Cultivating a change culture in teams

In this, the second of two articles looking at the behavioural impact of change on teams, I will be focusing on how you, as a leader, can cultivate a culture of change within your team(s). If you haven’t read it, I would suggest having a look at the previous article first (linked here) as that unpacks the ways teams resist change – which you’re going to need to be aware of for the following approaches to work!

As Kurt Lewin, godfather of change theory, identified: ‘for every positive driver of change, there is an equally powerful restraining force, which if not acknowledged and overcome will scupper any change project’. He may not have actually used the word ‘scupper’ but with 70% of change projects failing, you get the drift.

There are myriad change models that you can look up so as ever the approach here is instead to consider the challenge from a systemic and psychodynamic perspective – basically what looks to be happening and what is really happening under the surface. The key areas I will therefore be exploring within what Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habits) labelled the Solution phase are: the impact of sentience on culture; the establishment of self-management as a guiding principle; and how to leverage a team’s Big Mo.

I talked in the last article about the impact of a misalignment between a team’s task and sentient boundaries such as if a team’s new task conflicts in some way with their sense of group purpose. For example, if the team has formed around the value of ‘quality’ and the new task is to deliver ‘faster and/or cheaper’. And so it also holds true that to cultivate a positive change mindset, we need to understand the team’s sentience and if necessary work with them to understand why the change is needed and how the new task can deliver meaning.

Remember though that team culture is not something that can be imposed by the leader, it exists as the common understanding across all active members of the team as to why they exist and how they relate to each other. Therefore it has to come from the team themselves and their understanding of how their new team task contributes meaningfully to the business’s primary task.

And talking about things coming from the team, this neatly moves us on to the topic of team self-management. Frederic Laloux, in his excellent book Reinventing Organisations, defined team self-management as one of the three critical ingredients of an evolutionary organisation (the others being wholeness and purpose). Evolutionary in the sense that A.K. Rice would describe as an Open Systems organisation, one that constantly grows by learning from and adapting to its surroundings.

Team self-management is a huge topic that deserves it’s own article, but is best described as a team that actively manages its own performance (including developing new solutions to both task and team challenges) by engaging with its internal diversity and authority. This requires the leader to act in the belief that their team has all the capabilities, knowledge and creativity needed to define the best solutions to their problems and grow their performance. In effect defining leadership as ‘coaching’ rather than ‘management’.

In fact, successful evolutionary businesses like Buurtzorg in The Netherlands literally replaced their management level with external coaches whose role is to support the teams in finding their own solutions, and so avoid the dependency so prevalent in hierarchical organisations.

Finally, there is a secret ingredient in all change management that we must look to leverage – the Big Mo – momentum. Systemically, momentum comes from the application of habit theory – breaking long term goals into smaller, measured micro-goals and the application of ‘practise, learn, apply’ over time. However momentum is a fickle beast and also requires the right psychodynamic environment driven by motivation, permission to fail and the containment of anxiety.

Within businesses, motivation often only exists as part of the individual contract – in the form of salary bumps, promotions, bonuses, access to training, and other perks. Rarely is motivation considered at the team level. And yet we only have to look at team sports to see how individual and team motivation can and should work in parallel.

The reason motivation is so key is that it counters the natural human fear of risk. When we see risk aversion at a team level it manifests in delegation of authority back to the leader. And so as the holder of authority it’s down to the leader to give their team permission to fail. To do this requires leadership to demonstrate and encourage the values of transparency, learning and group responsibility – fail together, learn together, win together.

Another key role for leadership is the containment of team anxiety in the face of the change paradox. Wilfred Bion defined containment as when the leader acknowledges and holds their team’s anxiety, allowing them to access their strengths and capabilities in delivering the tasks. The very presence of the leader - not in coming up with solutions, but in acknowledging their stress, being empathetic to the team’s emotional shifts as the project progresses and reflecting back to the team their trust and belief – can create the psychological safety required for the team to take up their authority and to perform.

So what have we learned? That cultivating a positive change culture in a team requires: an alignment between purpose, motivation and self-management on the one side; and permission to fail, psychological safety and momentum on the other. And it is the leader’s ability to distinguish their own role between ‘manager’ and ‘coach’ that is often the critical differentiator in enabling their team to successfully navigate change.