No matter how aspirational our new vision or how exciting our plans, none of it could happen unless we significantly pivoted our culture to become adaptable, creative, accountable. Some obstacles:

• Systemic culture of bureaucracy, hierarchy, mistrust and blame for years
• New CEO lacked credibility due to no prior library experience
• Management’s outdated mindsets and practices, and resistance to change
• Sector groupthink warned culture change in libraries is very hard
• Unionized environment
• 66% of team part-time

A multi-pronged, always-on, collaborative approach to change, including:

• Strategy plan co-created with employees
• High Performing Culture is a strategic priority
• Culture is everyone’s responsibility, not CEO’s
• Leadership Brand workshops
• Team Experience Commitments
• Changed language (eg. “staff” to “team”, killed “discipline”)
• Optimized team for culture (reassignments/hirings/exits)
• Redesigned structure for role clarity
• New CA clause to attract new talent
• Employee innovation process
• All-Team Creativity Day

Inspired huge quantitative/qualitative mindset & workplace experience shifts, such as:

• Denison Culture Survey benchmarked us in 12 domains against 1000+ global public, private, not-for-profits. In 1 year we had “unprecedented” results, increasing all domains up to 46 percentile pts
• We’re a case study at the Denison Global Conference
• Consultant: “In over 10 years, I’ve never seen improvement this big this fast”
• Employee: “I used to be anxious coming to work, now I love it”
• 70% participation on 20 min survey
• Surpassed plan targets