This week I’m speaking with Siobhan McHale, the Executive General Manager of
People, Culture & Change (HR) at DuluxGroup and the author of The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change: Creating a Workplace that Delivers, Grows, and Adapts.
Siobhan and I talk about the importance of workplace culture and the steps you need to take to bring about a culture change in your workplace.
What You’ll Learn This Episode:
- What is workplace culture?
- The typical patterns of workplace culture
- Creating culture change in the workplace
- Role reframing and how it relates to workplace culture
- The steps to take to bring about culture shift
About the Guest:
Siobhan (pronounced ‘Shiv-awn’) McHale is the Executive General Manager of People, Culture & Change (HR) at DuluxGroup a paints company based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change: Creating a Workplace that Delivers, Grows, and Adapts.
Siobhan has worked across four continents, helping thousands of leaders to create more agile and productive workplaces. She has been on the “inside”, as the executive in charge of culture change in a series of multinational organizations. One of these inside jobs was a radical seven-year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) that transformed it from the lowest-performing bank in the country into one of the highest-performing banks in the world.
Important Links:
https://www.siobhanmchale.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchalesiobhan/?originalSubdomain=au
The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change: Creating a Workplace that Delivers, Grows, and Adapts.
Full Episode Transcripts
Patrick Adams
Hello, my guest today is Siobhan McHale, and she is the executive General Manager of people culture and change at Deluxe group in Melbourne, Australia. She’s also the author of the Insider’s Guide to cultural change, creating a workplace that delivers, grows and adapts. Welcome to the show, Siobhan. So I just covered probably a very small piece of your background, I’m interested to hear a little bit more about just your background, you know, where you came from, where, where your your ci background comes from?
Siobhan McHale
Sure. And I grew up in Ireland, as you might guess, from my accent, but I moved to England. And then in 1994, I moved to Australia where I currently live. And my career has been in two halves Patrick. So the first half of my career was as a management consultant, flying across four continents, helping leaders to create more constructive and productive workplaces and then sort of have a U turn in my career and wanted more. So I wanted to actually roll up my sleeves and make change happen and help companies to transform. So the second half of my career has been as an insider, and the executive in charge of change and transformation in a series of international companies. And that lens has been very different, very different to an external perspective, both are really necessary. But I’ve really written the Insider’s Guide to culture change from that insider perspective. So you can have theories on change, and models of change. But what happens when you’re actually inside rolling up your sleeves trying to make change happen every day?
Patrick Adams
I love that. So that actually leads me into my first question about you being an insider, right? Because you talk about yourself as an insider in the new book, The Insiders Guide to culture change. So why an insider? Why is it so important to have that insider’s view into culture?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, thank you for both perspectives. So as a consultant, you are really valuable because you have an outsider perspective, you’re not always well, you’re not caught by the often hidden patterns that run organizations. But as an insider, your role is to make the change happen. So especially in these disruptive times, it’s not enough just to be enrolling in running your business, you have to also step into changing your role to transform and continually innovate and reinvent our businesses often. So that’s why the inside of the role is really critical, because nobody can do that work for you. You’ve got to step into your change leader role. And every single level we’re in change leader roles.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And really true change is only going to be sustainable when it is adopted into the insider team. So it would make sense that you have to step into that insider role and really look at change from that insider’s perspective.
