One of the most important things that a management can do to encourage a new, and more productive, culture is to make it safe for people to experiment with new behaviors and new ways of working. Some of these will turn out to be less than optimal, and some will seem strange to the business leaders. But the increased feeling of autonomy and the often extremely beneficial ideas that come forth make it well worthwhile. For an enterprise’s leadership, this means letting go of some of the older management styles and working with the employees as a trusting team. We have found that this works even in businesses where there has traditionally been a high level of conflict between the management and the workforce.

“I want to get my partners to adopt a more entrepreneurial, cooperative culture,” the CEO of a mid-sized American law firm told us recently. He wanted our team to come up with instant answers to the question of how he should go about doing this. There had already been a couple of failed attempts to change the culture of the firm. We believed the reason for the failures was that the ideas behind the change programs were not based on what we now know to be the real drivers of human behavior and the willingness of people to change.

It is a common misconception that an organizational culture can be summed up by a series of vague quasi-value terms such as “integrity,” “entrepreneurial,” “excellence” or “respect.” These often tend to be managerial wish lists rather than any real description of what people actually believe or the way they actually behave. Most organizations, even medium-sized ones, will probably have a number of sub-cultures, some of which may even be mutually antagonistic. This was certainly true of the law firm. This mutual antagonism, and the accompanying suspicion, is one of the reasons why over 70% of culture change programs fail (Micheli , 2011). The reason humans adopt or create any particular culture is to surround themselves with a nexus of people who will support them (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). We are genetically geared to look for, and to rely on, that support (Baumeister and Leary, 1995). Therefore, an organization’s culture is reflected in the way people behave towards each other on a day-to-day basis: how they greet each other, how they socialize, how they use praise and in many other small everyday rituals.

Powering on Potential, The Science of Creating, Right Culture for Your Organization