Organizational Culture Change Quotes

Instead of waiting for a leader you can believe in, try this: Become a leader you can believe in.

You can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.

The purpose of leadership is to change the world around you in the name of your values, so you can live those values more fully.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

When you’re a manager, you work for your company. When you’re a leader, your company works for you.

Profitability. Growth. Quality. Exceeding customer expectations. These are not examples of values. These are examples of corporate strategies being sold to you as values.

The first step to solving any problem is to accept one’s own accountability for creating it.

Work/life balance is not about escaping work. It’s about living exactly the way you want to when you’re at work.

What first separates a leader from a normal human being? A leader knows who they are as a human being.

True leaders live their values everywhere, not just in the workplace.

Business people need to understand the psychology of risk more than the mathematics of risk.

The human dimension of organizational change is vital. Because ultimately, a company is a collaboration of people.

When rewards come from an external source instead of an internal source, they’re unreliable, which means they’re dangerous if you grow to depend on them.

The first step out of the gate has to be knowing where you want to end up. What do you really want from your company?

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

The worst thing in your own development as a leader is not to do it wrong. It’s to do it for the wrong reasons.

Values are the individual biases that allow you to decide which actions are true for you alone.

Values are deeply held personal beliefs that form your own priority code for living.

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual & physical commitment combined.

The myth of management is that your personal values are irrelevant or inappropriate at work.

Being relevant to your customers only when you’re trying to sell something means choosing to be irrelevant to them for the rest of the time.

Success means: I want to know the work I do means something to somebody and helps make the world, if not a Better place, not a worse one.

It’s impossible for a company to get what it wants most if managers have to make a choice between their own values and company priorities.

Your values are your essence: an undistorted mirror showing you at your pure, attractive best.

Success for Managers means: I want to be in healthy relationships. I want a real connection with people I spend so much time with.

Careful now: even a financially rewarding, intellectually stimulating work environment isn’t the same as living your own values.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

The gap between thought and action, between belief and will, prevents us solving our most pressing individual and societal problems.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

Ambiguity is not, today, a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

A company can’t buy true emotional commitment from managers no matter how much it’s willing to spend; this is something too valuable to have a price tag. And yet a company can’t afford not to have it.

people get trapped by using patterns of behavior to protect themselves against threats to their self-esteem and confidence and to protect groups, intergroups, and organizations to which they belong against fundamental, disruptive change.

Human behavior is only unpredictable and dangerous if you don’t start from humanity in the first place.

You can stuff yourself with emotional fulfillment until it’s dribbling down your chin & your ego will quickly chomp it down and demand more.

Try not to take this the wrong way, but your brain is smarter than you are.

You don't have to fear your own company being perceived as human. You want it. People don't trust companies; they trust people.

There will be plenty of other problems in the future. This is as good a time as any to get ahead of them.

The economy is in ruins! Bottom line? Good management will defeat a bad economy.

Leadership creates performance in people because it impacts willingness; it’s a matter of modeling, inspiring, and reinforcing.

Any expert will tell you that if you want emotionally committed relationships then people must be allowed to be true to who they are.

When you don’t know what true for you, everyone else has unusual influence.

Let’s get right on top of the bottom line: You must live your personal values at work.

Why live my personal values at work? This is an excellent question to ask. If your attorneys are planning an insanity defense.

This is your one and only precious life. Somebody’s going to decide how it’s going to be lived and that person had better be you.

Management controls performance in people because it impacts skills; it’s a matter of monitoring, analyzing and directing.

Companies should be the best possible place to practice fulfillment, to live out values and to realize deep connectivity and purpose.

When you’re not on your own agenda, you’re prey to the agenda of others.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Resistance to change should be a thing of the past if we could develop growth mindsets and create organizations with growth cultures.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

The key to behavioral change is to pass behavioral control to the environment.

Compared to ecosystems and some species, corporations are very fragile entities indeed.

Green light, STOP - if you want to see where you are taking the most risk, look where you are making the most money.

All of us are not always smarter than one of us, leaders need to distinguish between the wisdom of crowds and the madness of crowds.

A newly defined market will require either new capabilities or a new focus applied to current capabilities.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

True coworkers give each other honest feedback to improve their work.

Here’s what you need to know most about leadership: Lead your own life first. The only thing in this world that will dependably happen from the top down is the digging of your grave.

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

The sustainable success of digital transformation comes from a carefully planned organisational change management process that meets two key objectives, one being the company culture, and the other one is empowering its employees

Your company is its own competition and can deliver itself debilitating blows the competition only dreams of.

