The Change Marketing Flywheel: How To Shift Company Culture Through Stories
Neil is a partner at LOCAL , a Change Marketing™ company that helps Fortune 500 clients treat their employees like an audience to conquer.
Organizational inertia is often seen as the villain of any change program. And it's true that cultural momentum often returns a business to the shape, direction, and pace it was already in. But what if you could work with it instead of trying to cancel or interrupt the energy that is already there? Can this predefined flow be used to schedule long shifts?
There is a marketing mechanism for this. I call it the change marketing fly.
Culture is emergent, not concrete
To understand how this fly works, you must first understand the culture. For example, many leaders believe that culture is something that can be created, manipulated, and controlled from the top down. But it is a myth.
Culture emerges from the mindset - beliefs, thoughts and attitudes - of the people who work together to create it. Each person's state of mind is unique and manifests in words and actions (between formal meetings, in Slack, and even in body language or facial expressions) that influence or reinforce the attitudes of co-workers. The more people you interact with in your business, the harder it is to change the dynamic between them.
Simply put, culture is what your people think, feel, and do. And it cannot be imposed by memoranda, instructions, inducements or threats.
But it can be influenced.
The only role in the story
Although you can't control how your people think (and therefore can't dictate changes to your culture), you can influence them through stories.
Our brains are made for stories. Stories evoke emotions and guide our actions. We say them to ourselves and each other every day. And in the absence of any strategic intervention, we tend to talk to those who reinforce our current beliefs. Stories are the power of human nature.
When it comes to corporate culture, stories can influence the people whose words and actions shape them. Here is a simple example. Tell a story about how your employee, Morgan, thinks your company is a dangerous place to work. As this is Morgan's default setting, they will continue to notice any potential evidence supporting the existing narrative with every interaction. Confirmation bias could easily lead to examples ranging from town hall to team building happy hour, in part because it would give Morgan more stories to back up his thinking.
Because your company's culture is made up of people's collective mindset, Morgan's internal stories can (albeit unintentionally) influence the way Priya, Margaret, and Seth think and how others interact with them. Because they believe in history and insist that work is not a safe place, your culture stays the same because people follow others (not brands or company guidelines).
Fortunately, these stories are leverage you can use to make meaningful change.
Changing history, changing culture
As I wrote earlier, marketing is the thoughtful, strategic, and consistent use of stories. Change marketing is what my company calls using strategic marketing stories to drive organizational change.
Marketing change starts with understanding the stories people are telling right now that support the existing culture.
In order to promote culture change, you need to strategically present the new story. You must become an organizational change storyteller. Apply your marketing skills to telling that story well, intentionally, consistently and persistently.
Over time, a new story, told well, will influence people (even Morgan). With your persistent and consistent new message, their own story will begin to develop. There will be less favorable examples that reinforce their existing beliefs. As a result, they will start to display differently. They will act and respond to changed attitudes not only from themselves, but also from Seth, Margaret and others. Over time, the story of your culture will change through new stories that everyone tells and tells each other, ultimately without your intervention.
The road always turns and turns, but now its inertia can push you to move to a new place.
Transparency and trust accelerate storytelling
If stories are your lever to spin the wheel of change in the direction you want, then people have to believe it's true. So make sure they are actually true and that you speak them with a commitment to transparency and mutual trust.
Otherwise, you are simply engaged in propaganda and manipulation, which is ethically ineffective. Most people have a very sensitive BS detector and will switch off at the slightest hint. (I bet employees are more fickle than customers.) The road is always bumpy, but if you lose people's trust, the wheel will turn against your plan for change.
So if the new version of your business is that you put employee safety first, back it up with policies and practices that are proven to affect everyone's mindset. If regulators continue to cut corners on safety by creating quotas, these stories will sow cynicism and doubt, undermine the momentum you're creating in your safety story, and reaffirm the old image of the culture you're trying. to create.
Accidents can still happen. But when leaders communicate what went wrong and why, and clearly explain how they will prevent similar incidents from happening again, the safety story is strengthened, not diminished.
This intimate connection between your stories and your actions builds confidence, lubricates and accelerates your flywheel and therefore the pace of change. If you show that your first story is indeed true, everyone will be more willing to listen and participate in your next story. They will manifest differently and even begin to tell their new stories to themselves and everyone else.
It's these new, higher-quality stories that accelerate the marketing momentum of change, giving your change plan more momentum. With honest storytelling to begin with and transparency to back up the truth, the wheel will soon start spinning on its own without you having to take notes.
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