Tips for Cultural Change

By: Duke Rohe  drohe@att.net

1. Awareness. Know your own bias. Unless you start where you are, you won’t how to get to where you need to be…Joyce Meyers
2. Inquire. A good formulated question can reveal what’s concealed. Seek to understand without trying to resolve or reload. Try advocating less (you already know what you know) and enjoy understanding more.
3. Validate. Repeat what you understood they said and qualify what conclusions you may have drawn from it. There are few feelings better than feeling fully understood.
4. Acknowledge. If you find your defenses lifting, try to depersonalize them by realizing that what is said is just a difference between you and them. If your defense is in your way of understanding them, apologize and place it in the open. This usually creates an understanding by itself.
5. Receive. In order to grow what you know, you have to be wide open to what they are saying. Your goal in listening is receiving, not solving.
6. Trust. It is extended; not earned. Management is initiating this by opening up the discussion around what needs to change to make this a more effective and friendly place.
7. Discover. Environmental problems are neat because the workforce has total control of what they want to do about it. If the way things are, is not healthy, how does everyone want them to be? Then, what do they think is a good way to get there?
8. Endure. Collective solutions don’t fit personal ideals, so expect individual flack over team decisions. Surface any contention and bring it back to the team agreement, or get the team to change the agreement to match reality. The old emphasis handling problems was pDca, while the new emphasis in minimize casualties and accelerating change is PdCa.
9. Recover. Trials are simply the present colliding with the future. When you blow it as a manager, you can turn the trials into trails by: acknowledging, recovering and redirecting how you react.
10. Commonality. Humans tend to distinguish each other by magnifying their differences. If we all were honest, we would realize what we have in common and use that to drive us to a better solution of working together.