Fatal Five Failure Factors of Culture Change Efforts

Author and futurist Alvin Toffler’s powerful phrase “hinge of history” is an apt descriptor for our times. Our highly integrated global village is going through huge and massive shifts. We’re now in the midst of a major pivot point.

The “Shift Happens“ video (my last post) vividly illustrates these dramatic and accelerating changes. History teaches that tectonic change can be an agent of organizational destruction or renewal. It all depends on how we respond.

My last post illustrated how research with one Client pointed to leadership/culture development as the biggest internal change they must make. This is very consistent with most of our recent Client work. Organizational leaders know they must redefine, revitalize, and renew themselves or die.

I’ve been spending a large amount of time researching, reviewing, and revising our approaches to leadership and culture development for a series of upcoming speaking engagements, workshops, and consulting work. It’s proving especially challenging to boil all this down to a 60 minute webcast for the (no charge) November 4  Leading a Peak Performance Culture webcast.

One of the key emerging sections is the Fatal Five Failure Factors. The goal is to succinctly identify the core factors at the root of the 50 – 70% failure rate of organization change initiatives and programs. As a work in progress, here’s what’s emerging:

• Partial and Piecemeal Plans and Programs
• Poor Assessment of Systems/Processes and Perceptions/Attitudes
• Leadership Lip Service: Behaviors Undefined and Underdeveloped
• Not Building Cause and Capacity for Continuous Change
• Weak Implementation Framework, Plan, and Infrastructure

We’ll quickly dive down into each of these. Given the short time, we’ll be scratching the surface. If you’re signed up for the webcast, here’s a sneak preview of a few key concepts in this discussion and a chance to do a bit of advance study:

• Commitment Continuum
• “The High-Performance Balance“
• “Bolt-On Programs versus Built-In Culture Change“
• “Information versus Communication“

Note on Who Should Attend the Webcast

This session is for senior operating executives and organization/leadership development support professionals such as HR, Learning/Training, Organization Development, Safety, Lean/Six Sigma, Quality, Continuous Improvement, and Customer Service. We’re getting quite a few registrations from support professionals or executives who are bringing together their management teams to listen to the broadcast and use it to assess and refocus their own efforts. Click on Leading a Peak Performance Culture for more information and to register.

For over 30 years, Jim Clemmer’s practical leadership approaches have been inspiring action and achieving results. He has delivered thousands of keynote presentations, workshops, and management team retreats to hundreds of organizations around the globe moving his audiences from inspiration to application. He’s listed in the World’s Top 30 Most Influential Leadership Gurus based on research with 22,000 global business people, consultants, academics and MBAs. His website is www.JimClemmer.com.