All posts tagged: Culture

Inspiration: Step 2 in building a purposeful culture

By Mark Di Somma

An amazing thing happens when you ask people to imagine their current workplace working to its potential. First, they smile. Then they hesitate. Then they want to talk about everything that’s wrong and why a better workplace is not real or practical or feasible. If you’re patient though and you persist, slowly, very slowly, they start talking about what’s possible. And once that happens, before long, there are diagrams and dreams and the volume in the room rises from a gentle murmur to an excited buzz. It’s hard to get people to quantify the possibilities. All their disappointments and concerns quickly crowd in to stifle the magic. But if you ask them patiently to put that aside and form a vision of what work should be like, aspiration slowly gets the better of them. This isn’t about creating a dream kingdom. In fact, what works best I’ve found is getting people to forecast what a “better us” looks like – and a key component to achieving that is asking them to find proof for what’s …

Agitation: Step 1 in building a purposeful culture

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t and shouldn’t change a culture just for the sake of it. Obvious, right? And yet managers often announce change programmes without referencing and quantifying specific motivations. There’s little doubt that people act more positively and decisively when they are presented with a context for actions. A real context. A pain point they can feel. An opportunity that stares them in the eye and says “Come get me”. So often, the reasons given for changing a culture are far too broad. They’re couched around concepts or theory – productivity gains or the need to downsize or an economic change of fortune. The thing is, none of those reasons sound like reasons. They sound like excuses or, worse, prompts. They’re mantras not motives. In this wonderful article courtesy of Bain & Co, authors Patrick Litre and Kevin Murphy trace the ups and downs of the traditional change programme: Specifically, the Agitation stage of a culture change programme needs to address the three change resistors that cause that significant dip at the start: •  Anchoring locks …

Fighting the "fadar" …

By Mark Di Somma

We now have greater access to ideas than ever before, but the ideas themselves, it seems to me, have a much shorter half-life. New thinking, new people, new everything are presented to us at a dizzying pace – in editorial, feeds, slide decks, talks, videos, articles, almost everywhere one cares to look. In an age of instant celebrity and content marketing, thoughts and variations of thoughts are being championed from every social soapbox. Ideas have become fashion – because they are marketed to us as fashions. And like fashion, most will barely outlive the press release that trumpeted them. A proliferation of lists across the media adds to the sense of volatility. The “fadar” is how I describe the promulgation of ideas fighting for our collective and individual attention across every aspect of the cultural landscape. Some will shine. Many won’t get the chance. Others will bedazzle on first view only to burn out well before they hit paydirt … (Ironically, as an idea in its own right, the fadar is of course subject to …

30 things you should tell employees before you change the culture

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1.   The future that we now see for the organisation 2.   How we discovered that we needed to change 3.   How quickly we need to change 4.   Why we need to make changes at that pace 5.   How the new vision changes what the organisation intends to achieve 6.   Where our new priorities lie 7.   How this will change the ways we behave 8.   How this will change the ways we compete 9.   How this will change the ways we work 10. How this will change the ways you work 11. How we will now judge success 12. What we think the chances of success are 13. What we will be doing to stack the odds in our favour 14. Where we will be looking to make changes first 15. How far changes will extend …

How do you prevent your corporate culture from stalling?

By Mark Di Somma

There is plenty of discussion, quite rightly, about the fact that people are overworked, that they are under ridiculous pressure, that they feel undervalued and unmotivated – but a couple of conversations this week have got me wondering whether the opposite, an unpressured culture, whilst not as destructive, may nevertheless be undesirable, albeit for different reasons. I’m always concerned for instance when people inside a culture tell me that the place they work at is comfortable or that it has a real family feel. In a corporate cultural setting, too often those terms are code for a work force that is happy to leave things as they are. The other word that always rings alarm bells is “busy”. When people tell me they work in a busy workplace, that too is often code – this time for a lot of activity, noise and meetings, but without focus and without measured and effective outcomes. So how much urgency do you need in a workplace? Is some degree of turbulence necessary to keep people on their toes? …

How do you write a great purpose?

By Mark Di Somma

A sizzling purpose sets out how a company intends to change the world for the better. Its role is to unite customers and culture alike in the pursuit of that intention. It’s a statement of belief, of hope, of pursuit. It’s born of a wish to see the world put to rights. Having fielded a number of enquiries this week about how to develop a purpose, I thought I’d share how I approach such a critically important task. First and foremost, a purpose should never be developed in isolation. This affects your entire organisation. It should involve the senior leadership team to start with, and then be socialised for discussion. The discussion itself shouldn’t revolve around the words (because that quickly becomes semantic nit-picking). It should focus on the passion, on the biggest belief you share and on the implications of holding that belief for everything you do. Start with the greatest good Don’t tell your people and customers about what you want to see change in the business. State what you fundamentally believe must …

Purpose vs mission and vision

Purpose vs vision and mission

By Mark Di Somma

I hope the days of vision and mission statements are nearly over. They’re the paperwork of traditional management models. They’re strategic compliance, and as such, they get deliberated over at great length and then forgotten. For the most part, they’re also self-centred – all about what the organisation wants to achieve for itself, all about how it intends to achieve whatever it deems important. They often don’t suit the much more open, interactive, social ways in which business is increasingly being done.

Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth

By Mark Di Somma

You can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to planning, the business, the strategy and the culture all need to stem from the company’s driving purpose – its absolute reason for being. That in turn means that the purpose must be much more than a wish list or a broad hypothetical goal. It must be inspiring, engaging, profit-focused and it must work hard to stand the company apart from its competitors. Here’s how I use purpose and beliefs to drive distinctive business direction. 1. What is our core purpose (rather than just what is our core business)? When people think of our brand, what is their blinkpoint (the first association that snaps into their heads)? Are they aligned? 2. Why do people buy from us? How have we made …

The power of being purposeful

The power of being purposeful

By Mark Di Somma

In an age where products are increasingly similar and of equal quality, the opportunities to compete just on the basis of what you sell are disappearing. In fact, I’d go further than that and say, they’re as good as gone. Even if you know that your product has some sort of technical advantage over that of a rival, the chances of you continuing to hold that advantage or of that advantage being of such significance that consumers actually care are as good as nil.