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Chapter 19 Moving Forward
Change is not a one-time event. If the organization is in a continuous learning mode, then it makes changes, evaluates the results, and positions itself to make further changes. This is the realm of continuous improvement or cultural evolution – always improving on what you have created. This chapter closes out the book with a brief recap of what was discussed and encouragement for the task at hand.
1.6 Navigating through the Book
Ideally this book should be read from front to back; the material is presented in a manner that provides you with information that acts cumulatively to build your understanding of organizational culture. This information includes the four elements that describe culture, the concept of vision and the Goal Achievement Model, the eight elements of change, and, finally tying it all together, a discussion of the Web of Cultural Change.
However, the reader may wish to jump around and read chapters out of order based on their immediate and specific areas of interest. For these readers I offer a road map of the book in Figure 1-1. All of the chapters are labeled as well as the way in which they tie together. This should provide you with the tool you need to navigate your way through the text.
As with any effort, getting started is often difficult. However, the value in a successful effort is well worth the time, energy, and commitment required. The reason behind this is that you are not just changing the way a process is executed, or a procedure is followed. By changing the organization’s culture, you are in essence changing the very nature of the company. This book addresses this change of culture in a general sense that can be applied across many disciplines. But more specifically, it is targeted towards changing the culture as it pertains to reliability. If we are successful in this arena, the result will be a major shift in how work is performed. In addition, a culture that is focused on equipment reliability reaps other closely-associated benefits. These include improved safety and environmental compliance. Both of these are tied closely to reliability in that reliable equipment doesn’t fail or expose a plant to potential safety and environmental issues.
Changing a culture to one focused on reliability also has spin-off benefits in many other areas. Reliability or the concept of things not breaking can easily be applied to other processes that are not related to equipment efficiency and effectiveness.
However, this type of change is very difficult. After all you are trying to alter basic beliefs and values of an organization. These are the behaviors that have been rewarded and praised in the past and may even be the reason that many in the organization were promoted to their current positions. Change may also seriously affect people’s jobs because things they did in the past may no longer be relevant in the future.
I hope that you will find this guidebook useful, not just as a place to start or as a text to provide the initial information for your effort, but also as a book which will help you through all the phases of the process and into the future. I wish you success in your efforts and offer you this quote from Nicolo Machiavelli. Read and think about the message. It clearly describes the work you are about to undertake.
“There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator has for enemies, all of those who have done well under the old conditions, and luke-warm defenders in those who will do well under the new.”
Figure 1-1 Book navigation
2.1 What Is Organizational Culture Anyway?
All companies want to improve and, where necessary, change the things that they feel will lead to better work processes, improved effectiveness and efficiency, and ultimately better profits. They go about this task in many and varied fashions. Often managers are replaced with those who senior management believe are more in line with what they want to achieve. Another strategy is to conduct a work process redesign, developing an “as is” process followed by the “to be” model. This redesign usually leads to restructuring, often with layoffs, and the implementation of new and different work processes. At times these companies often bring in high-powered consultants whose job it is to work with plant management to accomplish all of the steps I have described.
In my thirty-three years in industry, I have been involved in numerous initiatives designed to improve how maintenance was conducted. Often these initiatives brought with them statements that what we really needed to do was to “change the organization’s culture.” In most of these instances I was led to believe that those making this statement, senior managers or the consultants that they hired, knew what this meant. After all, these were the people making the “big bucks” so I had every reason to believe that they possessed this knowledge. In general I was wrong.
What I found out through inquiry was that these individuals often had no more clear knowledge of what it took to change an organizations culture than I did. However, in their defense, they knew that to be successful with new change initiatives there was this hidden force known as culture that had to be altered if the organization was to make progress.
Part of the problem with those who claim that they understand the concept of organizational culture change is that they have the same frame of reference as the rest of us. The senior managers have usually worked their way up from junior engineers through other jobs of increasing responsibility in the organization until they reached the senior manager level. The consultants who are hired to support the efforts have the same bias. If they didn’t work their way up through the ranks of a business and then go into consulting, then they still progressed their career from the bottom to the top of their consultant firm.
In both of these cases what people learn along the way is what I will refer to as hard skills. These are skills like planning and scheduling of work, implementing a preventive maintenance program, and others made up of specific tasks that, when properly implemented, change the way work is conducted. These tasks and the change they bring are important; however, a majority of these initiatives end in failure. They fail when management “takes their eye off the ball” and moves on to other work. They fail when the sponsoring manager leaves and is replaced with someone who does not have the same passion for the initiative. They also fail at times due to open and active resistance from the organization.
What is missed in the training of most people, or if they receive training it does not receive the same value, is training in the soft skills. These are skills such as creating a vision, holding people accountable for their goals and initiatives, leadership, communications, and interrelationship building. To change an organization for the long haul and to avoid failure requires that these skills be employed constantly and consistently across the organizational landscape. Why? Because as shown in Figure 2-1, the soft skills are the foundation for hard skill implementation. We all know what happens if a structure is built over a poor foundation.
Therefore, in order to have a successful change of the culture we need to have an understanding of the soft skills and implement them before the
