Improving Maintenance and Reliability Through Cultural Change. Stephen Thomas G.
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 “hard skills that we are trying to change. But this only touches the surface of that hidden force known as culture. You can implement the soft skills and even have them fail to properly function due to negative cultural influence.
Figure 2-1 Hard Skill / Soft Skill Pyramid
The seriousness of this issue is why people in the change business, senior managers or consultants, always are referring to the need to change the culture.
Years ago I was involved with the implementation of a Quality Program. It was one of those initiatives sold by a consultant that promised to improve the quality of everything we did in the plant. It had a strong soft skill component and this was followed by the introduction of the hard skills built on the soft skill foundation. The program lasted several years, but in the end it failed. We had attempted to change many things, but we failed to understand and change the culture. In the end, the culture worked invisibly behind the scenes to restore status quo to the organization.
The point is that many claim they understand organizational culture, but when you observe the initiatives being implemented and the failure of a majority of them, it should be clear that culture is not so easily understood nor do most organizations work to alter the culture to achieve success in their change programs. The real model we need to consider has culture as the sub-foundation of soft skills. If we can successfully alter the culture, then we can then build soft skill and later hard skill initiatives on top of it.
Now that we know where culture belongs in the change scheme, we need to get a clearer picture of what it is and how it interacts with the soft skills it needs to support. If we can achieve this picture, then we can successfully build the hard skills on top of the soft skills that are built on top of the cultural change. It is only then that we can achieve the level of change and improvement we seek.
Figure 2-2 Pyramid with culture as a foundation
The starting point of our discussion is to define organizational culture in a way that is understandable. From this we can dissect the definition into its component parts and reach a clearer understanding of each. This should provide us with the starting point we need to discuss why it is important, the types of culture we need to learn to deal with, and how the work culture impacts the soft skills that we need to employ to make positive business change.
In his book Organizational Culture and Leadership, E. Schein defines organizational culture as follows:
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
If you think about this definition, it clearly describes that sub-foundation upon which an organization’s soft and hard skills are built. It also paints a clear picture of how ingrained these basic assumptions are; this picture allows you to understand how difficult they can be to change. Let’s look at the component parts:
“A pattern of shared basic assumptions”
The operative word here is that the culture is constructed upon shared basic assumptions. Because they are shared, when you try to change the assumptions you need to change them in everyone.
“The group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration”
The next part of the definition explains that these assumptions are not new creations. They have been tested over time as the organization learned how to solve both the internal and external problems that quite often were serious threats to their very existence.
“That has worked well enough to be considered valid”
Furthermore, these assumptions worked well for the organization, which has collectively considered them valid. Think about the problems you will face trying to implement change where the new initiative is in conflict with a basic assumption that has been validated over time.
“Taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”
This last part locks the assumption into the culture because it is taught to all new members as the “way we work around here if you want to succeed.”
This is a very powerful definition if you think about its far-reaching impact on new change initiatives. It essentially says that if a new initiative conflicts with a basic assumption that was learned over time, has worked well enough to be held as valid, and is taught to the new members so that everyone believes it as true, then changing things is going to be a very difficult task.
One of the most difficult changes to make in the area of reliability is to change a work culture from reactive to proactive. Let’s examine some of the reasons that this change is so difficult in light of the definition.
Suppose our change initiative was aimed at implementing a planning and scheduling process that brought with it reliability-based