Leading a culture change? Avoid these three things.

There’s an odd phenomenon in culture change.

People know certain things don’t work, but do them anyway because everyone else does them too.

You’ve probably experienced it.

The leadership team decides the culture needs to change. Energy builds and a programme gets launched. Twelve months later, not much has shifted.

The intention was genuine. The approach was wrong.

Here are three things that consistently knock culture change off track.

It isn’t connected to the strategy

Culture change that isn’t anchored to strategy will always get de-prioritised.

You end up with nice values that took time and effort to craft but have minimal impact.

The right question isn’t “what culture do we want?” It’s “what culture do we need to execute this strategy?”

Otherwise, the moment a bigger business priority lands, it gets dropped.

You launch the new culture like a product

The all-hands call. The video from the CEO. The new values on the wall. Cute merch.

The challenge is that a big bang launch doesn’t work in culture change.

It must be built. People must be championing it and modelling it before the masses will come on the journey.

When early adopters, including leaders, demonstrate it, people notice. They recalibrate and broader change follows.

The launch becomes about awareness and reinforcement, not the change itself.

It takes too long and runs out of momentum

After the kick off there’s a bit of energy. Month two, other priorities. Month three, it’s not even on the agenda.

One of the most effective ways to embed a new culture is structured 60 to 90 day projects that drive the new culture into your organisation’s policies, processes and procedures.

It should be alive in your ways of working. Without this, it becomes an HR thing.

Most culture change programmes don’t fail because the culture was too difficult to change.

They falter because we follow outdated approaches, even though we’ve seen them fail before.

If you’re leading a culture shift right now and any of this feels familiar, let’s have a conversation. I can share our model for making culture change.