Changing an Organization’s Culture, Without Resistance or Blame

One of the biggest challenges a company can face is changing people’s behavior — getting them to collaborate and be humble, for example, or put the company’s long-term interests first. Most behavior-change initiatives accomplish little, at best.

So when we faced such a challenge at Lear Corporation, a Fortune 200 automotive supplier with 136,000 employees worldwide, we knew the odds were against us. We asked ourselves: What could we do differently?

Lear had gone into bankruptcy during the Great Recession. Getting the company back on its feet required a major boost in operating efficiency. We succeeded, but by 2013 we worried that we had taken our focus on results too far. In satisfying our demanding customers, were we pushing the organization to the breaking point?

In order to make our success sustainable, we decided to roll out a new “leadership model” for our middle- and upper-level managers.

Read more: Organization’s Culture, Without Resistance or Blame.