Giving orders and nagging doesn’t impel change. Yet when it comes to “fixing” behaviour, we’d much rather yell it out or levy a mandate. One of the organisations that I frequented sometime in the past had put up huge posters in their corridors and lobbies that read “Don’t Shout”. I am not sure if that really helped, because if not shout, we aren’t really telling them what to do. 

If the poster read “Have heated conversations behind closed doors” it might have been a little better, don’t you think? It’s telling them what to do instead of what not to do.

Chevron worked their culture change in this way. 

Several years of employee engagement surveys at Chevron indicated that leaders lacked effective supervisory skills such coaching, feedback, listening. This was back in 1994 when they also realised that a 7-year Total Quality Initiative had yielded improvements in performance but not substantial performance improvement. 

Company leadership had also recently developed and communicated three vision objectives: 

1. Become the most efficient and reliable supplier in the industry

2. Possess the best technology in core products

3. Be a great company to work for

While they had been working along these lines for quote a few years now, they weren’t making any significant progress. And that’s when the final piece of the puzzle fell into place- the one thing that they weren’t actively working on was “behavior.” It was the only thing that could tie together all their goals and best them too. Chevron Chemical was interested in fundamentally transforming the culture of the company to one that was positively motivating and one which tapped into the discretionary efforts of employees at all levels; at the heart of which was superlative business results. 

And they picked up their leaders to model positive leadership behaviour. Darry Callahan, erstwhile CEO of Chevron Chemical was the executive sponsor for this change management process. For years Chevron had worked on strategies and processes and quality but never on people. Never on how people should behave or never even given thought to what should be the the “Chevron Way”. 

After a quick pilot of their culture transformation, Callahan knew that they were on the right track, when an operator at one of their chemical plants said, “You know, I’ve worked with this company for 30 years, and this is the first time they’ve told me when I do things right.” They had had positive discipline and they told people when they didn’t do something right, but this new way of telling people what they did right, was far more powerful than anything ever before.

Which brings us to, what was Chevron really doing? What did they mean by positive leadership behaviour? They picked up some vital behaviours that were impacting the organisation and set to work upon it. 

1. Stopped shooting the messenger: This was the culture then. Instead of listening to the message, as an organisation they were more intent on who was delivering the message. With that awareness in place, they turned around the quarterly business reviews. Instead of looking at reds and greens and making it a punishing exercise, they were intent on gathering information that all needed to know so that they could contribute to making the business grow. It doesn’t mean that there was diluted accountability, it only meant that they worked on appreciating what was being done really well and what could be done to fix what was not working well.

2. Changed what they were recording: Instead of putting up the non compliances on a dashboard, they began putting up the compliances. Which teams were doing extremely well, say in the 99% range rather than who wasn’t doing what. The perspective changed overnight. Everybody wanted to be on that board, there was some kind of internal motivation. This was a low threat way of people coming on board as they began to experience the new behaviour. If you are helping others reverse their negative patterns, don’t lecture. Honor their choices; lead them to new behaviours with questions, not orders. Build links between the action you want and the deeper intrinsic – but not obvious – rewards. Personal motivation is powerful.

3. Increased the frequency of “positive feedback”: At any given time, there are competing business priorities. There are 10 different teams and they have 10 goals and these goals can sometimes be at loggerheads with each other. It leads to a lot of ambiguity and wasted resources. But positive feedback helps cut through all that clamour and uncertainty. It tells people what needs to be done and gets them to focus on how to replicate that positive feedback. This helped to eliminate fear from the learning environment and this built their personal ability to work through situations keeping in mind what was truly important for the organization.

Chevron also put in place a leadership behaviour scorecard. There were 12 behaviors on this scorecard on which every manager and supervisor across the company was evaluated at six-month intervals. Not a complex competency model which most managers don't care for. They also trained the managers to develop plans to strengthen the delivery of performance feedback with their people around critical business targets and provided each leader with 1:1 coaching support, as they engaged in new behaviours and applied the behavioural principles. 

Chevron had understood that cultures can be planned and created over time.Although people can execute many everyday activities on autopilot and the way we usually do things, human beings have a remarkable capacity to override that system when they believe that that decision will help them do better. Chevron made use of this basic principle when they embarked on their cultural transformation. They made people experience that changing their behaviour was possible and sustainable.