Blink for too long and the business landscape around you will change. The tools you use, your competition, and the talent you employ are in a constant state of transformation. But as challenging as this sounds, many businesses have mastered change and use it to their advantage. Their secret? It’s not their strategy but their business culture that truly fuels their transformation efforts. This is how they do it.

When the Mighty Come Undone

General Electric, a longstanding energy and technology powerhouse, has a remarkable story of longevity that’s spanned more than 130 years. And like many other companies looking to find themselves on the right side of digital evolution, GE launched a product they hoped would transform their business model and give them a leading role in the software market by 2020.

GE’s digital product “Predix,” a program designed to help users enhance their operational efficiency, hit the ground running and generated more than $1 billion in revenue across its platforms in the early stages. But very soon their optimism was doused as the project collapsed, forcing them to sell the digital asset.

The result was a mammoth failed transformation project that shook the company’s financial performance. They suffered stock price dives, a tarnished reputation and were sent packing from the Dow Jones.

How did this happen though? With more than a century of operational experience and teams of highly qualified leaders and specialists pulling the levers, how does an engineering behemoth like GE fumble such a critical transformation project?

The Business of Culture

Tim Eisenhauer, Author and President of Axero Software Solutions suggests in his hard-hitting piece about GE’s demise, that a flashy transformation strategy was merely a front to a culture that wasn’t prepared to evolve. So it seems Predix was doomed before it even launched.

Company culture is a living entity with the muscle to determine the direction of your business, and if you have one that genuinely supports your vision and strategic decision-making, your transformations will have a serious kick. But without a supportive culture, even masterfully planned projects may fail.

Cultures that value open communication, feedback, and progress, allow change projects to run a smooth course because they prevent resistance, dismantle fear, and encourage employees to embrace new ways of being.

Netflix lives this thinking and by homing in on the cultural elements that turn employees into change champions, and nurturing it through their organisation, they’ve been able to master an industry synonymous with scary shifts.

They prioritise people and their decision-making abilities, encourage freedom, responsibility, and accountability, develop growth mindsets, and foster creativity and solutions. In essence, their positive culture gives wings to business transformation.

Coaching Develops Supportive Cultures

So how do we get our people to band together in favour of our business transformation goals? How do we create a culture that improves our ability to shift?

Executive coaching provides answers and is a powerful support resource for businesses that value leadership development, agility, have daunting transformation objectives and are looking to create cultures supportive of change.  

Coaching solutions get to the heart of the employees’ perspective towards change, identifying why they think and act the way they do. They help eliminate resistance, fear, and create the mindset needed to become an ally of transformation.

Coaching inspires a collective shift in how employees and leaders approach change, this is the cultural impact, and it’s essential to making strategy work. Perhaps the most promising realisation here is, if you get your culture right, you can transform your business in any way you want, and there are no limits to where you can go.

As a leading provider with 25 years of experience coaching leaders in blue-chip companies and government, Change Partners is perfectly positioned to help you advance.