Scaling culture change

Scaling culture change in the industry is a complex process. Everyone understands that this requires time until you need to come up with quick wins nonetheless. A few years ago I was already sharing about a few key ingredients to building a mentoring culture and using Worldline as an example. What they did with mentoring as a practice that became part of their culture, can be done with other types of practices and mindsets. Scaling culture change cannot be done overnight and needs to resonate strongly with at least a small motivated team of pioneers who will then by practicing trigger further changes throughout the organisation.

You do not want a culture change to be too fast for fear it would just be a trend, a season’s fashion. you want your culture change to slowly root itself in the everyday lives of employees and scale from there. You want to be a gardener and carefully and patiently tend to the seeds you have planted at the end of winter, beginning of spring.

Below is an infographic to illustrate this growth over several years. It shows how we started at Worldline from a narrow segment of employees, added different themes and logic organically, and ended broadening the impact to a large part of the teams.

Recently I attended a course about compassion delivered by Thupten Jinpa, former translator of his holiness the Dalaï Lama, and was connecting the dots with this scaling of mentoring and hoping more organisations would want to scale compassion at work.