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, I talk a lot about roles and the importance of seeing and understanding what role you’re stepping into. And I see many managers think that they’re in the role of delivery leader, or operations leader and of course, that’s a really critical role, but often we’re in multiple roles. Even in our personal lives, we might be enroller parents, we might be a mobile spouse, a partner, we could be friends, we could be enrolled or false or appear subordinate. Even in the same meeting, we can be in multiple roles. The listener role, the questioner role of negotiator and This mental map of our role is a bit like a GPS in a car, it helps you navigate your way in the world to tell you and instruct you about what behaviors are appropriate. It’s not appropriate to act in the same way as parents as it is to act in a role of a spouse or partner, for example, so sure, sometimes though, these mental maps or GPS of our role can be our places, and they’re actually taking our teams in the wrong direction. And we need to update and download the information about the mental map that we want to be navigated by.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely, in the CI world, continuous improvement world and process improvement, as many people that are listening live in that world. We talk a lot about, you know, sustainable change, and how it really only comes through cultural change and having the right culture that’s going to support a true continuous improvement organization. And so I just like to hear from your perspective, what exactly is workplace culture? What is your definition of workplace culture
Siobhan McHale
and my definition is how the organization of workplace functions and culture generally sits at the collective level. So it’s in the patterns or hidden agreements between the parts that essentially govern how the workplace mom’s to move into a workplace culture and very soon be captured by that culture. An example I have is a transformation that we led. I was head of transformation for a number of years at a bank in Australia called the ANZ bank. And when I walked into the bank, I noticed that the head office was palatial, it had very beautiful marble pillars stretching up into topic ceilings in the foyer, there were plush carpets on the on the floors, the offices were, and they were very spacious and light filled with sweeping views of the ocean. And a visit to the branches later on, showed a very different story with paint peeling from the walls with long queues of customers standing not getting answers to their cue questions. But the big passion running the organization was that there was discussion of delay between head office and the branches, each pointing the finger at each other for very poor customer satisfaction scores. So seeing that pattern of blame, in the culture, this culture of blame was critical to continuous improvement. If you miss that passion, you really wouldn’t have put in the right intervention to solve that problem. And basically get the turnaround that continues.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, that’s great to hear. I love that story and just hearing the differences between maybe what an outsider might see versus what the insiders see and how those patterns are definitely a piece of that. So when it comes to patterns, would you consider the behavior of say the people or behavior of leaders to be also part of that?
Siobhan McHale
Yes, absolutely. The behavior of the leaders because of their role in the system on what has a critical influence, they have the power of role and that has an inordinate influence on people’s behavior. But really, when you’re looking at organizations, you need to be looking at what is the role that the parents are taking up? So for example, in the ANZ bank example, you looked at the role of head office. So what what role are they in their role of head office, you know, that the volume tacking in our advice in terms of HR in terms of strategy in terms of risk, in terms of it, but actually, they were taking up a systemic role, which was really about being the order taker in the organization. So they took the order taker and made the decisions and gave the orders to the branches, there were 700 branches across the region, and they were more of a border. No, they were more a border tanker and the head office was involved in border fever. Okay, so one was giving the border to the others, the head office or the giver, at branches, order taker. And then this pattern between them was the head office, it was the orders around here. And that pattern was really running the organization. And if you didn’t see that pattern, you could intervene in a way that wasn’t as powerful as it needed to be.
Patrick Adams
That makes sense. And, Siobhan, since you’re talking about rules, you also talk about role reframing in your book. And I’d like to hear a little bit more about that. And if you could tell us just a little bit more about the power Role reframing, you know, and how that can bring about faster change within an organization.
Siobhan McHale
Yes. So in the answer example, and just making it practical, one of the things we know is that when we saw this order taker, or the giver pattern, it was very dysfunctional. It was just, you know, the branch staff or an old victim, the head office staff were very remote from the customers. So we decided to redesign the operating model of the organization. And we reframed the role of head office from order giver to support provider. So my role was no longer to make all the decisions and implement the rules, their role was to provide essential support to the branches whose role was redefined from order taker to support provider to the customer. So their role was to be delivering great service to the customer. And this reframe, and this new operating model started to create very fast change. And actually, within seven years, the bank had gone from the worst performing bank in this country in terms of customer satisfaction to the number one bank in the country to satisfaction. And the number one bank on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, it had doubled its profits over that time period and tripled its share costs, and employee engagement has also increased significantly. So this remarkable turnaround period, really was driven by the remarkable power and role. reclaiming.
