“I’d like to talk to you about a big project,” the woman told me on the phone. “We need to change our culture.”
She was a senior leader in a professional services firm, where people really are their most important asset. Only it turns out the people weren’t so happy. Theirs was a very successful firm with high revenues, great clients, and hard working employees. But employee satisfaction was abysmally low and turnover rates were staggeringly high. Employees were performing, they just weren’t staying.
This firm had developed a reputation for being a terrible place to work. When I met with the head of the firm, he illustrated the problem with a personal example. Just recently, he told me, a client meeting had been scheduled on the day one of his employees was getting married. “I told her she needed to be there. That the meeting was early enough and she could still get to her wedding on time.”
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/06/the-best-way-to-change-a-corpo.html#
To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:
Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.
