Change is difficult for most people.  I have changed culture a few times in my career successfully.  The keys to success in culture change are:
     ~ Truly believing the need to change
     ~ Allowing enough time to achieve change
     ~ An extraordinary amount of patience.

All three are indispensable in helping yourself and others change.

The most dramatic culture change I have accomplished was to achieve control room consolidation and head count reductions.  The operators called these control rooms home for forty years.  Anyone running that project would have been their nemesis.  The first day on the job the operators refused to talk with me until I brought up the subject of displacing them from their "home."  After that discussion, things went very smoothly.

That same project had a very tight schedule, which motivated me to have union maintenance hands working alongside non-union construction workers.  I was warned by what seemed like everyone to not do that.  The schedule was so tight, I feared we wouldn't meet it otherwise.

The construction workers had no problems.  Our maintenance hands had a lot of problems with the arrangement.  We got off to a rocky start, which made me rethink my arrangement.  But, with the schedule looming in my brain, I could not see altering it.

I listened once again and discerned the genuine fear and slowly began working to allay that fear.  It took several weeks to accomplish.  However, once accomplished, things went very smoothly thereafter.

By the end of the project, the operators were feeding the team and the maintenance hands were going to bat for the construction workers.