Bringing Your Aspirational Culture to Life

If you’ve taken the time and invested the effort into defining your aspirational culture—the one you believe you must have in order to achieve your strategic objectives—you’re on your way to being one of few high-performing organizations. But while defining your culture and putting it in writing is a great (and by that, I mean critical!) first step, it’s not enough to make that culture a reality.  And ultimately, that’s what you want, right?

Launching your aspirational culture

When I work with clients to define their needed culture, I encourage them to make a big splash about it.  We develop a launch plan and load it up with opportunities to talk about and experience the culture in action.

One of my favorite things to do is develop a little booklet that links the strategic foundation (mission, vision, values) and the culture description, and get this booklet in the hands of each and every employee.  Making an investment in something tangible goes a long way to communicate the importance.

Embedding your culture

In addition to lots of communication tactics, I work with clients to help them embed the culture into their human capital systems—this is the absolute best way to foster transition of that cultural mindset and associated behaviors to the new reality. The goal is to get to the point at which your talent acquisition processes are hiring for cultural fit, your onboarding and learning programs are developing new behaviors, your rewards system is recognizing people for living the culture, and your performance management system is holding employees accountable. 

There are myriad ways you can help bring the desired culture to life, especially through learning and development programs.  Here are some ideas.

• Onboarding: Openly talk about the culture during the first 90 days and help new employees understand how they can be successful within your organizational culture.

• Manager training. Help managers see how culture role modeling and cultivation is part of their responsibility and give them tools to make it quick and easy.

• Leadership development. Create programs for existing leaders and high potentials to serve as culture ambassadors and be part of the culture creation.

• Coaching. Whether it’s a manager coaching and employee or you’ve brought in outside expertise, weave the desired cultural behaviors into the “how” aspect of goal accomplishment.

• Informal learning (such as through communities of interest or lunch and learn programs)—Have the informal learning coordinators work with facilitators and presenters to emphasize cultural elements in their storytelling.

• Individual development plans—Use these as a mechanism to provide employees insight into how applying culturally desired behaviors will contribute to their success and growth in the organization.

One of my favorite books, The Transformative CEO: Impact Lessons from Industry Game Changers, makes the case for defining and cultivating the needed culture to drive organizational performance.  As human capital and learning practitioners, you can leverage this information to make the case with your leadership for transitioning to the culture you need.  And once it’s defined, use these ideas to bring that aspirational culture to life.  Let me know how it goes.  Be brilliant!