Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
equation. If there are no other supporters to continue the oversight and corrective action efforts, the program will most likely lose energy. Over a relatively short time, everything will likely return to the status quo.
The question we need to answer is why does this happen to well-intentioned reliability-driven change process throughout industry? The answer is that the process change is a victim of the organization’s culture. This hidden force, which defines how an organization behaves, works behind the scenes to restore the status quo unless specific actions are taken to establish a new status quo for the organization. Without proper attention to organizational culture, long-term successful change is not possible.
Think of an organization’s culture as a rubber band. The more you try to stretch it, the harder it tries to return to its previously un-stretched state – the status quo. However if you stretch it in a way that it can’t return and leave it stretched for a long time, once released it will retain the current stretch you gave it and not return to its original dimensions. That is going to be our goal – to figure out how to stretch the organization, but in a way that when the driver of the process is out of the equation, the organizational rubber band won’t snap back.
I have been involved in the world of change management for sometime. Quite often I have been involved in projects that were well planned and executed and then, when attention was turned to other initiatives, they disappeared in the blink of an eye. I as well as a great many others had difficulty understanding why this happened. Were the projects or effort ill conceived? Not really. They addressed specific business needs and had the potential for delivering value to the company. Were they poorly designed and not rolled out to the organization properly? No, some of the smartest people I know were involved in many of the efforts. Was the organization out to destroy the effort? Actually when these projects were rolled out, there usually was a lot of enthusiasm and interest from the organization. So what was the cause of the failure?
Some of the work I did on my last book, Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, explored the causes by examining the eight elements of change – leadership, work process, structure, group learning, technology, communication, interrelationships, and rewards in a holistic fashion via The Web of Change. From this and other work I have done, I recognized that properly addressing the eight elements was very important. But beyond these there are two concepts that are critical success factors to the longevity of any change. These are readiness and sustainability.
Coupled with my book and workbook was a training program using my concepts to help deliver successful change. However, as I developed training plans, I recognized that in training people to use new ideas and concepts, readiness and sustainability were two important drivers for success. However, knowing this raises a question. Why are readiness and sustainability required to help implement newly-learned ideas in a plant or any other setting?
It was around this time that I had several discussions with other change practitioners. Although they were not talking about readiness or sustainability, it was clear that both of these elements were an important part of a much larger concept. This concept focused on the need to change the organization’s culture in order to successfully implement new initiatives.
This raised questions in my mind. What is organizational culture and why do you need to change it to have a successful change process implementation? To answer this question, I began doing research on the topic of cultural change. What I discovered is that the concept is talked about, but what it really is and how you go about changing it was not crystal clear. In my search, I again ran into three types of books on this subject, as I had found during my research on my previous book. These books included CEOs describing how they made change at the senior management level; books by academics who explained the concept, but in ways not applicable to middle management; and consultants with many good ideas, some of which were available in the book, but others that required a fee for services.
The conclusion – if you really want to have successful change, changing organization culture is critical, but practical information for those of us in middle management who have to make it happen is lacking.
As a result of my investigation, I found the same motivation for this book as I did for my last book. What I have tried to create in the chapters that follow is a book designed for those of us in middle management who are faced with the day-to-day task of implementing successful change; we need to understand how to change culture so that the initiatives that we are being asked to implement are not only successful at the outset, but provide long-lasting change for the business.
The goal of this book is to show you how to change the culture in order to promote readiness, sustainability, and ultimate success for whatever initiative you are rolling out to the organization.
Changing the organization’s culture in order to promote long-lasting change benefits everyone from the top of the organization to the bottom. It benefits the top by providing a solid foundation on which to build new concepts, behaviors, and ways of thinking about work. To accomplish radical changes in how we think about or execute our work requires that those who are part of the culture support it. Senior management can only take this so far. They can set and communicate the vision and they can visibly support the effort, but the most important thing they can do is empower those in the middle to make it happen.
As middle managers, we all know that we have many more initiatives on which to work than there is time in the day (or night). This spreads our focus. If we don’t collectively embrace the new change, then no threat, benefit or any other motivational technique will make the change successful over the long term. Although this book can help educate senior management so that they can empower the rest of us, its real benefit is for middle managers. It will help them understand this very complex concept in a way that will enable them to deliver successful change initiatives.
Just as with Successfully Managing Change in Organizations: A Users Guide, I have been unable to find a book that I believe adequately explains the concept of organizational culture to those of us in the middle who are asked to change it. This book provides middle managers with “how to” guidance for cultural change,” targeting reliability improvement.
There is also benefit for those at the bottom tier of the management hierarchy. The term bottom is not meant to demean this roll because this is where the “rubber meets the road.” All cultural change and their related initiatives end here. This is where all of the plans, training, and actual work to implement end. If it doesn’t work here – failure is the outcome. The benefit of this book for you is that this book, unlike any other out there on the market, explains the concepts of cultural change in a manner that is clearly understandable and applicable to the difficult task you have in front of you every day.
1.4 Why Is This Book Different?
When I first heard the expression organizational culture, I had no idea what it meant. What I later learned was that the people telling me that we had to “change the organization’s culture” were not completely sure either. They sensed that, in addition to the skills we were trying to impart and the processes we are trying to change, there was something more basic that, if not addressed, had the potential to impede or even totally destroy what we were trying to accomplish.
The problem was that we were not entirely clear on what that something actually was, yet we knew it was there. As I did more research and questioning of others, I became convinced that people are very much aware of this key ingredient, yet most are not sure how to define it and get their arms around it. There is a general lack of clarity about the concept of cultural change, what is involved to successfully accomplish it, and what parts need to be addressed if one is to be successful.
This book will demystify the concept of cultural change. It will explain organizational culture in a way that will make the concept