Discover five ways to encourage your Executives to play an active role in culture change

While there is merit in our efforts to drive bottom-up culture change, it only succeeds if done at the right time and with the right context of Executive support, enablement, and role modelling.

Engaging executives in culture change and getting them to play lead roles in setting standards, creating opportunities to change and driving accountability over time is critical to success. Here are five things you can do to encourage executives to take an active role:

1. Make the links between culture, behaviour and ultimate business results

While we often hear the call to action for proving the business case, giving general stats on the influence of engagement score on turnover or time to hire or the like, we often miss the opportunity to define our ideal culture in terms of the behaviours it will deliver and the impact that behaviour can on business results. Talking less about culture and translation is more in terms of ways of working, and the ability to deliver the key top-line business results in your exec is driving towards helps to capture and keep attention in a more authentic way.

2. Involve Executives in the Planning Process

Often we take the bait of being delegated culture, disappear off to make our plan and bring it back to convince our Execs to get involved. We’ve found over the years that more conscious action streaming our actions planning, HR activity based as capability building and Exec driven action around day to day decisions making, tone of leadership and standing setting in the business, being a stream of work that relates to giving people the motivation and opportunity to change. Taking a more rounded approach to our action planning and involving Execs in defining their own specific action stream is critical to engagement.

3. Provide Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Linked to the point above, even when Execs want to help, they can be unsure of what to do and how, worried about saying the wrong thing or acting in the wrong way. Defining clear roles in change, giving clear guidance on comms messages at different stages of the program and segmenting your action plan to consider not just HR lead actions but defining the key tasks and actions you want execs to take (things like role contracting with their direct reports action planning to overcome barriers to new behaviours or even public blogs, vlogs and sessions with the business on their views of the evolving culture and their role in it.

4. Treat them like human beings

Like everyone else in the business, they’ll need time to get their eyes around the change, feel worried about the impact on themselves, consider how they may need to to shift their own habits and behaviours, and even make clear decision on whether the new culture is one they feel they can support and thrive in. Give them the space, tools and support they need to take their own change journey before asking them to be a figurehead for others.

5. Keep them accountable

Acknowledge and reward executives who actively engage in and support culture change initiatives. Measuring levels of adoption of new behaviours or levels of proactive action by Execs to move their own business area forward is helpful and will allow you to work with your Chief Exec or Board to keep them truly accountable for the commitments they make on support the culture change. This element does require some pre-work on creating a clear contract of change with senior stakeholders and effort to make sure commitments made are tangible and measurable, but in our experience, that effort sure is worth it when things get a bit hectic and effort risks facing away.

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