Patrick Adams
Sure. And obviously, you mentioned that, that it was over a seven year period. So this wasn’t something that just happened overnight. And I’m sure that it wasn’t easy in the beginning. And I’m curious to hear just what were the team members’ feelings in the beginning, when you started to present them with this role reframing and what that would look like? What were some of the challenges that you came across with team members?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, well, the 32,000 people across the bank, so it’s a very big, quite a big organization and getting people on board was absolutely critical. But one of the things I talk about in my book is the need for a leader named change leader at all levels. So it’s not just the top leaders, although they have a significant influence. So one of the things we did right from the start was have this principle of leader lead change. So we designed the three day workshop where we were giving people this reframe, and giving people the tools to step into their change leader role. So we started that program with the top 600 executives. And then we progressively rolled it out to all 32,000 people across the organization. So everybody had the sweet friend, they had the tools to embark upon the change. And then we followed it up with a whole series of programs. So one of the initiatives, for example, Patrick was a day in the life where everybody from head office, every six months, had to spend a day at the branches, they began to see what it was like to step into the shoes of the branch staff who didn’t have the right equipment who had shot the officers who weren’t able to answer simple customer queries. So that started to also accelerate the change in my love.
Patrick Adams
I love the idea of making that happen with it, it’s an interesting concept. And definitely something that I think, like you said, can bring about some very fast change for leaders, and obviously, just in their behaviors that they’re displaying, you know, when they are experiencing some of that themselves. So that’s great. And when it comes to leaders, what would you say were some of the mistakes that were made in that example? Or even in any example, you know, that that you have in your book, or that you’ve experienced? Where would you say some of the mistakes happen with leaders when, when they’re experiencing culture change or going through culture change?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, one of the conversations I had with the head of lean at the bank was, he said to me at the time, we couldn’t have done the lean stuff, if you haven’t done the culture stuff. So I think sometimes we implement technical solutions, we think while we will implement a process based solution, but underneath that, you still have these dysfunctional patterns. So I was working, for example, at an infrastructure company where they were losing money on about 60% of their contracts, they were in the red and then we’re in a serious financial situation and they were actually being run by a passion of being lied to is more important than Delivering performance and they weren’t even seeing. So within the company, people weren’t giving feedback to the performers, they were moving the poor performance around. there just weren’t any consequences in place for underperformance. And the same thing was happening with the client, they were taking up the role of nice guys and gals, not charging fully for all of their time, not managing their margin saying yes to small favors. And all of this was adding up. So seeing this passion of the nice guy or gal was critical to turning that organization around. So despite all the financial skills training, they weren’t solving that underlying pattern that was actually running them. So my advice to leaders is to dig a bit deeper, really start to discover what the role of the thoughts are, not just their defined role? What is the role that they’re taking up in the system? So in the infrastructure company, managers who are taking up the role of nice guy or girls, and the employees are taking up the role of underperformers, underachievers just weren’t being stretched and weren’t being consequences managed. And so, you know, we think two years that organization turned around by seeing the patterns and managing those rather than being managed by them. Sure, sure.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, I can see where that would be discouraging for sure for people. But to have that, to have the understanding of the patterns and know, you know, that there are steps that you can take in order to start to change that or get out of that is that definitely gives people that fresh perspective and opportunity to see things a little bit differently. And I guess I would ask that question, too. Are there certain steps that people can take that leaders can take that organizations can take to change the culture that they’re working in today? That’s always a tough question, right? Because, you know, some people say that there’s no, there’s no step by step approach. Other people say there is, what would you say, you know, to that question around what steps need to be taken in order to create a culture change.
Siobhan McHale
And there are definitely steps that can be taken. They’re not linear steps. And so people might argue about that. But there are definitely ways that you can, as a leader, start to create a better culture. And when I say culture, as well, Patrick, often people think our culture, that’s just the relationship stuff, that’s just the soft, fuzzy stuff that actually helps you is how your workplace operates. And it impacts every aspect of the workplace, you know, you design your products for the manufacturer to hands down service, you’re no good. So your services. So it actually is impactful on your top and your bottom line. It’s not insignificant. So you know, in the book, I give a four step process for creating a culture that closes the gaps. And the first critical step that I’m talking about is how do you see those patterns that were often blind to sort of like being in a family, you know, you can look at other families and service echo steps, pretty dysfunctional. But within the family, it makes perfect sense. I think it’s quite normal, whatever it is that they’re doing. And the same in workplaces, often things that have become the norm are actually not working for you anymore. and protect, particularly in a complex fast moving environment, the things that want to work for you may no longer be serving you in the culture. So the first thing I’ve talked about is seeing the patterns reframing, and then how do you keep going and keep the momentum on the change journey. But the other thing that culture is, it’s never one size fits all. So it’s never a cookie cutter, a little bag of bat cultures all build the same culture, we’ve got to get into building cultures that are going to help us to achieve our strategic imperatives. So that might be that you need to create a global culture, in a bit of culture, customer oriented culture, et cetera, et cetera. So it really depends on what your strategy is. And then how do you create a culture that enables that?
