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How many times has someone said that something “can’t” be done because the culture doesn’t support it?

As a change agent in general, and specifically in the Project Management space, I’m always pushing boundaries and helping people find ways to push beyond their perceived organizational constraints to progress. When I start working with them, I am often faced with a lot of “yeah but” language. I know you’ve heard it before, in fact, some of us have even said it. I used to say it. I felt that I was working in extremely change resistant cultures that wouldn’t allow the PMO we were setting up to be successful. I was full of “yeah but” language.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t work in .”

“Yeah, but we have to follow the 50 steps on this checklist to get something done.”

“Yeah, but we don’t do things that way.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t work in our culture.”

That kind of language we sometimes find ourselves saying causes us to be stuck. In fact, we are perpetuating the same culture by vocalizing that it “can’t” be changed.

This is your call to action to challenge yourself to stop perpetuating this belief that shifting the culture to a more functional, focused, and deliberate way of operating is impossible. It’s not.

It’s hard.

It’s scary.

It’s frustrating.

But, it’s not impossible. And when it works, it’s incredibly rewarding. In fact, it feels amazing. Kinda like that feeling when you have accomplished a personal goal at the gym or academically achieved a higher level of education or certification. It feels amazing to push beyond what we believe to be our limits and do something that makes a big impact…especially if it was hard.

You can do that at work. You can do that in your culture. Yes, YOUR organizational culture. Yes, even you. 🙂

Here are a few techniques to consider when trying to encourage a cultural shift to a more productive and effective environment.

1. Don’t do it alone. When we know that we need to help the culture shift, we think that the mountain is too high to climb and we are in it alone. You aren’t. There are always people in your organization that think the way you do. The key is to find them and work together to slowly and deliberately influence the people that make up this culture to open their eyes to better ways of doing things. A team working together has greater influence than one voice. As someone close to me used to say, “One team, one fight!”

Now if you follow my IMPACT Engine framework and approach, you are assessing the organization for opportunities before you go telling them the medicine they need to take. Now, if you’re not familiar with my assessment framework and my approach to assessing the organization for IMPACT opportunities, definitely go back and check out episode 20. In fact, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24, go over that framework for you. So as you’re going through that assessment process, you are talking to people about the services and capabilities, the pain points they have, where you might be able to help the organization accelerate project delivery, getting to IMPACT and all the things that we talk about a PMO should do. When you’re having those conversations, you want to be listening for the people that could be the champions and work with you to create those changes because you don’t want to go it alone.

You want to find those early champions, the people that support what you’re doing or that are going to greatly benefit from your services and capabilities. Bring them with you early and often through that process, especially when you know there’s going to be culture shifts, as a part of this PMO going in place. And this is just an example, this works for any project you’re doing, any big change you’re creating in an organization. Look for places that there are pockets of people that are really going to benefit from the outcomes that you’re creating and get them on board early. Not just to be receivers of those change or give you feedback on the changes happening, but to be an active and proactive champion, helping you get the organization to see as a whole how positive these shifts are going to be. Then when you start making changes and momentum, they are the ones that should be talking about it and telling the stories of those benefits and how things are working.

2. Don’t try to do it all at once. Let’s think about where we are as a species. We are constantly evolving. In fact, our very existence depends on it. But it doesn’t happen overnight. If it did, we would have had no idea what to do with the iPhone when we were still writing on the walls of caves. The beauty of evolution is pace. We must realize that the culture shift we are trying to create must be digestible for the organization…this means slow and steady.

Let’s go back to that example of building a PMO. Now, the way I teach my students to build a PMO is this evolutionary process as opposed to big bang approach. We do 90 day cycles of impact delivery. Every quarter you’re releasing a new change or bringing about a shift that is helping the organization with some direct and visible impact. That approach as opposed to waiting two years analyzing, planning, creating, and then boom, everybody sees everything all at once, two years later.

