Loyalty

Welcome to the Loyalty Factor Information Exchange, a bi-weekly service providing summaries of major publications and books on various management and customer relationship topics. 

 Loyalty Factor has been instrumental in helping companies:

• Increase Customer Satisfaction by 20 – 33%
• Increase Revenues by 50% in 18 months
• Increase Manufacturing Production by 200% in 18 months

Our information exchange this week highlights the book, “Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results” by Roger Connors and Tom Smith.

Mastering the ability to accelerate culture change is an essential core competency for every leader who wants to keep his or her organization competitive and focused. Organizational culture is defined as the way people think and act. 

For the change process to have maximum effectiveness, accountability is key. With accountability, people at every level of the organization embrace their role in facilitating the change and demonstrate the ownership needed for making true progress, both for themselves and their organization.

In this book the authors state “Beliefs about how work should get done affects what people do.” They outline three essential change components:

• Experiences which foster beliefs
• Beliefs which influence actions
• Actions which product results 

According to the authors, if you:

• Change people’s beliefs about how they should do their daily work,
• Help them adopt the new beliefs you want them to hold,
• You will produce the actions you want them to take! 

Effective leaders understand that beliefs drive people’s actions in the organization. When people see leaders reinforcing beliefs, everyone gets the message that “I ought to be doing that too,” which directly affects culture change.

To enroll an entire organization in change the authors state:

1. Start with accountability – clearly define results.
2. Get people ready for the change – Describe the process.
3. Begin with the top and then proceed to enact teams.
4. Engage and Involve Individuals – when people are co-creators of the culture it will be easier to implement. 

In summary:

• Experience fosters beliefs
• Beliefs influence actions
• Actions produce results