CREATE ENERGY BEFORE YOU DEMAND IT

Your culture only has so much energy to give. Doing its regular job uses most of it; anything new comes from whatever is left. A culture will prioritize use of remaining energy to protect itself before protecting the company and its goals. Demand whatever energy you want but fill it up before you do by removing uncertainty in the areas that matter most: context, predictability and sense of self.

ASK FOR TRUST A LITTLE AT A TIME

Management is focused on success so you’re always looking forward to see what can be sold next. Your culture is focused on survival so it’s always looking backwards to see what happened to the last thing it was sold – did it work out as promised? Your culture isn’t going to be inclined to trust as quickly and fully as you want it to, so don’t ask for it. Instead, ask for a smaller amount of trust that the culture can give you without perceiving risk, deliver on that promise, and then renegotiate for more trust. Repeat the pattern and you will gain dependable momentum.

INSPIRE A CULTURAL LEGEND

This intention has to be clear and dramatic to set context for the actions that follow. You want to create a clear “said this-did this” linkage for your culture so that it makes the immediate connection. The legend-worthy actions that follow have to be significant and provocative to make the point that your intentions are believable. You can change an ineffective process that has always frustrated your culture; adopt a new process that it has always hoped for; respond with extreme enthusiasm to its support of your intention; play the fool and risk your dignity to make a point; or bury your dead (terminated employees) with dignity.

REINFORCE WITH MEANING, NOT MONEY

Your culture likes money but what it wants most is to understand the meaning of the money: Is there a connection between reinforcement of good performance and its increased safety? The effort and creativity that you give to performance reinforcement shows the culture how important the performance is to you. The systemic elements of compensation — salary, benefits, bonus programs — don’t provide the same data as your rapid, genuine, individualized and situational responses to good performance. This isn’t a matter of spending a lot of money; it’s a matter of knowing and showing your culture that you recognize what they did and were moved to respond.

CREATE MORE ENERGY

Your culture’s discretionary energy is constantly being used to guard against perceptions of uncertainty and so you have to continue to fill up its tanks to resupply what has been diluted. Some of the sources of energy, such as what isn’t changing, might be the same as months before but even if you have nothing new to add redundancy is your friend here: A culture needs to hear this message repeated.

ASK FOR TRUST A LITTLE AT A TIME

Management is focused on success so you’re always looking forward to see what can be sold next. Your culture is focused on survival so it’s always looking backwards to see what happened to the last thing it was sold – did it work out as promised? Your culture isn’t going to be inclined to trust as quickly and fully as you want it to, so don’t ask for it. Instead, ask for a smaller amount of trust that the culture can give you without perceiving risk, deliver on that promise, and then renegotiate for more trust. Repeat the pattern and you will gain dependable momentum.

LIGHT THE PATH AHEAD

If you do a good job of explaining where the strategy starts and a good job of explaining where it ends, you can’t blame your culture for not believing everything in between has been figured out too. When the culture realizes that’s not the case it resists following you down what it perceives to be an unproven and unknown road. Of course you can't know every twist and turn in the road between starting the plan and achieving it but you can continue to light the path ahead 90 days at a time for your culture by explaining three things that they will encounter and what to do when this happens.

CAUSE ANOTHER CULTURAL LEGEND

Your culture is concerned with its survival so legendary acts alone won’t convince it of anything: it is looking for the pattern of behavior in-between those grand acts. But cultural legends continue to provide unmissable linkage between management’s declared intention and actions and this is what causes trust in those intentions to occur and spread within the culture. You should therefore continue to cause new legends to happen every several months.

ANOTHER PERFORMANCE REINFORCEMENT

Performance reinforcement is vital data for your employee culture, which is seeking a dependable link between what you ask it to do, it’s performance in doing it, and your reaction to that performance. Its need for data is constant so continue to show that you recognize and are moved by its performance. Reinforce situational performance and efforts to protect what is most important with effort and creativity. Focus on how something was done, not just what was done. Remember that your culture uses money to buy meaning: skip the middleman and give it the meaning.

CONTINUE TO CREATE ENERGY

Your culture’s discretionary energy is constantly being used to guard against perceptions of uncertainty and so you have to continue to fill up its tanks to resupply what has been diluted. Some of the sources of energy, such as what isn’t changing, might be the same as months before but even if you have nothing new to add redundancy is your friend here: A culture needs to hear this message repeated.

PREPARE THE PRESSURE TEST

Just when you’ve done everything you’ve committed to, your culture may go crazy on you and act like you’ve not done anything at all. This is a good thing: The culture is beginning to recognize enough of a pattern of empathy, respect and promise-action to consider a revision in its level of commitment to your cloud transition.

It only has a few ways to test whether this is a safe move and one of the easiest is to pretend to walk away – revert to former lower levels of commitment and behavior -- since if you weren’t serious you would abandon the new way of treating it as a tactic that didn’t work. Hold the course here.

The test won’t last long and you’ll come out of the other side with a noticeably increased level of commitment.