Patrick Adams
Very nice. So as far as the steps go, you mentioned seeing the patterns, right? So that would be the first step. Second step. reframing.
Siobhan McHale
Yeah. And there’s a whole lot of techniques for how you reframe the passion in multiple ways. And the third one is to break the passion. And the fourth one is to consolidate your game Perfect.
Patrick Adams
Okay. I just wanted to make sure we had clarity for the listeners that they know exactly what those four steps are, because they’re so important to understand and apply them, you know, in the exact way that you have laid out in the book. And so I think that’s important. The key part of key takeaway for listeners, but for you, what would you say what would be, you know, one thing as we start to kind of wrap up the conversation today, what would be, you know, a parting thought or, you know, something that is important for listeners to know, as they as they step away from this podcast and want to go and apply something today, what would be something maybe that you would say, you know, this is something that you need to walk away with
Siobhan McHale
think, thinking about your role, and stepping into change leader role, and deliberate play, and also framing your team’s role as change leaders, you know, just as managers, operations managers, so that reframe, I think, is really essential. Not just seeing your role as delivery, Ops, but seeing your role as delivery and change. And I think just that reframe, and thinking about how you take off that role, and how you put yourself in the team’s tank up that roll, and can make a difference.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love that. And definitely something that can, can be applied very easily, you know, by anyone that’s listening today, just understanding the importance of having the right culture in place, and you know, making the right decisions, taking the right steps towards moving towards that, that culture change. Siobhan If someone wanted to get a hold of you, where would they go? Where How would they be able to reach out to you also, I’m interested if someone wanted to purchase the book, and I’ll place these links into the show notes to make sure that people can click on those, you know, right on our web page, but where would they go to get in contact with you?
Siobhan McHale
You can connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn and Siobhan McHale or and the book you can get it on Amazon or other online athletes.
Patrick Adams
Perfect just searching the title The Insider’s Guide to culture change should come right up. Otherwise, again, just look for the link in the show notes. We’ll put the link directly to the book there. If you’re interested to grab that Siobhan it’s been great to have you on thank you so much for being a guest on the lean solutions podcast. Appreciate your book, appreciate the work that you’re doing, to continue to just help people to change their cultures and just being a part of the lean community and what we’re doing to help support change through the lean community. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Hello, my guest today is Siobhan McHale, and she is the executive General Manager of people culture and change at Deluxe group in Melbourne, Australia. She’s also the author of the Insider’s Guide to cultural change, creating a workplace that delivers, grows and adapts. Welcome to the show, Siobhan. So I just covered probably a very small piece of your background, I’m interested to hear a little bit more about just your background, you know, where you came from, where, where your your ci background comes from?
Siobhan McHale
Sure. And I grew up in Ireland, as you might guess, from my accent, but I moved to England. And then in 1994, I moved to Australia where I currently live. And my career has been in two halves Patrick. So the first half of my career was as a management consultant, flying across four continents, helping leaders to create more constructive and productive workplaces and then sort of have a U turn in my career and wanted more. So I wanted to actually roll up my sleeves and make change happen and help companies to transform. So the second half of my career has been as an insider, and the executive in charge of change and transformation in a series of international companies. And that lens has been very different, very different to an external perspective, both are really necessary. But I’ve really written the Insider’s Guide to culture change from that insider perspective. So you can have theories on change, and models of change. But what happens when you’re actually inside rolling up your sleeves trying to make change happen every day?
