Culture Over Compliance: Why Your Training Fails and How to Drive Consistent Performance
In your experience as a nonprofit L&D leader, has telling people what to do and forcing them to comply ever led to the behavior change you were looking for? Unfortunately, this doesn't work for two-year-olds, 52-year-olds, and even less for those who work at your nonprofit.
In this episode, I talk about how it's culture, not compliance, that drives consistent performance, and that if we want to create change in our organization, we have to influence the culture around us. Tune in for practical ways to nurture and build on your nonprofit's existing culture for the best results over time.
▶️ Key Points:
00:00 Understanding culture and how to nurture it
06:30 Establishing shared strategic goals
09:15 Creating and strengthening shared practices
10:06 A practical starting point to shape culture
Training Mandates Don’t Work
Why do we expect a one-hour workshop to override years of ingrained habits?
When things get busy or hard, we naturally fall back on what feels comfortable—even if we just sat through a great training session. Just telling people what to do doesn't work.
Forcing compliance is a losing strategy.
To drive performance, improve capacity, and fuel mission impact, we must shift our focus from compliance to culture.
And that’s what we explore in episode 174 of Learning for Good.
Compliance vs. Culture: Why Compliance Fails to Create Change
To understand the difference between compliance and culture, imagine for a moment that you are responsible for getting a group of college students to make good choices and stay out of trouble. If you have ever been in a sorority or fraternity, or if you have college-aged children, you know that these students are not particularly receptive to a group of strangers in a corporate office telling them what to do.
There is significant risk involved—organizations want their members to be safe and productive while protecting the brand—but telling a group of students with free will what not to do rarely works.
So, what does work? The answer lies in the community and identity that comes with the organization.
When someone joins a Greek organization, they aren't just signing a contract of rules; they are adopting an identity and jumping into a preexisting culture. It is that culture that compels them to use their free will to adopt new behaviors and make better decisions.
The same principle applies to our workplaces. Our organizations have cultures, and it is culture, not compliance, that drives consistent performance. If we want to move from being an undervalued order-taker to a change agent and confident strategic leader, we must learn how to influence the environment that surrounds our staff.
Why Most Training Fails to Change Behavior
It is a difficult truth to acknowledge, but most training fails to change behavior. This isn't necessarily because the content is bad or the facilitator is unskilled. It fails because people attend a training session and then immediately return to the exact same environment they left. They go back to navigating the same systems, following the same processes, and working under the same leadership on the same team.
As noted above, as work gets busy or difficult, it is human nature to fall back on what feels comfortable.
New behaviors are, by definition, uncomfortable. If the surrounding culture does not support, reinforce, and model those new behaviors, the training will be forgotten as soon as the first crisis hits the inbox.
If we want our programs to create real change, we have to stop looking at training in a vacuum and start influencing the culture around us.
What Is Organizational Culture?
To influence culture, we must first define it. Culture consists of shared beliefs, customs, goals, values, and practices. It is the unspoken set of rules that says, "This is what we do here." Culture is not just a poster on the wall; it shows up in the tangible ways people work together. It dictates how decisions are made, how feedback is given (or avoided), how conflict is handled, and overall staff performance.
Pillar 1: Aligning Beliefs
As a nonprofit leader, you actually have a distinct advantage. Your organization is anchored by a mission or purpose for existing. Most people who join your organization already align with that mission—whether it’s healthcare, youth development, animal rights, or justice. They likely already share some foundational beliefs. Your job as a strategic leader is to nurture that shared mission and build the goals and practices that turn those beliefs into high performance.
Pillar 2: Building Shared Goals
Strategic leadership begins with clarity. If you are an executive, you must ensure the organization has clear strategic goals, because these goals impact the clarity of every single staff member. If you are an HR or L&D leader, your opportunity lies in making those goals relevant to the daily work of the staff.
This relevance shows up in three key areas:
Clear Expectations: Staff must know what is expected of them in their individual roles and workflows. Success must be clearly defined and communicated. Without this clarity, staff are unlikely to hit performance expectations.
Performance Reviews: While they aren't always exciting to discuss, performance reviews are a vital system for creating shared goals. They provide a structure that gives staff autonomy to own their work, accountability to follow through, and clear rewards or consequences for their actions.
Training and Solutions: This is where L&D adds its greatest value. Training allows people to pursue shared goals by building their confidence and skills. If people do not feel capable of meeting an expectation, they are unlikely to try. Training equips them to execute the goal and often serves as a shared experience that strengthens the culture.
Pillar 3: Building Shared Practices
The third pillar of a high-performance culture is shared practices, which define “how we do things here.” This requires creating consistency in areas like decision-making, feedback, follow-through, and even meeting norms.
To influence these practices, L&D and HR leaders must invest time and resources into leadership development. People managers are the ones who shape the daily culture of the organization through their behavior and the feedback they provide to their staff. By focusing on leadership norms, you ensure that the new behaviors learned in training aren't undermined by a manager who does things the old way.
How to Create Culture Change in Your Nonprofit
Shifting an organizational culture does not happen overnight. It takes sustained effort and a strategic approach.
Here is a practical starting point to begin that shift:
Identify One Specific Behavior. Don't try to fix the entire organization at once. Instead, identify one specific behavior that is currently impacting performance. It might be that managers are avoiding giving feedback, or perhaps there is a lack of follow-through in customer interactions. Identify one pain point and keep your focus very small and targeted.
Conduct a Root Cause Analysis. Once you have identified the behavior, analyze where it is being supported or undermined. Look at the people, the systems, the structures, and the reinforcement. Ask yourself: Is there a system that makes the wrong behavior easier? Is there a lack of reinforcement for the right behavior? By doing this analysis, you will begin to see the root causes of the performance gap.
Take a Multifaceted Approach to the Solution. After identifying the root cause, you must create a solution—or a set of solutions—that incorporates behavior change principles. Rather than just launching a single training module, a strategic leader takes a multifaceted approach:
Create Interventions for Staff: Provide the necessary training and tools directly to the employees.
Equip Managers to Reinforce: Give managers the specific skills they need to encourage and support the new behavior in their daily interactions.
Support Leaders in Modeling: Ensure that senior leadership is visibly practicing the behavior themselves.
By consistently applying this targeted, multifaceted strategy, you will eventually see behaviors change and your culture shift, providing the ultimate proof that your programs are creating real, lasting change.
Culture Over Compliance
When we focus on culture over compliance, we stop being reactive order-takers and start being collaborative partners who drive real change. By moving toward a strategic, multifaceted approach, we ensure that our staff don't just attend a class; they join a community (workplace) that is designed for success.
The end result of this shift is the capacity, confidence, and proof that your programs are working.
You will start to see behaviors change, performance improve, and the culture shift toward one that truly fuels your mission impact.
Don't let the pressure to "just get it done" overnight derail your expertise. Take the time to analyze the environment, focus on shared goals and practices, and lead your organization toward a culture of excellence.
To learn more about how to shape your nonprofit culture, tune into episode 174 of the Learning for Good podcast.
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