That’s dangerous. That’s why I like this Agile or more iterative approach to change, whether it’s projects or creating changes in an organization or building a PMO, my IMPACT Engine PMO framework is an iterative and Agile approach to IMPACT delivery, to setting up and running a PMO.  You get feedback and engagement early and often and at the same time, one of the coolest parts is that it’s almost like people don’t even realize the changes are happening. They happen at a consistent pace, but not big bang, so it’s almost like they aren’t even noticeable. Poof. Things are just better. Oh look, we made a change over here and things started working better. Oh, we put that change over here and it worked better there as well. It’s almost like as one of my favorite program managers used to say, a Jedi mind trick where you’re putting together these services and capabilities and you’re getting value moment by moment in an evolutionary way.

So we don’t even realize we have shifted from writing on the walls of caves to walking around with our heads down, staring at our iPhones. It happened so slow and steady. It’s a state of constant change so we hardly even realize it.

3. See the forest for the trees. We can get buried in the moment and immediacy of the changes we want to make and forget to look up. The changes we make are sometimes so imperceptible that those we are influencing don’t even realize they are happening. However, to us, the change agents, the culture shift is moving at an excruciatingly slow pace. Then, we step back and can see how far we’ve come and it’s beautiful. I’ve had this experience many times when building a PMO or creating a project management culture. Just remember to take a moment to recognize the progress you’ve made. That will give you the inspiration and energy to keep going.

This has been a really big one for me and for many of my students. I often spend time in our one-on-one sessions talking about how much progress they’ve made in their organization. Some of my students that have been with me for years don’t even realize because it’s been so much focus on the work and the change and the things that we’re creating, they forget to look up and out and see the big IMPACT, the big outcomes that they’ve achieved for the organization. And that’s critical for so many reasons, including your own self evaluation and your performance rating in the organization, drawing attention, getting more funding and support for the services you want to create. It’s important that you have a perspective of looking up and out and seeing not just the outputs you’re creating, but the outcomes that you’re helping the organization achieve.

There were so many times when I was in the role of PMO leader, that I forgot to do this and I would just get so frustrated and tired and exhausted. I’d be so impatient with the pace of change and wanting things to move faster and then, some of my mentors and coaches would help me learn how to look up and out and see that we were making really big progress in an organization that prided itself on being slow and steady. So look for those ways that you can look up and out and see that the forest is actually thriving and growing beautifully while you were planting one tree at a time.

4. Don’t let what you believe to be the standard stop you. I often hear things like, “We have to do x, y, z because that’s how things are done in this sector.” If you work in one of those environments with stringent processes with far too many steps to be productive, take a step back to evaluate what you are truly being asked to do. Most people that work in that environment will tell you that they must fill out 25 documents to start a project because “that’s the way it’s done.”I would like to challenge you (and for you to help others) to think about the impact of the work being done and the value it’s creating. Does anyone actually read the 50-page document you just created? I’m not talking about all the people doing the review cycles to make sure it’s perfect before it’s delivered. I’m talking about the consumer of the information. Are they using it? Is it causing action, change, or progress? If the answer is no, then maybe you still must “do” the document, but maybe you can find a way to streamline the process of reviews or simplify the content. Think about it…just because a deliverable must be created, where does it say it must be 50 pages? Will 20 do and get the same point across? Will one review cycle be good enough? Your level of effort here should be proportional to how impactful the deliverable is in moving the project forward or supporting sustainability of the project deliverables.

Many years ago when I was working in financial services, I was working in an organization that dealt with a ton of regulation on how they did the work they did. And as a part of us being compliant with all of that regulation, we were told that there were tons of steps in process and documentation that needed to be created, and of course we had to do it. But when you looked at how people interpreted what needed to be done, they were always erring on the side of so much information that it wasn’t actually useful or helpful. So one of the things I did was challenge, where are the places that we can meet the letter of the requirement? Make sure that what we’ve created is actually usable and effective to, let’s say, preventing some kind of a challenge down the road but isn’t so big and onerous that it defeats the purpose in the first place.

And when we went through that exercise of saying, how do we actually meet the intent, create something is effective and achieving the outcome and you use that as our guide. We were able to streamline a lot of steps in process and a lot of documentation and in turn actually make us more secure and better prepared to avoid the risks that we’re facing. The organization. From a financial perspective, it’s all about perspective and understanding what the outcome is you’re trying to achieve and what’s the best way to actually get that outcome as opposed to this is the number of steps we are interpreting we need to follow in order to achieve outputs. Remember, it’s all about outcomes.

