Recently I was working with a Client struggling to bring about cultural change in her organization. Senior managers were paying “passionate lip service” to the organization’s core value, but their actions clearly conveyed that “hitting the numbers” ultimately trumped all other behaviors. Unfortunately, this is an all too common situation.

This HR professional was reinforcing a leadership development program for supervisors and department managers we designed for them using The Leader’s Digest and its Practical Application Planner. She decided to now use Moose on the Table as pre-reading to a refresher follow-up session.

I wrote Moose on the Table based on what my experiences have taught me about what is needed to bring lasting cultural change to organizations. If change facilitators like HR professionals or middle managers are not able to get senior executives leading this charge from the top down (and even if they are), a critical component to success is equipping supervisors and middle managers with the skills, tools, and processes to change the way their part of the organization is led on a day-to-day basis. This does tie directly into metrics, priorities (what we call Strategic Imperatives), processes, systems, and the like.

Pete Leonard (the central character in Moose on the Table) made a feeble attempt to do some moose hunting in Chapter Six (I’d like to rename that chapter “Wild Moose Chase”.) It’s not until he goes through a deeper team/organizational analysis (Chapter Eight) and gets into identifying Strategic Imperatives with his team (Chapters Nine and Ten) that things start to happen (the Strategic Imperatives of Pete’s team start on page 120). But as he gets back to the organization, his boss and the organizational culture pushes back and he needs to really screw up his courage to break through that inertia.