From the Ask Tom mailbag – on Quickest Way to Change the Culture.

Question:
Okay, I got what I wanted about hiring new people who are more into process than firefighting. But how do you change the current team, whose culture has been more about firefighting than process.

Response:
Changing culture is a long term journey. It requires patience, persistence and paying attention. Same scenario for maintaining the culture you want.

Behavior – it’s all about behavior. We can put teamwork posters on the wall, but that doesn’t mean a thing. Culture is about behavior, not posters. Culture is that set of unwritten rules that governs our required behavior in the work that we do together.

It starts in the debrief, the post-mortem, the project review. That’s why you have to pay attention. You have to pay attention to behavior IN alignment and behavior NOT IN alignment. When you see it, you have to call it.

I like to use a group setting after a project, because I want lots of people talking, not just me. In fact, I just want to ask questions. Let’s stick to process vs firefighting, here are my questions.

• When we attack a problem, using a process (checklist, model, protocol, step sequence) what are the major benefits in the result? [Your group or team should be able to come up with a dozen or so benefits.]
• If those are the major benefits, what stops us from using that process? [Your team should be able to come up with a dozen excuses not to use the process.]
• So, let’s look at the process. [You do have a process, don’t you, because if you don’t have a process, you may have to go back to firefighting.]
• In what way can we stick to the process next time to get the results we want? [Here is where I go back to the excuses to reveal them for the head-trash they are.]

And I use this de-brief often, just asking the questions. BTW, this is a simple gap analysis.

• What do we want?
• Where are we now?
• What’s in the gap, keeping us from getting what we want?

Rinse, repeat. Often. Slowly, the group will turn. Patience, persistence and paying attention.