Most culture change efforts are designed to fail. What if the approach guarantees it?
Leaders announce a culture shift, a program gets designed, workshops roll out, and posters go up. The posters have a longer half life than the commitment. Twelve months later the organisation is roughly where it started, except now people are cynical about culture change too. They have seen this before. They know how it ends.
The sequence is so predictable it almost qualifies as its own cultural pattern. Leadership identifies a culture gap, a consultant is engaged, language is workshopped, and the organisation braces for a wave of activity that everyone understands will pass.
The trouble starts when culture gets treated as a project: something you scope, schedule, resource and deliver. There is a kick-off, a set of milestones, and an implied finish line. Culture keeps refusing to behave that way. It has no completion date. It is the accumulation of what leaders consistently do, say, recognise and tolerate, across every team, every day. It is built in the ordinary moments. The offsite is not where it lives.
This is why the program approach fails so reliably. Programs create a temporary container for new behaviour. The program ends, the container disappears, and the organisation defaults to whatever the leadership team is actually modelling. Where leadership behaviour has held steady, so has the culture. The program was a parenthesis.
McKinsey's research shows that 70 per cent of transformation projects fail, and some attribute up to 70 per cent of that failure to culture. Kotter names the habit underneath it: most efforts stall because leaders declare victory too early and shift their attention elsewhere. The launch gets all the energy, and the follow-through is left to fend for itself.
There is a deeper issue with the project approach. It locates culture change somewhere outside the leader. The program becomes the mechanism, and the leader becomes the sponsor rather than the subject. It is remarkably easy to champion a culture initiative while personally modelling none of what it recommends. It is the culture equivalent of insisting you are down to earth while arriving by helicopter. I have seen it more times than I can count. Culture shifts when leaders change what they personally do, repeatedly, in front of people who are paying close attention.
People watch the leader. That is where they learn what actually holds here.
The shift worth exploring
Culture change is something you practise. Pick one leadership behaviour you want to see more of and do it visibly this week. Then do it again next week. The leaders who shift culture most effectively are paying attention to what happens in the moments between the milestones, doing it consistently enough that the organisation starts to notice. It is unglamorous work with no ribbon to cut at the end of it. That is precisely why it works.
The Bottom Line: Culture is cumulative. It shifts when the practice outlasts the program.
What are you practising?
Regards
Meredith
PS If you'd like support and scaffolding while leading a culture shift, I designed Leading Culture for you. It's a 12 month executive experience for leaders shaping, shifting and scaling culture.
