This Oakwood trainer is currently involved in four separate culture change programmes:
• In three different high tech, light engineering manufacturers with very stable workforces, helping supervisors, junior leaders and middle managers take on a more strategic viewpoint and leadership behaviours.
• In a new start-up heavy engineering organisation, helping the team in one function to ‘toughen up’ and gain more general business awareness to better equip them to negotiate with their colleagues in other departments.
Three observations:
• Firstly, in each programme, one of the symptoms of each of the organisations’ underlying cultural problems is a wide disregard for the process and benefits of performance management: non-SMART or absent personal objectives; what objectives there were being kept secret by managers and staff; no monitoring or recording of the evidence of performance, an unwillingness to meet regularly to discuss performance. Once managers take performance management seriously they start to manage well.
• Secondly, culture change programmes that are not thoroughly and aggressively supported and promoted (championed) by the highest levels of management seem to fail quickly and badly.
• Thirdly, one Training Manager had a good view on culture change. He said ‘When we tried to introduce a ‘nil defects’ culture into a new aircraft maintenance unit, we got the policies, structures and procedures right, did all the training, and it STILL took fifteen years until the culture was completely embedded. I’ve got a plan for at least the next five years to get the culture right here. I can wait.’
So… performance management, support and patience: three routes to culture change.
Monday, 18 July 2011
Friday, 8 July 2011
Why ‘Oakwood’?
Students regularly ask Oakwood International trainers why the company is called ‘Oakwood’. So here’s why.
Oak trees grow in many countries but are particularly associated with England. They live many hundreds of years and are among the oldest trees in the UK: many live on after fires, lightning strikes and other disasters. They are not the tallest trees in the British countryside but are the most robust, handsome and impressive. They are excellent trees to climb and in summer their foliage is thick enough to provide excellent shade from the sun or shelter from the rain.
Oaks have long been associated the best in British culture. English sailors were described as having ‘hearts of oak’. King Charles II hid in an oak tree during the English civil war, and in fiction both Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh lived in oak trees. In the British rock band Queen, Brian May plays a ‘Red Special’ guitar that he and his father made from an old oak fireplace. A famous English proverb, illustrating how great ideas and businesses develop, is ‘from little acorns mighty oaks do grow’.
The wood of the oak tree is not just good for guitars. It is also one of the UK’s strongest and most useful building materials. Long before ships were made from iron, the Royal Navy and merchant navy sailed ships made of oak. Original oak beams still support the UK’s oldest inhabited houses, churches, barns and public buildings, 500 to 1000 years after they were built. They were often built with ‘green’, recently cut, oak, which then shrank and hardened as it aged, making the buildings more rigid. Oak has the unusual quality of becoming stronger and stiffer as it ages, so that in very old buildings the oak beams have taken on the characteristics of concrete. And although oak can burn, it burns slowly and does not lose strength quickly, so that oak-built houses are fire-safe.
But oak is not just a material from the past. It’s a green renewable resource – easy to shape and sculpt – that has been used in some of the most exciting new architectural projects and interior designs of recent years. As well as having superb structural qualities, it also looks good.
So Oakwood is here for the long term. It will help you climb and keep you safe. It comes from a strong and robust culture. It will you help you build your business and your career. And it will go on being useful and relevant in the future.
That’s why we chose to call our business ‘Oakwood’.
Oak trees grow in many countries but are particularly associated with England. They live many hundreds of years and are among the oldest trees in the UK: many live on after fires, lightning strikes and other disasters. They are not the tallest trees in the British countryside but are the most robust, handsome and impressive. They are excellent trees to climb and in summer their foliage is thick enough to provide excellent shade from the sun or shelter from the rain.
Oaks have long been associated the best in British culture. English sailors were described as having ‘hearts of oak’. King Charles II hid in an oak tree during the English civil war, and in fiction both Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh lived in oak trees. In the British rock band Queen, Brian May plays a ‘Red Special’ guitar that he and his father made from an old oak fireplace. A famous English proverb, illustrating how great ideas and businesses develop, is ‘from little acorns mighty oaks do grow’.
The wood of the oak tree is not just good for guitars. It is also one of the UK’s strongest and most useful building materials. Long before ships were made from iron, the Royal Navy and merchant navy sailed ships made of oak. Original oak beams still support the UK’s oldest inhabited houses, churches, barns and public buildings, 500 to 1000 years after they were built. They were often built with ‘green’, recently cut, oak, which then shrank and hardened as it aged, making the buildings more rigid. Oak has the unusual quality of becoming stronger and stiffer as it ages, so that in very old buildings the oak beams have taken on the characteristics of concrete. And although oak can burn, it burns slowly and does not lose strength quickly, so that oak-built houses are fire-safe.
But oak is not just a material from the past. It’s a green renewable resource – easy to shape and sculpt – that has been used in some of the most exciting new architectural projects and interior designs of recent years. As well as having superb structural qualities, it also looks good.
So Oakwood is here for the long term. It will help you climb and keep you safe. It comes from a strong and robust culture. It will you help you build your business and your career. And it will go on being useful and relevant in the future.
That’s why we chose to call our business ‘Oakwood’.
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