Patrick Adams
I love that. So that actually leads me into my first question about you being an insider, right? Because you talk about yourself as an insider in the new book, The Insiders Guide to culture change. So why an insider? Why is it so important to have that insider’s view into culture?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, thank you for both perspectives. So as a consultant, you are really valuable because you have an outsider perspective, you’re not always well, you’re not caught by the often hidden patterns that run organizations. But as an insider, your role is to make the change happen. So especially in these disruptive times, it’s not enough just to be enrolling in running your business, you have to also step into changing your role to transform and continually innovate and reinvent our businesses often. So that’s why the inside of the role is really critical, because nobody can do that work for you. You’ve got to step into your change leader role. And every single level we’re in change leader roles.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. And really true change is only going to be sustainable when it is adopted into the insider team. So it would make sense that you have to step into that insider role and really look at change from that insider’s perspective.
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, I talk a lot about roles and the importance of seeing and understanding what role you’re stepping into. And I see many managers think that they’re in the role of delivery leader, or operations leader and of course, that’s a really critical role, but often we’re in multiple roles. Even in our personal lives, we might be enroller parents, we might be a mobile spouse, a partner, we could be friends, we could be enrolled or false or appear subordinate. Even in the same meeting, we can be in multiple roles. The listener role, the questioner role of negotiator and This mental map of our role is a bit like a GPS in a car, it helps you navigate your way in the world to tell you and instruct you about what behaviors are appropriate. It’s not appropriate to act in the same way as parents as it is to act in a role of a spouse or partner, for example, so sure, sometimes though, these mental maps or GPS of our role can be our places, and they’re actually taking our teams in the wrong direction. And we need to update and download the information about the mental map that we want to be navigated by.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely, in the CI world, continuous improvement world and process improvement, as many people that are listening live in that world. We talk a lot about, you know, sustainable change, and how it really only comes through cultural change and having the right culture that’s going to support a true continuous improvement organization. And so I just like to hear from your perspective, what exactly is workplace culture? What is your definition of workplace culture
Siobhan McHale
and my definition is how the organization of workplace functions and culture generally sits at the collective level. So it’s in the patterns or hidden agreements between the parts that essentially govern how the workplace mom’s to move into a workplace culture and very soon be captured by that culture. An example I have is a transformation that we led. I was head of transformation for a number of years at a bank in Australia called the ANZ bank. And when I walked into the bank, I noticed that the head office was palatial, it had very beautiful marble pillars stretching up into topic ceilings in the foyer, there were plush carpets on the on the floors, the offices were, and they were very spacious and light filled with sweeping views of the ocean. And a visit to the branches later on, showed a very different story with paint peeling from the walls with long queues of customers standing not getting answers to their cue questions. But the big passion running the organization was that there was discussion of delay between head office and the branches, each pointing the finger at each other for very poor customer satisfaction scores. So seeing that pattern of blame, in the culture, this culture of blame was critical to continuous improvement. If you miss that passion, you really wouldn’t have put in the right intervention to solve that problem. And basically get the turnaround that continues.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, that’s great to hear. I love that story and just hearing the differences between maybe what an outsider might see versus what the insiders see and how those patterns are definitely a piece of that. So when it comes to patterns, would you consider the behavior of say the people or behavior of leaders to be also part of that?
Siobhan McHale
Yes, absolutely. The behavior of the leaders because of their role in the system on what has a critical influence, they have the power of role and that has an inordinate influence on people’s behavior. But really, when you’re looking at organizations, you need to be looking at what is the role that the parents are taking up? So for example, in the ANZ bank example, you looked at the role of head office. So what what role are they in their role of head office, you know, that the volume tacking in our advice in terms of HR in terms of strategy in terms of risk, in terms of it, but actually, they were taking up a systemic role, which was really about being the order taker in the organization. So they took the order taker and made the decisions and gave the orders to the branches, there were 700 branches across the region, and they were more of a border. No, they were more a border tanker and the head office was involved in border fever. Okay, so one was giving the border to the others, the head office or the giver, at branches, order taker. And then this pattern between them was the head office, it was the orders around here. And that pattern was really running the organization. And if you didn’t see that pattern, you could intervene in a way that wasn’t as powerful as it needed to be.
Patrick Adams
That makes sense. And, Siobhan, since you’re talking about rules, you also talk about role reframing in your book. And I’d like to hear a little bit more about that. And if you could tell us just a little bit more about the power Role reframing, you know, and how that can bring about faster change within an organization.
