Company Culture & “Blue Shirt” Mondays

Several years ago, I started a new role at a new company. I recall participating in my first HR leadership team meeting, and I was wearing a white shirt.

I was the only person in the room wearing white clothing. Everyone else was wearing blue. When I sat down, a peer leaned over to speak to me. She started just a few months before me, “I don’t understand why, but everyone here wears blue on Mondays.” To fit in, I wore blue every Monday for years.

Company culture is the collection of beliefs handed down from employee to employee. These beliefs are so integrated that employees don’t think about them anymore; they simply act. These beliefs can be as harmless as blue clothing on Mondays or as dangerous as tweaking financial reports or misogyny.

When leaders seek to change the company’s strategy, the focus often turns to structure. However, people’s behaviors and the culture that drives those behaviors are also important. When leading this type of change, there are several actions leaders can take to help facilitate cultural changes.

Engage Stakeholders

A leader's most critical action is to engage and equip stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who is affected by the proposed change. The best stakeholders to engage are those who are both impacted and have influence over their peers.

Engaging an entire stakeholder group before identifying the key person influencing the group is a mistake. Another mistake is focusing only on organizational leaders as the only important stakeholders. In many global organizational changes, I’ve found that executive admins, HR business partners, project managers, trainers, and others are also helpful stakeholder groups.

Once you’ve identified your key stakeholders, meet with them and give them the space to share their ideas and concerns with you. Please resist the temptation to become defensive when they offer critiques. Bring them along on the journey.

Choose to collaborate with them and include their ideas.

Talk to People

In most cases of organizational change, people often feel that they are hearing critical information too late in the process. This reduces their ability to plan for the change and negatively impacts their performance. The outcomes from this scenario are very predictable: employee disengagement, burnout, turnover, absenteeism, and reduced performance.

In most cases, preemptive communication solves this problem. However, there is more to it than just sending out a well-intentioned email. Creating the space for 2-way dialogue is critical.

To lead the change, leaders must be visible and engage in questions from the workforce.

Today, we have incredible tools for mass communication, but change happens within an organization one person at a time. A heartfelt handshake and 5-minute conversation with an employee can move the needle much more than a virtual conference call with hundreds of people.

Involve Others

My last piece of advice is to resist the urge to be the “answer” person or for your leadership team to have all the answers. Invite others to help you problem-solve. You can do this in a variety of ways: roundtable discussions, surveys, and kaizen events are just a few. You are only limited by your creativity and willingness to hear from others.

I don’t miss “blue shirt” Mondays, but I will never forget the lesson I learned from the experience. Company culture is a pervasive phenomenon that happens in every organization. Changing the words on a wall or your website won’t change it.

You have to think bigger and be willing to engage the collective intelligence of your whole organization.