Creating a great and enduring culture is hard, but changing an existing culture is even more difficult. To do the latter, you will first need to break the existing culture down before building the mechanisms to create the change. You’re not only fighting against culture’s positive feedback loops, but also the team’s inertia itself - the way a team works is built around its existing culture, and by breaking the culture you are also breaking the established ways of work. Therefore it is not surprising why so many efforts at making this change fails, and even the attempts that are successful tend to be chaotic.
This also means that if you truly want to change the existing culture, you will need to have strong conviction on doing so, and be willing to sacrifice a lot to get it done. Changing culture is not just a type II (irreversible) decision, it is close to an all-in decision in that if you fail, you will likely no longer be a part of your team. Additionally, small, low conviction pushes will do very little, and in the worst case it will push you to a scenario where you have the existing culture, but without the trust of the team.
However, when culture needs to change you will need to pull the trigger, since the alternative is often a slow and painful erosion of the team.
Given how difficult breaking an existing culture is, being strategic on how to efficiently break it helps the effort greatly. The ultimate goal of breaking an existing culture is to disrupt its feedback loops enough so that the reinforcing effect they have are weakened, allowing you to put something new in its place. These feedback loops often have anchors, and breaking the anchors will make breaking the culture itself much easier. Most commonly, the anchors come in the form of:
People
Gatherings
Privileges
By identifying the sturdiest anchors within these three categories and breaking them, the manager can make the task of changing their team’s culture a tractable one.
People
As culture develops within an organization, certain people naturally become cultural anchors within it. These individuals tend to be senior or highly impactful members of the team, and other team members are incentivized to emulate their principles and behaviors because they also want to achieve at the same level as these anchors. This is especially true of the junior and mid-level members of the team who are seeking role models to emulate as they progress in their careers. Since this group also tends to be the majority of the team, it means that the cultural anchors are deeply entrenched in enforcing the existing culture.
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