Siobhan McHale
Yes. So in the answer example, and just making it practical, one of the things we know is that when we saw this order taker, or the giver pattern, it was very dysfunctional. It was just, you know, the branch staff or an old victim, the head office staff were very remote from the customers. So we decided to redesign the operating model of the organization. And we reframed the role of head office from order giver to support provider. So my role was no longer to make all the decisions and implement the rules, their role was to provide essential support to the branches whose role was redefined from order taker to support provider to the customer. So their role was to be delivering great service to the customer. And this reframe, and this new operating model started to create very fast change. And actually, within seven years, the bank had gone from the worst performing bank in this country in terms of customer satisfaction to the number one bank in the country to satisfaction. And the number one bank on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, it had doubled its profits over that time period and tripled its share costs, and employee engagement has also increased significantly. So this remarkable turnaround period, really was driven by the remarkable power and role. reclaiming.
Patrick Adams
Sure. And obviously, you mentioned that, that it was over a seven year period. So this wasn’t something that just happened overnight. And I’m sure that it wasn’t easy in the beginning. And I’m curious to hear just what were the team members’ feelings in the beginning, when you started to present them with this role reframing and what that would look like? What were some of the challenges that you came across with team members?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, well, the 32,000 people across the bank, so it’s a very big, quite a big organization and getting people on board was absolutely critical. But one of the things I talk about in my book is the need for a leader named change leader at all levels. So it’s not just the top leaders, although they have a significant influence. So one of the things we did right from the start was have this principle of leader lead change. So we designed the three day workshop where we were giving people this reframe, and giving people the tools to step into their change leader role. So we started that program with the top 600 executives. And then we progressively rolled it out to all 32,000 people across the organization. So everybody had the sweet friend, they had the tools to embark upon the change. And then we followed it up with a whole series of programs. So one of the initiatives, for example, Patrick was a day in the life where everybody from head office, every six months, had to spend a day at the branches, they began to see what it was like to step into the shoes of the branch staff who didn’t have the right equipment who had shot the officers who weren’t able to answer simple customer queries. So that started to also accelerate the change in my love.
Patrick Adams
I love the idea of making that happen with it, it’s an interesting concept. And definitely something that I think, like you said, can bring about some very fast change for leaders, and obviously, just in their behaviors that they’re displaying, you know, when they are experiencing some of that themselves. So that’s great. And when it comes to leaders, what would you say were some of the mistakes that were made in that example? Or even in any example, you know, that that you have in your book, or that you’ve experienced? Where would you say some of the mistakes happen with leaders when, when they’re experiencing culture change or going through culture change?
Siobhan McHale
Yeah, one of the conversations I had with the head of lean at the bank was, he said to me at the time, we couldn’t have done the lean stuff, if you haven’t done the culture stuff. So I think sometimes we implement technical solutions, we think while we will implement a process based solution, but underneath that, you still have these dysfunctional patterns. So I was working, for example, at an infrastructure company where they were losing money on about 60% of their contracts, they were in the red and then we’re in a serious financial situation and they were actually being run by a passion of being lied to is more important than Delivering performance and they weren’t even seeing. So within the company, people weren’t giving feedback to the performers, they were moving the poor performance around. there just weren’t any consequences in place for underperformance. And the same thing was happening with the client, they were taking up the role of nice guys and gals, not charging fully for all of their time, not managing their margin saying yes to small favors. And all of this was adding up. So seeing this passion of the nice guy or gal was critical to turning that organization around. So despite all the financial skills training, they weren’t solving that underlying pattern that was actually running them. So my advice to leaders is to dig a bit deeper, really start to discover what the role of the thoughts are, not just their defined role? What is the role that they’re taking up in the system? So in the infrastructure company, managers who are taking up the role of nice guy or girls, and the employees are taking up the role of underperformers, underachievers just weren’t being stretched and weren’t being consequences managed. And so, you know, we think two years that organization turned around by seeing the patterns and managing those rather than being managed by them. Sure, sure.
