Culture – vivovii

Move the needle on culture

Leaders won’t achieve the agility they need unless they foster the right kind of culture. We work with all levels of your organization to move the culture toward one that embraces change, risk-taking, and learning from your customers.

The biggest reasons agile transformations fail? Old habits and an unreceptive culture—including at the top.

Because habits are hard to break, new mindsets and behaviors must be stitched into the fabric of how real work gets done.

The business agility model has a strong advantage in this regard. Implemented properly, agile work practices create opportunities for consistent reflection and learning.

Agile practices are also self-reinforcing: continuous feedback from customers, freedom in decision-making, and short cycles of value creation are inherently rewarding.

But this assumes that people are receptive to agile practices to begin with, and have the support they need to change their behavior and reap the benefits.

We support you as you make the culture change needed for business agility. This starts at the top but involves everyone in the organization. It requires coaching, and weaving new practices, mindsets, and behaviors into mutually reinforcing culture change.

We bring extensive experience and a personal approach to helping our clients:

Inspire culture change from the top

Functional and departmental silos, fear of taking risks, and lack of customer focus continue to plague agility efforts. Leaders must take bold and visible action to confront these challenges and set the tone for their people to follow.

Leaders themselves need to develop new mindsets and behaviors that embody agility. This must be an authentic commitment and transformation: leaders need to “walk the talk” and begin personally acting in different ways.

One example is to embed a mindset of calculated risk-taking and innovation through all ranks of the enterprise. This can be achieved by adopting a venture capital-style approach to prioritization, funding, and decision making.

This transition can be challenging for individual executives and leadership teams. It involves breaking the status quo of hierarchical decision making, shifting from optimizing to innovating, and celebrating risk-taking and learning from failure.

To help leadership teams make the transition, we offer programs that provide a deep and intuitive understanding of what it takes to successfully implement business agility, as well as leadership coaching.

Real change happens with leaders listen to their employees’ reservations, and help team members experience firsthand the benefits of agile ways of working.

Build change into real work and relationships

Neither talk of change nor classroom training perceptibly moves the needle on culture. Real change requires leaders and teams to refashion the way they do real work, and how they work together.

Employees are naturally (and often rightfully) skeptical of change efforts. Change is difficult, uncertain, and effortful. It asks people to embark on an uncomfortable journey to a place they may not be able to visualize.

The traditional change management response is to create a “change imperative.” This is a corporate narrative which often refers to a fate of impending doom, should we not hop on board with the new direction.

Many people don’t connect with this kind of message—and even if they do, it doesn’t address the fears they have about change. Still, the underlying need to change is real, and leaders need to find a way to communicate it.

We help leaders engage their teams in a dialogue. They learn how to listen to their employees’ reservations, and make moves that allow team members to experience firsthand the benefits of agile ways of working.