Cover Story
Thought leaders
Smart Business San Diego | July 2009
Page 2 of 3
Form a plan
The first step in shifting the culture at ICW Group was to refocus the company on its vision and core values. Prior started to reform the company vision by constructing it around the stated goal of rebuilding the culture.
“You start something like this with the realization that it needs to occur, which we made part of our vision,” Prior says. “When I took over, the company didn’t have a strong mission and there wasn’t a lot of clarity around the core values. So we started with something that really represented our vision, an acronym called ‘FACT.’ It stands for ‘finance, advisers, culture and transformation.’”
To rebuild a culture, you need to first identify what you want your new-look culture to emphasize. Prior and his leadership team settled on those four areas, around which they would rally the entire company.
“With finance, we started talking about how we wanted to use leading indicators to drive real-time decisions,” Prior says. “We wanted to look forward, not backward. With advisers, we wanted to develop a brand position that dealt with not just enhancing the relationship with the agent but enhancing the relationship the agent has with the insurer. The culture aspect was aimed at creating a self-sustaining culture, meaning that we wanted to memorialize the activities that made us successful. The technology part was more about sitting down with people and asking them how we can make it a part of the new culture.”
After rolling out the initial principles upon which the new culture would be based, Prior wanted to begin recruiting and developing change-minded people who could help transition the company.
To change your culture, you need to find people who are willing to take the initiative and make change happen. Prior wanted to find employees — both outside recruits and in-house talent — who wanted to do more than just follow orders. Prior says it was a difficult task in some respects, largely because he was swimming upstream against a childhood’s worth of socializing in each employee.
“When you’re undertaking something like this, you’re going to move away from employees who are just looking for direction and orders,” he says. “You’re going to start looking more for employees who like to engage in the process themselves. It’s a different skill set, and one that is tough to find in business.
“As we can all appreciate, in the first 16 or so years of our lives, when the bell rings, we’re told to sit down and be quiet. Now you’re sitting down with people and asking them to stand up, think about what is right and have a say in how you run the company. It’s a completely different mentality than how we’re socialized to be as children. You are looking for the people who thrive in that kind of environment, and then place them in key positions in the company.”
To address the issue, Prior and his staff had to both recruit for change and develop a change mindset in as many current employees as possible. On the recruitment front, it required a balancing act. You need new employees to possess business skills, but if the candidate doesn’t mesh with your culture, it will be a tough fit.
Finding the right employees to help promote a culture begins with developing and promoting a strong brand identity. More of the right kinds of people will find their way to your door if they know what your company is all about before they inquire about the job.
“It’s easy to find who fits and who doesn’t fit if you have a strong brand identity to begin with,” Prior says. “If you start with that, you’re probably getting more people who tend to fit at the outset. From there, during the interview process, they’re not just meeting one person. They need to meet several members of the team so that you can develop different touch points and try to understand the applicant.
“We always try to explain to the applicant that it is in their best interest to work in this culture and have it as a place where they can embrace it and thrive in it. That goes back to having a strong brand identity, so that people know what they’re getting when they walk in your door.”
Internally, Prior’s executive team members met frequently with each other to develop a plan for communicating the reasons behind the cultural shift, and then they began conducting quarterly meetings with ICW Group’s entire management team.
The communication throughout the upper tiers of the organization helped allow the culture to take root at the ground level.
“We spent a lot of time with the managers in those quarterly meetings, telling them that their attendance in the meeting was twofold: One, to bring ideas to that meeting to help us succeed, but number two, to be responsible for pushing down what is shared to the front-line employees. You really need to put that kind of process in place where the communication is pushed out.
“If you want to be a company that values ideas and has the business departments created by your people, you need to find out who can be engaged and execute at that level.”