Patrick Adams
Yeah, I can see where that would be discouraging for sure for people. But to have that, to have the understanding of the patterns and know, you know, that there are steps that you can take in order to start to change that or get out of that is that definitely gives people that fresh perspective and opportunity to see things a little bit differently. And I guess I would ask that question, too. Are there certain steps that people can take that leaders can take that organizations can take to change the culture that they’re working in today? That’s always a tough question, right? Because, you know, some people say that there’s no, there’s no step by step approach. Other people say there is, what would you say, you know, to that question around what steps need to be taken in order to create a culture change.
Siobhan McHale
And there are definitely steps that can be taken. They’re not linear steps. And so people might argue about that. But there are definitely ways that you can, as a leader, start to create a better culture. And when I say culture, as well, Patrick, often people think our culture, that’s just the relationship stuff, that’s just the soft, fuzzy stuff that actually helps you is how your workplace operates. And it impacts every aspect of the workplace, you know, you design your products for the manufacturer to hands down service, you’re no good. So your services. So it actually is impactful on your top and your bottom line. It’s not insignificant. So you know, in the book, I give a four step process for creating a culture that closes the gaps. And the first critical step that I’m talking about is how do you see those patterns that were often blind to sort of like being in a family, you know, you can look at other families and service echo steps, pretty dysfunctional. But within the family, it makes perfect sense. I think it’s quite normal, whatever it is that they’re doing. And the same in workplaces, often things that have become the norm are actually not working for you anymore. and protect, particularly in a complex fast moving environment, the things that want to work for you may no longer be serving you in the culture. So the first thing I’ve talked about is seeing the patterns reframing, and then how do you keep going and keep the momentum on the change journey. But the other thing that culture is, it’s never one size fits all. So it’s never a cookie cutter, a little bag of bat cultures all build the same culture, we’ve got to get into building cultures that are going to help us to achieve our strategic imperatives. So that might be that you need to create a global culture, in a bit of culture, customer oriented culture, et cetera, et cetera. So it really depends on what your strategy is. And then how do you create a culture that enables that?
Patrick Adams
Very nice. So as far as the steps go, you mentioned seeing the patterns, right? So that would be the first step. Second step. reframing.
Siobhan McHale
Yeah. And there’s a whole lot of techniques for how you reframe the passion in multiple ways. And the third one is to break the passion. And the fourth one is to consolidate your game Perfect.
Patrick Adams
Okay. I just wanted to make sure we had clarity for the listeners that they know exactly what those four steps are, because they’re so important to understand and apply them, you know, in the exact way that you have laid out in the book. And so I think that’s important. The key part of key takeaway for listeners, but for you, what would you say what would be, you know, one thing as we start to kind of wrap up the conversation today, what would be, you know, a parting thought or, you know, something that is important for listeners to know, as they as they step away from this podcast and want to go and apply something today, what would be something maybe that you would say, you know, this is something that you need to walk away with
Siobhan McHale
think, thinking about your role, and stepping into change leader role, and deliberate play, and also framing your team’s role as change leaders, you know, just as managers, operations managers, so that reframe, I think, is really essential. Not just seeing your role as delivery, Ops, but seeing your role as delivery and change. And I think just that reframe, and thinking about how you take off that role, and how you put yourself in the team’s tank up that roll, and can make a difference.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love that. And definitely something that can, can be applied very easily, you know, by anyone that’s listening today, just understanding the importance of having the right culture in place, and you know, making the right decisions, taking the right steps towards moving towards that, that culture change. Siobhan If someone wanted to get a hold of you, where would they go? Where How would they be able to reach out to you also, I’m interested if someone wanted to purchase the book, and I’ll place these links into the show notes to make sure that people can click on those, you know, right on our web page, but where would they go to get in contact with you?
Siobhan McHale
You can connect with me or follow me on LinkedIn and Siobhan McHale or and the book you can get it on Amazon or other online athletes.
Patrick Adams
Perfect just searching the title The Insider’s Guide to culture change should come right up. Otherwise, again, just look for the link in the show notes. We’ll put the link directly to the book there. If you’re interested to grab that Siobhan it’s been great to have you on thank you so much for being a guest on the lean solutions podcast. Appreciate your book, appreciate the work that you’re doing, to continue to just help people to change their cultures and just being a part of the lean community and what we’re doing to help support change through the lean community. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the lean solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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