You can upgrade your IT. You can rewrite your processes. But you won't change your business if you can't change your people—how they think, how they work together and how they use the resources around them.

Changing the culture of your company isn't easy. It takes time, effort and a very specific kind of leadership. To learn more about it, we spoke to IBM's Senior Vice President Linda Sanford and General Manager Ross Mauri.

Make or break   Inspiring change Succeeding together   Revving the growth engine Role models   Tools to connect

Ultimately, real change in a company has to come from its employees—from the millions of decisions made every moment, every day, at every level of the corporation. Technology can enable new solutions, and management can mandate them, but they don’t actually solve anything until employees use them, embrace them and rely on them.

Cultural change can't be mandated. It takes real leadership—inspiring people, creating opportunities to excel and rewarding difficult-to-quantify results like team-building and innovation.

It's not always quick, and it's not always easy. But the end result is a more productive, more empowered employee—ready to look beyond departments, beyond specialties to work toward the success of the entire company.

"You can't hardwire an organization to make it more collaborative. That's sometimes where organizations fail—they think they must make a structural change in order to affect the behavior they're looking for. What we're talking about here is a set of behaviors that are sensing changes, requirements, opportunities in our marketplace. And then responding in a very collaborative way."
—Linda Sanford

"I think that executives in an on demand world have to be more affiliative and they have to be more inspirational. And the reason for that is that the old drive-to-the-numbers operational things are needed, but may stifle innovation. And if you're in an innovative culture, you're going to have to inspire, you're going to have to lead, not just drive with a whip."
—Ross Mauri

On demand business is built on connections—on the power of IT systems that can communicate smoothly, processes that integrate seamlessly, and most importantly, people that can collaborate effortlessly.

Real collaboration is more than taking a meeting. It's about pooling ideas, experiences and resources to create solutions that are more than the sum of their parts. These breakthrough solutions are where companies begin to create real value—they're the reason they began overhauling their IT and business processes in the first place.

"When you think about collaboration, I think it's important to really understand the definition of it. It is much more than just returning my phone call. It's much more than just participating in a meeting with me if I've called one. It really starts first and foremost with listening, listening to each other. The second key descriptor of collaboration is really being open in sharing our experiences, our knowledge—and through that open sharing, we are really able to start to see and take the best of everyone's thinking."
—Linda Sanford

Collaboration, empowerment, breakthrough solutions…obviously, all of these changes can’t emerge overnight. But by driving the right incremental changes, leaders can kick off what Linda Sanford calls a "virtuous cycle"—a self-perpetuating process where transformation fuels growth, which creates the possibility of even greater transformation and ongoing growth.

The focus on people within an organization in on demand business is to make them empowered—empowered to collaborate, empowered to innovate, empowered to bring out the best ideas.
—Ross Mauri

"So how do you get a growth engine revving in any company? Well, what we hear from IBMers is, first and foremost, they are looking for time—time back, if you will. So one of the key ingredients for growth is freeing up time. And with that time, we're looking for our employees to collaborate with each other, to reach out across their silos and to really start to work together, bringing their ideas, their creativity, their experiences to that particular opportunity."

"It's amazing to watch in that open sharing how breakthrough innovation occurs. Literally, breakthrough innovation: new ideas, new opportunities, new solutions to problems. And that just starts again to feed the next round of productivity."
—Linda Sanford

Creating cultural change takes a very specific kind of leader—one who can communicate, recognize and embody the future that the company is working toward. He or she needs to be willing to come out from behind the desk, reach across departmental silos and reward employees who are willing to do the same. The on demand business needs more than just executives—it needs role models

"I think the executives, the managers in an organization are very critical—from two perspectives. Number one, they have to be role models themselves. So if they are going to be asking their employees to act one way, then they'd better be sure to be acting that same way themselves. And the second thing they need to do is to recognize and reward the behavior that they are looking for from their employees. And it's not enough to just say, ‘This is how we need to behave in the new company,' but rather highlight people—make them heroes, communicate that it's through their behavior that we were able to achieve certain results."
—Linda Sanford

"One of the things that leaders have to overcome in doing this transformation, in doing this culture change, is they need to communicate. They need to over communicate on what the goals are. Why? The company needs to get there, and they need to enable people to get to those goals. But the communication becomes an overriding factor. Do people really understand why the company needs to transform, and what their role is?"
—Ross Mauri

Good intentions and good leadership are not enough to make cultural change happen. Technology can play a crucial part in bringing people together—within a single company or across multiple trading partners in a supply chain. Team rooms, resource locators and other tools can help enable and magnify the changes that make businesses more collaborative and more innovative.

"We are a company of 320,000-plus IBMers, scattered around the world in some 160-plus companies. 42 percent of us today are mobile, which means we don't have a home office, per se, to come to. And so, when we talk with IBMers and we say, ‘We really need you to work across boundaries, across silos and collaborate,' their first response is ‘Yes, I want to do that. I obviously want to do that, it's what right for the customer. But, how do I find the expert?' And that's where technology can come to play…"
—Linda Sanford

"…Within IBM we have a skills locator, which if you don't happen to have someone on your team that speaks Korean, but all of a sudden you've got a creative engagement going on, you could get online and find out who knows how to speak Korean, who's a subject matter expert in the topic you want to cover, and bring that person virtually onto your team…"
—Ross Mauri

"…Now you can bring people together. They still have to be open and sharing in terms of their knowledge and expertise. So tools won't force that to happen. But it certainly is an enabler."
—Linda Sanford