A Roadmap for Achieving Real Culture Change in Your Organization
A Roadmap for Achieving
Real Culture Change in
Your Organization
by Timothy Bowden and Commander Rosario “Mike” Russo, CGFM
Each year when the Office of Personnel Management releases the results of the
Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS), federal agencies get a window into the
health and status of their workforce. For federal leaders, the FEVS provides an
opportunity to understand how employees feel about their jobs, their agency, their
ability to grow, and their sense of ownership and empowerment in the workplace.
S
ince the survey’s inception in 2004, federal
leaders have had a solid tool for understanding
and quantifying the organizational challenges
faced by their agencies. Many have used the
results as a springboard for initiatives aimed at
improving the federal employee experience. In
recent years, though, despite focused effort on moving the
needle on employee experience, sustained improvement
has proven elusive for the government as a whole, and for
many individual agencies.
While it is no surprise that turning the tide in an organization
as large, diverse, and complex as the federal government is
1
Ostroff, C., Kinicki, A.J., & Muhammad, R.S. (2013). Organizational Culture and Climate, in Weinder, I.B. (ed) Handbook of Psychology, 2nd edition. John Wiley & Sons: Hoboken, NJ
no easy task, recent FEVS data leave many in the federal
community wondering what can be done to shift the per-
ceptions and experiences of federal workers, and to
ultimately achieve the overall goal of 67% engagement
across the government.
One potential reason why the various FEVS-inspired initia-
tives have failed to show sustained results is that the
initiatives are addressing climate rather than culture.
The Difference Between Climate and Culture
Organizational culture and organizational climate are com-
plementary, but different, psychological aspects of every
organization. According to the Handbook of Psychology1
organizational climate is “the perception of practices, policies,
procedures, and routines in the organization” (p. 650). Climate
is the generalized description of “the way it is around here”
and reflects a shared understanding of how things are or
how things were. It includes perceptions about reward
systems, structures, leadership, autonomy, and job design.
Like measures of the physical climate (such as temperature
and humidity), measures of organizational climate (such as
the FEVS) provide a snapshot of the current state of the
organization and offer insight into the day-to-day experience
of the organization’s workforce.
In contrast, organization culture encompasses the norms
and expectations that shape workplace behaviors. According
to Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus at MIT’s Sloan School
of Business, and a leading expert on organizational culture:
The Journal of the American Society of Military Comptrollers n 35
 A Roadmap for Achieving Real Culture Change in Your Organization
“Culture is the pattern of shared assumptions that has
worked well enough to be considered suitable, and as
such should be taught to new members as the correct
way to perceive, think, behave, and feel in response to
the problems and challenges the organization faces.”
A key feature of this definition is that behavioral norms
transmitted to new members of the organization must be
stable enough to have been tried out and refined over time
to achieve a measure of success and acceptance within the
organization.
While climate reflects organizational conditions that members
experience, culture reflects the shared values and beliefs
that generate and reinforce behaviors that create climate
and shape organizational outcomes. As such, achieving
sustained improvement in an organization’s climate requires
interventions aimed specifically at changing the underlying
behavioral norms that govern overt behaviors.
Changing an organization’s culture
requires an investment of time and
effort and a commitment to seeing
change initiatives through. But, the
Changing an organization’s
good news is that changing culture
to drive performance and engagement culture requires an
is a relatively straightforward process investment of time and
where you can see results in just a effort and a commitment to
short amount of time. If you want to seeing change
create a performance culture in your
agency or workgroup, here are six
initiatives through.
steps you can follow to drive
meaningful change:
1. Define your current reality
The culture of your organization is meaningful only in the
context of how it enables or inhibits you from achieving
your mission-focused performance priorities. Every organi-
zation and agency exists to deliver a service, product, or
impact to their constituencies. Meeting those performance
objectives should be the driving focus of the organization,
and culture can have a major impact on the agency’s ability
to deliver on its mission. The question that needs an answer
is “What is most important to address a known gap in our
performance and reach the desired performance outcome?”
Only limited resources are available – whether you are
thinking time, people, knowledge, money, or something
else. Naming the highest priority will help to create a
common focus on the problem, challenge, or goal, and how
to address it.
2. Clarify the vision
Former publishing executive and marketing expert, Michael
Hyatt, says, “Culture is largely invisible to those inside of it.
It’s like water to a fish or air to a bird. It’s simply the environ-
ment we live in.”
36 n Armed Forces Comptroller Fall 2017
Because culture is so embedded in the organization, de-
scribing and understanding the culture is an important first
step in charting the course for change. Validated inventories
can provide a common language and assessment of your
organization’s current culture. Human Synergistics Interna-
tional’s Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI)® provides
tools to assess current organizational culture and identify
gaps between the current and ideal state.
Creating clarity is about envisioning a possible future that
responds to and resonates with others and their desire for
individual and collective success. In this step the focus is on
defining the specific cultural norms and behaviors that will
need to change to achieve the selected mission priority.
Just as you narrowed your list of priorities to focus on, you’ll
need to select just a few norms to change that will enable
success. By focusing on the specific “from-to” shifts in
changing culture that you believe will have the most impact