The company may have captured their minds, their bodies and their pockets, but that doesn’t mean it’s captured their hearts.

Your dreams and the dreams of your company may be different, but they are in no way incompatible.

Providing the ultimate solution to work/life balance: not escaping from work but living the way you want to at work.

Your company really has to work for you before you’ll really work for your company.

Imagine a world where what you say synchs up, not sinks down.

Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.

Leaders make a lot of mistakes but they admit those mistakes to themselves and change because of them.

Most managers have plenty of emotional commitment to give to their jobs. If they can be convinced it’s safe and sensible to give it.

Hard-core results come from igniting the massive power of emotional commitment. Are your people committed?

Do you think your people struggle with being true to themselves? Do their values match up with their work?

The heart of a company’s performance is hardwired to the hearts of its managers.

The high quality of a company’s customer experience rarely has anything to do with the high price of their product.

What managers want most from companies they stop themselves from getting. What companies want most from managers they stop them from giving.

To integrate one’s experiences around a coherent and enduring sense of self lies at the core of creating a user’s guide to life.

Leaders are people who know exactly who they are. They know exactly where they want to go. They’re hell-bent on getting there.

Managers know what they want most: to be allowed to achieve success by leveraging who they are, not by compromising it.

Emotional commitment is a personal choice. Managers understand this even if their companies don’t.

A manager’s emotional commitment is worth more than their financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined.

If you’re not confused, you’re not paying attention.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.

Mindfulness promises a great number of desirable benefits, and is based on much more solid research than many competing ideas on how to change people.

we are in one of those great historical periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don’t understand the world anymore, and the past is not sufficient to explain the future

What companies want most from their managers is what they most stop their managers from giving. What managers want most from their jobs is what they most stop themselves from getting.

Destructive organizational habits can be found within hundreds of industries and at thousands of firms. And almost always, they are the products of thoughtlessness, of leaders who avoid thinking about the culture and so let it develop without guidance. There are no organizations without institutional habits. There are only places where they are deliberately designed, and places where they are created without forethought, so they often grow from rivalries or fear.

We are committed to involving as many people as possible, as young as possible, as soon as possible. Sometimes too young and too soon! But we intentionally err on the side of too fast rather than too slow. We don’t wait until people feel “prepared” or “fully equipped.” Seriously, when is anyone ever completely prepared for ministry? Ministry makes people’s faith bigger. If you want to increase someone’s confidence in God, put him in a ministry position before he feels fully equipped. The messages your environments communicate have the potential to trump your primary message. If you don’t see a mess, if you aren’t bothered by clutter, you need to make sure there is someone around you who does see it and is bothered by it. An uncomfortable or distracting setting can derail ministry before it begins. The sermon begins in the parking lot. Assign responsibility, not tasks. At the end of the day, it’s application that makes all the difference. Truth isn’t helpful if no one understands or remembers it. If you want a church full of biblically educated believers, just teach what the Bible says. If you want to make a difference in your community and possibly the world, give people handles, next steps, and specific applications. Challenge them to do something. As we’ve all seen, it’s not safe to assume that people automatically know what to do with what they’ve been taught. They need specific direction. This is hard. This requires an extra step in preparation. But this is how you grow people. Your current template is perfectly designed to produce the results you are currently getting. We must remove every possible obstacle from the path of the disinterested, suspicious, here-against-my-will, would-rather-be-somewhere-else, unchurched guests. The parking lot, hallways, auditorium, and stage must be obstacle-free zones. As a preacher, it’s my responsibility to offend people with the gospel. That’s one reason we work so hard not to offend them in the parking lot, the hallway, at check-in, or in the early portions of our service. We want people to come back the following week for another round of offending! Present the gospel in uncompromising terms, preach hard against sin, and tackle the most emotionally charged topics in culture, while providing an environment where unchurched people feel comfortable. The approach a church chooses trumps its purpose every time. Nothing says hypocrite faster than Christians expecting non-Christians to behave like Christians when half the Christians don’t act like it half the time. When you give non-Christians an out, they respond by leaning in. Especially if you invite them rather than expect them. There’s a big difference between being expected to do something and being invited to try something. There is an inexorable link between an organization’s vision and its appetite for improvement. Vision exposes what has yet to be accomplished. In this way, vision has the power to create a healthy sense of organizational discontent. A leader who continually keeps the vision out in front of his or her staff creates a thirst for improvement. Vision-centric churches expect change. Change is a means to an end. Change is critical to making what could and should be a reality. Write your vision in ink; everything else should be penciled in. Plans change. Vision remains the same. It is natural to assume that what worked in the past will always work. But, of course, that way of thinking is lethal. And the longer it goes unchallenged, the more difficult it is to identify and eradicate. Every innovation has an expiration date. The primary reason churches cling to outdated models and programs is that they lack leadership.

