A Culture Transformation Cannot Be The Flavor Of The Month

Leave the “Flavor of the Month” to Dairy Queen®. A business needs sustainable change.

When an organization enacts a culture transformation, we assume it will make a lasting difference. Too often, such initiatives become a flavor of the month. An organization introduces a change with great fanfare. Everybody gets excited about it. The future is bright.

However, the organization often lacks actions needed to actually realize that transformation. Six months later, the initiative has stalled, and the status quo has returned. The vision goes unrealized and, in some cases, forgotten altogether.

The Risk of Flavor-of-the-month Culture Transformation

If you go down this route, you risk more than you may realize. First, you won’t get the impact you’d hoped for from the culture transformation. You may also lose the support of employees jaded by the promise of change that goes unfulfilled. This can take a negative toll on organizational credibility.

As a result, you’ll likely lose the ability to effectively launch the initiative in the future. Even worse, in the big picture, the organization’s ability to enact any kind of transformation at all may come under scrutiny.

In the same time it takes you to get up and pour yourself a cup of coffee, you can probably think of a flavor-of-the-month initiative that flopped, even though the intended transformation itself was worthwhile. It’s easy to identify examples of unsustainable culture transformation.

It’s more challenging to take the personal steps needed to ensure worthwhile initiatives do not fall into a flavor-of-the-month pitfall but are sustained in a meaningful way. What might that look like?

Sustainable Change Requires Taking Personal Accountability

Lasting change starts with the executive team. Any initiative needs to be visibly directed by the company’s leadership. They must talk about it, reference it, and reiterate it in their messages. When others see the executives supporting the plan, they’ll buy in.

From there, the initiative itself needs to be reinforced at the manager level, not only in theory but also in practice. Managers must engage with the new culture and coach against it, so that when employees are trained on their role in making it happen, their managers provide consistent support. Finally, the change needs to be reiterated until it becomes part of the company’s DNA.

If you can get those components right, you’ll achieve culture transformation that’s sustainable, and where each person steps up and makes a difference.

It’s easy to criticize a transformation that flops. Taking the personal action at every organizational level to see change through is much harder. If an initiative is valuable enough to begin, it’s worth doing what is necessary to keep it alive. If everybody made that effort, worthwhile initiatives wouldn’t die on the vine and become fast-forgotten flavors of the month.