The learning team drives leadership development and the organizational development team drives culture change, right? Your leadership development programs are focused on creating great leaders and increasing their effectiveness. But how are you aligning your learning programs with the future needs of the organization? How are you using your leadership development programs as a means to drive culture towards a vision of the future instead of just developing leaders of today.
If you can find a way to identify those key culture change messages that evolve on an annual basis, you can align your programs in such a way to integrate those messages into your program activities. Imagine the power of every leadership program targeted at frontline, mid-level, and executive level leaders using the same culture messages in their activities. The activity themselves would be different, but the core messaging the same. You could create a situation where each program supports each other in messaging and literally gain the cultural hard wiring of important messaging from top to bottom.
Many times I’ve seen organizations create separate initiatives to drive culture change. Rather than change the existing programs they create a new one. Believing that the focused effort will have greater impact. While agree sometimes, this is true, I more firmly believe you get greater outcomes when you integrate culture messaging directly into the existing programs instead.
Love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
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Mike,
I thoroughly agree with you on this. Programs, initiatives, systems that are already in place have enormous potential to anchor cultural change efforts, when leveraged to build on their existing strengths and supporters to sharpen the organization’s focus on positively growing toward a more effective way of operating. The love of new initiatives, to get one’s agenda recognized, or to catch attention, or out of frustration with the status quo, contribute so much to the “program du jour” cynicism that is rampant in most organizations. And, they far too often throw the baby out with the bath water, failing to reinforce the best of their predecessors and capture the synergies that are naturally present.
Good on ya, mate!
Kit
by the way, I found my way to your blog from our LinkedIn connection- and now I see that can catch you on Twitter {:->