Siobhan McHale: Disrupting Dysfunctional Patters

Our guest today is Siobhan McHale, a culture change specialist, EGM People, Culture & Change at DuluxGroup and the author of The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change.

Siobhan has worked across four continents, helping thousands of leaders to create more agile and productive workplaces. She has been on the “inside”, as the executive in charge of change in a series of large, multinational organizations. One of these inside jobs was a radical seven-year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) that transformed it from the lowest-performing bank in the country into one of the highest-performing and most admired banks in the world.

Professor John Kotter used her work with ANZ as a Harvard Business School case study designed to teach MBA students about managing change.

Episode Highlights

In this episode, Siobhan and I talk about how to disrupt dysfunctional patterns of behavior in a company. Here are some of the topics we cover:

• Culture as patterns of relatedness and behavior between the parts of the wider organizational system
• The challenges of seeing patterns clearly in our own environment
• Why focusing on behavior change is not enough 
• The power of reframing roles 
• How our mental maps drive our behaviors
• Supporting people in stepping into a reframed role to drive culture change
• What can lead to a tipping point when it comes to culture change
• How to track culture change progress
• The dangers of linear thinking