5. It’s OK to be a disruptor. We often get scared that making noise will get us fired. How often is that really the case? Innovation and change only come because someone was brave enough to make some noise, question the process, propose a new idea, or challenge the status quo. I was often known for this in my organizations and it annoyed some people. There will be people that don’t want the culture to shift because they are either benefiting from the way things are now or they are scared that the cultural shift will negatively impact them. Decide which is more beneficial (less painful) to you…living with the culture (or process) the way it is or having someone temporarily upset with you because you challenged their way of thinking. Innovation comes when we stop tying ourselves down by believing that we cannot accomplish something, that we cannot make a change, that we cannot move our culture forward to a healthier space.

Your goal is to help them see why the pain they’re experiencing today doesn’t have to be the way things are. There is a better way you can relieve the pain. You just need to show them the path to get there, because many times people don’t see that there is a path to a better way. Do you know anybody in your life that maybe lives in pain, physically, on a daily basis and why is that? Often it’s because they don’t know that there is a better way. They either haven’t done enough research or they don’t realize there are resources or they’ve just become accustomed to living in that pain. Has it ever frustrated you knowing that, if they just maybe did a little bit more exercise or if they just went and saw a doctor or if they’d just addressed whatever the problem was, that they would feel so much better? The same thing happens at work, and in particular at work, because somewhere along the way someone was told that this is the way it has to be done and they might be afraid to be that disruptor, to challenge the status quo and think about doing things differently.

This is where you become a champion for the change and help people see that the pain they’re experiencing can be changed and the risk of inaction has more powerful and more painful consequences, then they will experience by actually making the change you’re trying to get them to make.

6. Occupy yourself. I remember working in an organization that digested cultural shifts very slowly. I was implementing a PMO and was so eager to start moving them on the next step and the one after that, knowing that the outcomes they had achieved thus far were nothing compared to where I wanted to take them. But they weren’t moving…very fast. They needed time to grow accustomed to the shifts we had made to the culture thus far and pushing them would only deepen resistance.Exasperated, I sought the guidance of a change agent mentor of mine in the organization and he said, “Go occupy yourself with other things while you wait for them to catch up.” I laughed thinking it was ridiculous, but then realized he was right. He encouraged me to work on self-development items or find a hobby outside of work that would keep me busy until it was time for the next cultural shift to happen. It worked. I channeled my craving for change into some self-development items (and increased my focus on a fun hobby outside of work) that allowed me to practice patience at work with the pace of cultural change and see it for the beautiful process that it was. Perspective is everything. 

I was able to join the board of a nonprofit organization that I felt very strongly in supporting because it was all about second chances and helping people embrace change.
So I was able to take my talent and my skills and my eagerness to help people realize change and use that in the nonprofit work I was doing while I was waiting for people in my organization to fully digest the changes we’d already given them and it really did work. And what it taught me is that perspective is everything. From my perspective, things were moving so slowly and I needed to find other ways to feed that desire and craving to help my organization accomplish their objectives. But for the people that were experiencing the change, it felt like things were moving pretty quickly and they felt like they had the right amount of time to digest those changes because I wasn’t shoving more changes down their throat. I paced myself. I found ways to occupy myself, while those in my organization were able to digest the last round of changes I had just given them and of course I was always looking for ways to support them and to help them and to provide additional services and to continue to communicate and talk about the value in the impact we were creating for our PMO all while my stakeholders were able to digest what they had in front of them.  So it worked out beautifully.

I know that it’s not easy to work in environments where the culture seems to drive so much of the actions and decisions that people make. Trust me, I totally get it. It can be challenging to see something that you are sure will help the organization become more successful and feel that it’s out of reach. It’s not. It requires patience and a hunger to drive change. You don’t have to make it all happen at once, but you can make it happen. It starts by promising yourself you will not allow the culture to stop you from going after what you know to be a better way.

Then, you can get onto the business of driving big IMPACT for your organization with a culture that is ready to engage and foster growth. Just remember that culture eats strategy for breakfast every time, so you must address the culture first.

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