consequence for performance just tells your people that you’re not serious about this. It feels more like a gentle request than a serious requirement. 

This probably means that you need to change your performance management system to allow you to accurately measure both task performance (i.e. how good are you at the job we hired you to do?) and behavioural performance (i.e. does this person adhere to the behavioural standards that we’ve defined?)

If you start from a place of “culture will drive performance and change everything,” you’ve built yourself a very solid foundation for the work you need to do.

About the Author

Andrew Saffron is a world-leading culture change expert, the author of Better Culture, Faster and the director of Innermost Consulting.