How do you engage and empower your frontline staff to become culture change agents and advocates?

In real life, though, that usually fails - for a simple reason. It's top-down, and no-one likes being told what to think. Start by asking frontline staff what matters to them, and you'll discover what your culture really consists of. THEN there is scope to develop it further if you need to.

In my experience, it starts with respecting and trusting your frontline staff. To do this, organizations are best served by spending quality time with the people they hire. Vision and values are essential and so is making sure frontline staff understand their roles and how each fits into the organization. For example, knowing the purpose, aka why the organization was created, helps the frontline staff align with the needs of the organization.

From my perspective, this AI input is sterile and out of touch with reality. While feedback and recognition are necessary, I've learned the key is making sure there is buy-in across the organization as to why feedback and recognition are vital to establishing a culture of innovation, collaboration and excellence. We must all fail to succeed, perfection does not exist. Aligning people with trained internal coaches works well in providing constructive feedback. The organization will do well by having a written constructive feedback process so there are no gaps in application. Recognition at the time of the event builds confidence. Encouraging people to learn from their mistakes reduces stress and anxiety thereby enhancing performance.

That's probably more about performance management (which often doesn't work very well, and sometimes backfires badly) than culture. For a clear focus on culture, skip this stage and/or come back to it later.

The empowerment has to be real for this to work. When leaders genuinely delegate some authority to frontline teams, they are rewarded with creativity and commitment - but if the exercise looks tokenistic, it invites cynicism.

This works when the business leader has a positive mindset and is open to team breakthroughs. In my experience, people want to take responsibility and be accountable for their actions, decisions, and results when the business leadership uses a 'nameless, rankless debrief' process.

Empowerment, empowerment, empowerment! Your frontline folks are the closest to the work and they have an amazing opportunity to make a huge difference for your customers and business overall. Empowerment is about offering choice- offer your team the opportunity to take action. Make sure to give them guardrails both to make sure they leverage the empowerment well, but also to support their psychological safety in doing so.

Better still, invite frontline staff (the real experts) to educate leaders. The learning this generates is amazingly powerful.

Another consideration is surveying your frontline staff to see if they support the culture change initiative. A change success diagnostic can be completed by both the leadership and the team involved in the change. Based on the results, an action plan can be developed to address the areas of concern before tapping into resources. The desired outcome is to remove barriers to the change up front.

Modelling the desired culture is vital, and to truly leverage its power, it's worthwhile to identify the informal influencers in your company - people with high social capital and high credibility. Tools like Organizational Network Analysis can be super helpful here.

This is a truly fundamental step, and perhaps best done earlier. Make sure leaders are fully involved! A willingness to roll up sleeves and get to work creates a positive impression of collegiality, and that's good for culture. Leave it to a junior with a 'culture ambassador' badge but no real power, though, and people won't take it seriously.

In my experience, culture change works best when handled as an innovation project led by a project leader and managed by a project team. Frontline staff within the organization can participate in separate project teams to support the objective. Before modeling the desired culture, it has to be created. Once that is achieved through the work of the project teams and acceptance by the leadership, modeling the desired culture begins. A consideration is to set up a test cycle and keep an eye on progress once the desired culture is identified. Tweak it until it becomes natural.

Make sure there's a genuine success to celebrate, and ideally get a leader to talk about what they have learned from working with the frontline team concerned for a day or two.

Honoring the efforts of the frontline staff encourages them to participate in future change initiatives. Most likely, these individuals were responsible for their primary role and took on the additional project work above and beyond their daily responsibilities. The best part is applying what is learned throughout the project and subsequently increasing the stackability of the change initiative.

By the way, if members of your c-suite are not up for getting back on the factory floor occasionally to be part of culture change, they're sabotaging your future. Managing culture is serious, and takes commitment - and managers willing and ready to contribute are the ones to hire.

You may consider establishing a culture of continuous improvement. By doing so, each person's responsible for becoming a change agent and an advocate as an expectation of their role. Thus, it becomes second nature for frontline staff and leadership to identify improvements - in all they do. While these improvements will be prioritized as to the level of importance and impact, there will be a financial plus to the bottom line when the culture changes for the better.