There is a change underway, however. Our society used to be a ladder on which people generally climbed upward. More and more now we are going to a planetary structure, in which the great dominant lower middle class, the class that determines our prevailing values and organizational structures in education, government, and most of society, are providing recruits for the other groups — sideways, up, and even down, although the movement downward is relatively small. As the workers become increasingly petty bourgeois and as middle-class bureaucratic and organizational structures increasingly govern all aspects of our society, our society is increasingly taking on the characteristics of the lower middle class, although the poverty culture is also growing. The working class is not growing. Increasingly we are doing things with engineers sitting at consoles, rather than with workers screwing nuts on wheels. The workers are a diminishing, segment of society, contrary to Marx’s prediction that the proletariat would grow and grow. I have argued elsewhere that many people today are frustrated because we are surrounded by organizational structures and artifacts. Only the petty bourgeoisie can find security and emotional satisfaction in an organizational structure, and only a middle-class person can find them in artifacts, things that men have made, such as houses, yachts, and swimming pools. But human beings who are growing up crave sensation and experience. They want contact with other people, moment-to-moment, intimate contact. I’ve discovered, however, that the intimacy really isn’t there. Young people touch each other, often in an almost ritual way; they sleep together, eat together, have sex together. But I don’t see the intimacy. There is a lot of action, of course, but not so much more than in the old days, I believe, because now there is a great deal more talk than action. This group, the lower middle class, it seems to me, holds the key to the future. I think probably they will win out. If they do, they will resolutely defend our organizational structures and artifacts. They will cling to the automobile, for instance; they will not permit us to adopt more efficient methods of moving people around. They will defend the system very much as it is and, if necessary, they will use all the force they can command. Eventually they will stop dissent altogether, whether from the intellectuals, the religious, the poor, the people who run the foundations, the Ivy League colleges, all the rest. The colleges are already becoming bureaucratized, anyway. I can’t see the big universities or the foundations as a strong progressive force. The people who run Harvard and the Ford Foundation look more and more like lower-middle-class bureaucrats who pose no threat to the established order because they are prepared to do anything to defend the system.

Where to stash your organizational risk? Lately, I’m increasingly hearing folks reference the idea of organizational debt. This is the organizational sibling of technical debt, and it represents things like biased interview processes and inequitable compensation mechanisms. These are systemic problems that are preventing your organization from reaching its potential. Like technical debt, these risks linger because they are never the most pressing problem. Until that one fateful moment when they are. Within organizational debt, there is a volatile subset most likely to come abruptly due, and I call that subset organizational risk. Some good examples might be a toxic team culture, a toilsome fire drill, or a struggling leader. These problems bubble up from your peers, skip-level one-on-ones,16 and organizational health surveys. If you care and are listening, these are hard to miss. But they are slow to fix. And, oh, do they accumulate! The larger and older your organization is, the more you’ll find perched on your capable shoulders. How you respond to this is, in my opinion, the core challenge of leading a large organization. How do you continue to remain emotionally engaged with the challenges faced by individuals you’re responsible to help, when their problem is low in your problems queue? In that moment, do you shrug off the responsibility, either by changing roles or picking powerlessness? Hide in indifference? Become so hard on yourself that you collapse inward? I’ve tried all of these! They weren’t very satisfying. What I’ve found most successful is to identify a few areas to improve, ensure you’re making progress on those, and give yourself permission to do the rest poorly. Work with your manager to write this up as an explicit plan and agree on what reasonable progress looks like. These issues are still stored with your other bags of risk and responsibility, but you’ve agreed on expectations. Now you have a set of organizational risks that you’re pretty confident will get fixed, and then you have all the others: known problems, likely to go sideways, that you don’t believe you’re able to address quickly. What do you do about those? I like to keep them close. Typically, my organizational philosophy is to stabilize team-by-team and organization-by-organization. Ensuring any given area is well on the path to health before moving my focus. I try not to push risks onto teams that are functioning well. You do need to delegate some risks, but generally I think it’s best to only delegate solvable risk. If something simply isn’t likely to go well, I think it’s best to hold the bag yourself. You may be the best suited to manage the risk, but you’re almost certainly the best positioned to take responsibility. As an organizational leader, you’ll always have a portfolio of risk, and you’ll always be doing very badly at some things that are important to you. That’s not only okay, it’s unavoidable.