It’s easy to get people to talk about the culture of organisations to which they belong. The conversation tends to cover a wide range of subjects and one always has the clear sense that strong, positive cultures mean happy, motivated individuals who produce better results. Simple – but for two problems. The first is that what is enabling and inspirational to some people is unstructured and directionless to others – so how do we define ‘good’? And the second is that it is difficult to measure what a ‘good’ culture leads to in terms of tangible results. Success has many fathers and it isn’t usually clear what part culture played in the conception.
So when we come across a clear link between a programme of cultural change and a phenomenal improvement in the performance of an organisation, it really is something to write home (or indeed to blog) about.
It’s a particularly good story to be telling in the current economic environment. For organisations who are beginning to dare to believe that the worst is behind them and that growth is back on the agenda, one of the biggest challenges is going to be to hold on to their talent, and there’s lots of evidence that achieving this has as much to do with the environment and the culture as with material reward and career opportunities. Where recovery is still a distant dream, or in public sector bodies for whom the worst of the squeeze is yet to come, taking cost out is the easy bit. Getting more output from fewer resources will require an ability to think differently and to innovate – qualities that depend on having motivated and committed employees who are up for the battle.
Over the past year we have been facilitating a culture change programme with one of the largest Further Education colleges in the country. I’m going to avoid any suspense by telling you first what the outcome has been. They recently completed an Investors in People assessment in which the assessor (not people normally given to hyperbole) described them as the best education organisation they had ever seen. Staff gave consistent messages about the changing culture, team work and sharing. The college community was highly praised and the commitment to social responsibility was described as outstanding. The college’s grading placed them in the top 1% of all organisations assessed nationally by IIP. At a time when a sector-wide staff morale survey reported that morale across the Further Education sector had dropped, the college’s rating went up 18%.
So where did all that come from? Leadership is largely defined by the environment it creates, and the driving force behind the transformation was an enlightened principal who came into his role a few years ago with a vision to turn around an organisation that had been making do and getting along. Adopting the maxim of an inspirational book on leadership – ‘Good to Great’ – he set about his task of making the college the best in the country. He partnered with Ignite to launch a culture change programme which was designed to enable the vision to be turned into a reality that could be understood, embraced and enacted by every category of stakeholder with an interest in the success of the college. Well over a hundred people from every walk of life in the college were invited to join one of seven teams, each taking a different angle on the question: ‘what does great look like – and how do we get there?’
The seven teams were all presented with different challenges about greatness and what it would take to achieve it. The organisation team set out to identify what makes the college special and unique, how to break the barriers to joy at work and how to ensure everybody was aligned to the college’s strategic objectives. The staff team engaged with staff from all over the college to redesign the appraisal system, present a “strawman” for the ideal college manager and launch a project to stamp out bureaucracy and the mindset that creates it. Other teams looked at communications, product, and at the respective perspectives of students, customers, support functions and staff. We deployed a wide range of techniques to get the large and varied participant group to look at life from different perspectives, always seeking more clarity about what the elusive quality of greatness looked like and what spark of innovation it would take to achieve it.
Ignite introduced creative and challenging thinking at every opportunity, using exercises and insights to spark innovative ideas. Thinking about how to make the college experience engaging and unique from the first point of contact onwards, we devised an idea generation process titled: ‘Carlsberg don’t do college open days, but if they did …’ Anyone familiar with the advertising campaign can guess the rest. A similar exercise asked “If Richard Branson opened the Virgin FE College, how would he design the student experience?’ The Communications project closely studied Barack Obama’s election campaign while the team looking at the appraisal system first thought about how other professions, such as actors, surgeons or athletes received feedback on their performance. A cosmetics innovation centre and its processes helped provide the insights to conceptualise an Entrepreneurial council and the successful Bureaucracy Busting campaign (which helped to reduce paperwork for Tutors by 50%) resulted from an exercise studying how staff spent a typical “week in the life”.
Underpinning the whole experience was the very clear journey that Ignite, more often than not, steers clients through: frame the challenge to get absolute clarity about what we’re trying to achieve, illuminate it to get every possible perspective on what will work and what won’t – and why; generate innovative and creative ideas that can then be filtered, stretched and built into a compelling case for change – and then embed the solutions into the fabric of the organisation. Simple, and it works. It carries within it an extraordinarily powerful balance of rigour and insight, process and liberation, and most importantly of all it is founded on the belief that human beings are innately constructive, curious and creative. Give them the right leadership, environment and tools and they will succeed. Ask the assessors.
