Implementing a ‘turnaround’ project, or any attempt to change a team’s culture, involves many challenges. Here are five tips, based on my experiences and observations over decades in the software industry.

1. Engage Directly

It is vital that you actually show your face on the 'shop floor' of the business. What form this takes depends on the business you’re in, but to an extent it doesn’t matter exactly what you do. What matters is that you demonstrate your willingness to get involved in making the changes. If there’s one thing that employees notice when leadership wants them to change, it’s how willing they are to do more than just talk about it.

While engagement with the ‘floor’ allows you to set the tone fast by making quick wins and beginning to address what’s not working with the status quo, you need to ensure you don’t get into too much detail. Showing that you appreciate that there is detail to be worked through is very different from spending all your time grappling with that detail! Make sure you’re setting the tone and direction rather than doing all the work.

2. Move People to Other Teams

A critical feature of effective complex organisations is that they make people do all the jobs. Only when people have seen things from all angles can they make real and effective adaptations to changing circumstances or effect real change within a complex organisation. This is absolutely critical when an organisation is looking to change.

With one client, we ensured all the central IT staff spent a couple of weeks sitting alongside the developers to better understand the job they do. The resistance I got to this idea, even among the keen ones, was deeply surprising to me. There was a profound tendency on the part of the people being seconded to put others on a pedestal and fear humiliation by going outside their comfort zone.

The results, however, were immediate. Relations between teams improved dramatically. Areas of tension that had been bubbling for years were resolved as central IT staff got to see things ‘from the other side’.

This changed their view of why certain blockers needed to be removed, and – equally important – how they could be removed using more creative means that the ‘other side’ perhaps could not see. Once staff saw the drivers of frustration, they could implement solutions for the problem itself, and not necessarily what was being asked for.

The perceived downsides of this kind of initiative (lost productivity, for example) are more often than not quickly compensated for by improved empathy and communication. This ultimately results in improved efficiency across the organisation.

3. Remove Negative Influences

People don’t like to talk about this, but one of the most effective ways to change culture is to remove people that are being obstructive. There’s a (probably apocryphal) story about an Orson Welles management technique he used as a film director. He would get a friendly stooge to show up to work on the first day of a shoot, do something Welles didn’t want, and Welles would immediately fire him. The message to the crew would be unambiguous: my way, or the highway.

That’s obviously an extreme example, but I’ve seen time and again the powerful effects of removing people who are obstructing change. That doesn’t mean you don’t follow due process, or give people clear warnings, or help them to mend their ways, but nothing sends a message of ‘I disapprove of this bad behaviour’ better than dealing with it firmly.

One of the first questions I generally ask myself as a change consultant when considering the latest attempt from on high to bring cultural change to a group is: what behaviour will now get someone fired?

4. Take Responsibility for Hiring

Another critical signal for how seriously management is taking the proposed change is how much they take responsibility for hiring. As with ‘getting on the floor’, you shouldn’t need to get too involved with the details, but you do want to ensure that a delicate balance is achieved: new hires need to work well within the existing business, but also be able to carry the business to a new place.

A few critical hires can accelerate your transformation significantly. By the same token, mis-hires can set you back years as you spend time undoing their missteps and organising their removal and replacement.

5. Take Responsibility for Training

There’s a powerful quote from Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, about training:

 Training is the manager’s job. Training is the highest leverage activity a manager can do to increase the output of an organisation. If a manager spends 12 hours preparing training for 10 team members that increases their output by 1% on average, the result is 200 hours of increased output from the 10 employees (each works about 2000 hours a year). Don’t leave training to outsiders, do it yourself.

And training isn’t just about being in a room and explaining things to people – it’s about getting in the field and showing people how to respond to problems, how to think about things, and where they need to go next. The point is, as a leader, you need to take ownership of it.

As a change consultant, I personally train people in things as varied as giving presentations to Kubernetes networking. This training can demystify these skills and empower staff to go further.

Conclusion

These tips have a common thread: they emphasise the importance of leadership ‘getting their hands dirty’ when encouraging cultural change as part of a broader transformation. By spending time on the floor, hiring, firing, moving, and training, you are sending messages about what’s important to the business. Many leaders suffer from Impostor Syndrome, but whatever you feel internally, your staff look to you to tell them what’s important. You don’t have to get everything right, but if you show that you care about what people are doing, then they will quickly share your passion for the right outcome.

About the author

Ian Miell is a partner at Container Solutions, and has been helping companies, across industries, move to cloud native ways of working for over ten years. Container Solutions develops a strategy, a clear plan and step by step implementation helping companies achieve a smooth digital transformation.

With services including Internal Developer Platform Enablement, Cloud Modernisation, DevOps/DevSecOps, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Consultancy, Cloud Optimisation and creating a full Cloud Native Strategy, companies get much more than just engineering know-how.

https://www.container-solutions.com/