Changing the Culture
Over the years, I’ve promoted Patrick Lencioni’s four-step approach to changing culture at ski areas.
The fourth step—aligning measures, incentives, policies, and processes with the desired culture—tends to be the hardest and receives the least attention. After reading James Heskett’s Win from Within, I found a set of practical questions that make this step much more approachable. Use them as a short audit to see whether your ski area’s systems actually support the culture you say you want. Every ski area has a culture; it may just not be the one you intended.
Steps 1–3 are essential, and Steep is ready to help you through the 6–12-month process of building the culture you want. Step 4 involves making that culture a reality in day-to-day operations. You’ve likely heard the line “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” I believe it—and I treat how an organization measures and rewards behavior as a key indicator of how professionally it’s managed.
Use the following questions from Professor Heskett to evaluate the alignment between your stated mission, values, policies, and everyday practices. They’re a straightforward way to identify gaps.
Use the following questions from Professor Heskett to evaluate the alignment between your stated mission, values, policies, and everyday practices. They’re a straightforward way to identify gaps.
Are we measuring the right things?
Do our policies reinforce the values and behaviors we say we want? (If you’ve started a cultural change, do policies actually reflect the new values and behaviors?)
Are we recognizing and rewarding the behaviors we’ve agreed on—not only in performance reviews, but also in the informal coaching and feedback people receive?
Does the work environment reflect the way we want to work? Have you defined and shared that with everyone? For example, does the organization facilitate cross-functional coordination or encourage teamwork if those are objectives? Cross-functionality and teamwork are essential for professionally managing ski areas.
Do our policies encourage the types of communication we value (top-down, bottom-up, or across levels)?
Do routine practices—like how we run meetings—reinforce values (for example, frankness) and desired behaviors (for example, constructive debate)?
There’s a lot packed into these questions. They assume you’ve already clarified mission and values; if you haven’t, that should be the first step. I don’t mean that as criticism—early in my leadership career, I relied on conversation rather than codified expectations, and not everyone understood the details. Learning from those gaps is how you build stronger, more professional management.