Why culture change starts with your leaders

Our organisation has been evolving over the past 26 years. We launched in 2000 as ‘The Performance Coach’, became ‘TPC Leadership’ back in 2016, and recently we have become ‘TPC Leadership & Culture’. This article gives some background to that latest shift.

One of the key issues we hear from our clients is the lack of engagement. People don’t give it their all. Disengagement has many fathers: lack of psychological safety, poor line management, systems and processes discouraging people from taking ownership, the wrong incentives being in place, reduced ‘esprit de corps’ due to remote work; generational shifts in attitudes towards work and career planning (‘Portfolio Career’, anyone?), personal matters, etc. 

None of this is new; we could e.g. refer back to the research-backed ‘Blue Ocean Leadership’. 

When annual Employee Engagement Survey results roll in and the above-described disengagement shows up on the KPI dashboard, alarm bells go off. This is when a CHRO (typically) has two options:

The fastest approach, although in our view not the most effective one, is the typical ‘posters-on-the-wall’ culture initiative we all know. Think about it, companies rarely choose to change their culture for the fun of it – they do it to drive collective behavioural change, for good reasons. Aspirations we often hear include: the wish to keep attracting and retaining top talent, to accelerate technology adoption, to make the Five-Generation-Workplace work, to drive cross-departmental collaboration, or to increase performance of individuals or teams.

For a myriad of reasons, we at TPC Leadership & Culture are not the greatest fan of such top-down culture programmes on their own. We believe that people deserve to be talked to as adults, not to be talked down to; that a one-solution-fits-all prescribed culture often misses the nuance needed to be effective in today’s hyperdiverse organisations; and, although it may sound controversial, that the distance between C-suite and the workfloor is just too big. Senior Executives and Internal Comms teams often simply don’t have the authority (!) for workers to feel personally inspired to start changing behaviours. People struggle to identify with what many of them describe as huge, increasingly AI-first, numbers-driven giants. Anthropologically, human brains simply did not evolve to feel connection, loyalty, or mutual trust toward abstract legal entities with tens of thousands of employees – we refer to ‘Dunbar’s Number’ of 150 being the upper threshold.

The alternative choice for the CHRO, as opposed to (or alongside) a top-down approach, could be a bottom-up leadership development initiative focused on teams. At TPC Leadership & Culture, we see the team as the prime unit of belonging. It is the arena where leadership is shown (not told), and where good vs bad leadership behaviours make the largest impact – both on the business and the people. A team is where people can thrive (not just survive), where they belong, where they take pride, where value is created, where work is done. It is a place where leadership improvements (through leadership development) have a direct impact on how people work, collaborate, and feel about their work. A team is where you can truly measure the ROI of leadership interventions.

The last logical step in our reasoning is to link leadership back to culture. If you boost one team’s performance and wellbeing by developing its leader, then a second, then a third…you create momentum. These leadership behaviours eventually become the norm in terms of ‘how we lead our teams over here’ – that becomes the leadership culture, and eventually it becomes the company culture. For a deep dive on this fascinating topic, see Joanne Martin’s perspectives or refer to the concept of the ‘nested culture’. Put simply: ‘the’ culture of the organisation is not uniform; it is composed of subcultures. What matters most in ‘driving culture through leadership’ is:

1. Creating alignment across leadership interventions, i.e. use the same vocabulary, encouraging the same leadership behaviours, and 
2. Creating momentum, which comes from reaching a critical mass of leaders: enough of them going through the same programme, in the same timeframe, for the new behaviours to become visible and self-reinforcing.

Final thought – in the introduction to this article, we mentioned ‘doing leadership right’. What does that require? From experience, we’d recommend you make sure that the program:

• Is embedded strategically (linked to business priorities rather than run as a stand-alone HR initiative); 
• Goes beyond skills development (shifting mindset and behaviour, not just knowledge);
• Reach a critical mass of leaders in the organisation (so the new behaviours become the norm);
• Ignites the intrinsic motivation of the leaders involved (people change because they want to, not because they’re told to);
• Involves leaders’ leaders (so senior managers model and reinforce the same behaviours);
• Is a journey, not an excursion (sustained over months, not a one-off workshop).

With the above, you maximise the chances that participating leaders become ‘influencers’ or  ambassadors of the desired culture. Collectively, and over time, that becomes the ‘way things are done around here’… your culture.