Can You Teach an Old Dog New Tricks?

To build a really great team, you need to first get the best individuals on board. Then, you have to put them together in a way that delivers exceptional performance… if you say it fast enough it sounds easy!

At some stage during your career, you’ll no doubt find yourself in the position where you need to drive a turnaround in your team’s culture and performance. And when you’re faced with that proposition, it’s really important to recognize that you can’t expect the same people to do things in a radically different way.

Driving any significant change will bring you face to face with resistance from people who like the world exactly the way it is! That’s because any change has the potential to threaten their existing position, status, and power base.

But even for those who want to change, they may not have the vision, or the perspective, to know what’s required. I had a number of roles during my career in companies that, for many years, had been run by engineers, for engineers… there was zero commercial focus.

So, trying to explain what needed to be done differently (and why), was really hard… the company was full of good people who only knew one way to be. And trying to articulate what needed to be different was like trying to explain color to a blind person.

In these situations, you’ve got to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The trick is to preserve the valuable elements of the existing culture while introducing new skills and capabilities that will move the business forward.

This is about integrating the old with the new. Instead of trying to explain the different capability, performance, and focus that’s required to move forward, it’s infinitely easier to bring in someone new – someone who already has the capability and focus you need.

Instead of banging your head against a brick wall every day, saying, “You need to do it this way” you’ll get much better results by pointing to the person who already exhibits the behavior and performance you’re looking for, and saying, “Just watch her… that’s what I’m talking about!”

Importantly, this is all about your leaders, not your front line workers. Quite often, you’ll find your team full of really good people who have just been poorly led.. and they’re dying for someone like you to liberate them from the mediocrity.

You’ll clearly see leaders below you who are saying, “Thank God you’re here… not a moment too soon”. And you’ll also see plenty who are saying, “You don’t understand how things are done around here…”

Now, here’s the bad news… ultimately, if you’re serious about changing the culture in an underperforming team, you will end up having to replace somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 of the leaders below you. 

I really wish it were different… I do! I wish everyone would choose to embark on the journey to improved performance. But experience tells me that this just isn’t the case. And, if every leader isn’t committed to the change, it will hold everyone else back!

TO put it into context, many leaders you inherit created the underperforming world that you are trying to change… they supported the development of that underperforming culture… and they were either too weak or too complacent to do anything about it.

If you want a culture change to be successful, the trick is to blend the best of the existing capability and culture with new ways of thinking, behaving, and performing.