on your selected performance
priority you emphasize areas of
change that will visibly drive results.
3. Engage Others
Engaging a broad set of stakeholders
is essential for building momentum,
getting new ideas, challenging
assumptions, and increasing
common experiences. Relationships
among those involved will be
cultivated, making it easier to get
things done down the road.
Engaging others is about designing
a set of connected plans and implementation actions to cre-
ate the desired alignment and change. The best designs:
• Create a sense of ownership by having the right
information and support to solve problems, make
improvements, and take responsibility
• Reinforce behaviors needed to achieve the vision
• Strengthen accountability with defined measures of
success with visible milestone and one-on-one
progress checks
Something else also begins to happen when you engage
others in charting the path forward for culture change: the
shared learning and mutual experience of those involved
create new steppingstones for other parts of the organiza-
tion. New expectations based on experience are formed
and put into practice, opening the door for greater collec-
tive culture change.
4. Manage the Change
Defining the desired state and engaging a broad set of
stakeholders are just the first steps in achieving successful
culture change. Achieving the change you desire requires
 A Roadmap for Achieving Real Culture Change in Your Organization
careful, ongoing management of the change process. The
key to success in change management is being intentional
in your communications and tying all messages back to the
overall goals of the effort: achieving a measurable improve-
ment in performance while building new cultural norms that
reinforce and sustain the improvement. A good rule of
thumb when thinking about change communication is to lay
out a plan for communicating and managing change, and
then multiply the communication efforts by ten. It may feel
like you are over communicating about the process and
goals of your culture change effort, but in our experience,
few changes have failed because of too much communica-
tion, while many have failed because of too little. Create a
plan and hold yourself and others in the organization
accountable for sticking to it.
Finally, define metrics for effective change management,
such as meeting deadlines for stakeholder engagement,
the degree of stakeholder participation in planning and
executing changes, or the frequency you see people
exhibiting the new behaviors you are trying to achieve.
Collect data on those metrics regularly throughout the
change process and use them to drive communications and
course corrections as needed.
5. Build Capabilities
Achieving the desired performance improvement and culture
change for your organization will require individuals and
teams to build new skills. Building these new capabilities
takes place in concert with the work you are doing on the
highest mission priority and focuses on learning to reinforce
new behaviors that lead to culture change.
One of the best ways to create shared learning experiences
is through working together with individuals from across the
2
http://www.mckinsey.com/app_media/reports/financial_services/the_inconvenient_truth_about_change_management.pdf
organization on specific projects aimed at closing the iden-
tified performance gap. Groups working together, wrestling
with various issues, trying new things, and sharing experi-
ences that reinforce the new, desired cultural norms provides
an opportunity for new behaviors to be tried out and refined
in an environment where everyone has agreed on the desired
outcomes. But, intentional focus on the desired behaviors is
key. If you bring groups together and employ only “legacy”
or passive/defensive norms, you won’t get the alignment
you are looking for and will likely fail to achieve the
performance gains you’ve targeted.
6. Sustain Performance
It takes time for new thinking and behaviors to become
embedded within an organization’s culture. Reinforcing
support to individuals and teams will help to minimize or
avoid slippage when confronted with short-term distractions
and the desire to do things the old way. As you make
progress on your key priority it is essential to establish the
metrics and measurement methods that you will monitor to
ensure the performance gains and behavior changes can
be maintained over time. You should define measures both
for the mission performance priority and the new cultural
norms formed while working on that priority. Also establish
a regular cadence for gathering data to ensure the progress
you made is maintained.
Summary
Changing the culture of your agency or team can feel like
an insurmountable task. And it’s no secret that any change
can be hard. Research by McKinsey & Company2 in 2008
found that only 30% of organizational change efforts succeed.
But, with the aging federal workforce, and predicted short-
ages of talent for critical federal positions, the consequences
of failing to attract and retain the next generation of workers
could be significant.
On the positive side, though, the benefits of constructive
organizational cultures are well documented. Organizations
with constructive cultures consistently perform better on
measures of customer service, retention, and financial
success. Federal agencies could benefit from the innovation,
commitment, and energy that characterize these
organizations.
Many agencies are ready for a culture change, and with
careful planning and commitment, any organization can
realize the benefits of a new and improved culture.
The Journal of the American Society of Military Comptrollers n 37
 A Roadmap for Achieving Real Culture Change in Your Organization

Commander Rosario
Timothy Bowden “Mike” Russo, CGFM, BS,
MS Finance
Tim Bowden is a certified Human
Commander Russo is a project
Capital Strategist and leads the
officer at the Coast Guard's
People & Performance Consulting
Department of Operational Logistics
Division of Management Concepts,
located in Norfolk, Virginia imple-
Inc. For 17 years he has focused
menting the Coast Guard's Financial
on providing performance
Management and Procurement
improvement and learning
Services Business Process
solutions to clients in the federal
Reengineering Modernization. He
government. You can find his bio
is a Certified Government Financial
and connect with him on LinkedIn
Manager and earned his B.S. and
at linkedin.com/in/timbowden.
M.S. in financial management from
Golden Gate University.

38 n Armed Forces Comptroller Fall 2017

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