Performance management, support and patience in culture change

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.