Why does culture change fail? (and how you can make it succeed)

Third in a series of articles about building high-performing workplaces using the power of emotions.

Part 1 : From Emotional Intelligence to Emotional Engagement

Part 2 : It's Lonely At The Top

I got into consulting when I joined IBM fresh out of college in the 90s. At the time, IBM and Microsoft were dominating the tech scene, much like Google and Apple do today. I was fortunate to have begun my career at such an exciting time.

My role involved encouraging companies to embrace technology and the Internet, which was still relatively new at that time. While it was tough at first, what I learned at IBM helped me convince companies how crucial technology was for business success. We got the leadership’s buy-in and go signal to proceed.

When it came to implementation though, we realized that just installing tech wasn’t enough. We encountered resistance due to legacy systems, manual processes, and people's reluctance to change. It became clear that we needed to not just address the systems and but we also need to engage the people involved to do it right.

This realization led me to shift my focus from improving companies through technology to enhancing their effectiveness through people. I found myself shifting careers and became skilled at facilitating culture change, recognizing that true success lay not only in what companies did in the business but also in how they did it with their people.

More than two decades later, I’ve been involved in several large-scale initiatives to help companies create a stronger and high-performing culture: with multinationals and large local companies in industries such as telecoms, consumer goods, hospitality, media, food service, pharmaceuticals, finance, and many more. I’ve done this not just in my home country but all over the region as well. I’ve seen culture change that works and culture change that fails.

My years of experience have led me to discover a common thread that shows up with culture change that fails: people don’t really feel the change. In my local language Tagalog, “hindi siya ramdam”. The lofty and aspirational purpose, vision, and values statements intended by companies to drive change end up as mere superficial slogans adorning office walls, devoid of genuine substance or resonance in reality, with no tangible impact on individuals’ lives.

In the past, we went back to the drawing board with the leaders and maybe needed to rewrite our statements or create alternative initiatives to engage people. Maybe we need a different leadership program? Maybe we need to revise our communications rollout? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Now that I’m more mature and experienced I now advocate a new approach. Instead of just thinking about purpose, vision, and values, what if we start talking about how we want people to feel?

This focus on emotions, on orienting culture change from the beginning to how we want people to feel, has been game-changing. Suddenly, all the initiatives and all the interventions weren’t about communicating or indoctrinating a message: It was all about how to ensure that the culture we cultivate directly addresses the desired emotional experience of being part of this company.

And to make it more effective, what if we can identify the emotions we don’t want our people to feel? Again, this added a fresh new lens to see if what we are doing is really working and helped us redesign how we create this change.

As much as I want to take credit for this discovery, I picked this up by being part of a growing community of global consultants who are focused on this new and novel approach: we call this emotional culture. 

We realized too many organizations don’t really put enough attention about how their people are, or should be feeling at work. When leaders ignore or fail to understand emotion, they’re missing a vital component of what makes organizations tick, and their companies and people suffer.

All of the culture change initiatives conducted by our team in Fearless Inc have fully embraced this approach. When we introduced it to our clients, there was initial skepticism: Can we really talk about emotions at work? Should we even do so? Is this really productive and impacting the bottom line?

Now, after many successful implementations of emotional culture, they can’t believe how much it has made a massive difference in creating actual change.

Let me share some of the ways our team has applied this approach:

• A high-profile local company we worked with realized that their culture change activities for the last few years have not been as productive as they wanted. Working with them we helped them identify the essential emotions they needed (and those to be avoided) so that their people can drive business success. We started by engaging the leadership team before extending to the field team. During a joint session, leaders were startled to discover that they had overlooked the genuine emotions prevalent among field personnel. This revelation prompted a breakthrough shift in their approach. We’ve since revamped the leadership program and the communications campaign. We even built a people manager’s kit where they promote performance and conversations powered by emotion to help embed the culture with success.
• In a continuing multi-phase change campaign with one of our international clients, we worked with the leadership team to use emotional culture to identify personal behaviors and systemic changes that they need to implement in order to create a culture of psychological safety, where people can speak up and welcome challenge. They are now in the process of making this happen in the next few months.
• Two technical teams for one of our multinational clients wanted to avoid being seen as a blocker and instead be true business partners to the rest of the organization. We used emotional culture to identify how they want their internal customers to feel (and not to feel) when working with their teams. This led to more human and emphatic interactions, building higher customer-centricity in their function.

These are just a handful of the success stories we’ve achieved by using the power of emotions to create a high-performing workplace. The teams we've collaborated with and the clients our community has served have recognized the transformative and highly effective nature of this approach.

In the past, we've heard that culture is "how we do things around here."

Now, we're elevating this concept by adding that culture is also  “how we feel.”  In my local language “ang kultura na totoo ay dapat ramdam.”

Our team's mission has always been to spark innovation and humanity in what we do. By embracing the power of emotions, we spark real change in our workplace, we truly engage with our people, we help create tangible business results, and we build a culture that lasts.

#emotionalculturedeck #proelephantrider #ridersandelephants #emotionalculture

Let’s flip what the world feels. Check out The Emotional Culture Deck – the #1 game for better workplace culture. Use it to create and amplify human conversations about what matters in the workplace. Download a free Lo-fi PDF version of the deck here: www.ridersandelephants.com/the-emotional-culture-deck