Time For a Reset?

Almost every company I’ve spoken to over the last couple of months went through some kind of major transition in 2024 – it was a year of change for all of us. Some were positive, such as successful funding rounds and exciting strategic pivots, while others were more challenging, including redundancies and restructuring.

All these changes, however, are opportunities for a cultural reset. Some even require it. By re-aligning your team around your objectives and principles, doubling down on what’s working and scrapping what’s not, and giving deliberate, measured thought to how your culture needs to evolve, you can use these “reset points” to your advantage.

Transitions, whether positive or negative, shake how a company operates and can have a significant impact on employee engagement. As a result, they’re natural points of change - cultures shift through these transitions, whether you initiate it or not. By harnessing these shifts, you can shape the next phase of your organisation and create clarity, focus and renewed energy.

Facebook (now Meta) provide a classic example of this. In their early days, they were famous for their mantra of “move fast and break things.” This was a great ethos to have as a challenger start-up, but when they had their IPO in 2012, public market investors were less tolerant of the plucky social media company when things did, in fact, break. As a result, they conducted a deliberate cultural reset, retaining the creative spirit that made them successful but adding more accountability, foresight and governance. It’s this reset, in part, that enabled them to scale at the phenomenal rate they did.

While every transition is different, the steps required to deliver a cultural reset are consistent. If your overall objective is to become a better version of the company you were before, and to realign in light of your new strategic goals, there are four steps you must take.

Start by “renewing your vows” to your Mission and Vision. As a business grows, it’s easy to lose track of your initial reasons for starting the journey you’re on and certainly for the initial enthusiasm that got you and your team going to fade. When resetting, revisit that Mission and Vision, make sure it’s still relevant and useful, adapt it if you need to and reconnect to the purpose that ignited your fire. Help your team to reconnect too, remembering that there may be different factors that drive each person. Starting with the end in mind is crucial if you’re going to make good decisions as the business advances – otherwise you’ll find yourself trapped in cycles of short-term thinking that are difficult to escape from.

Then, review, revise and refresh your Values. Hopefully, your current set of Values can remain intact through your transition, but if the ones you have don’t work for you, change them. Maybe they were poorly set in the first place, or maybe they just don’t work for you anymore – whatever the case, getting your Values right is crucial to success. If you’re sticking with the same ones, analyse which elements of them remain relevant, and which need to evolve. Are they consistently lived up to? Do you need to change the emphasis or provide a new perspective on them?

Make sure this is a collective exercise – while Mission and Strategy should come from the top of the organisation, Values should be developed and revisited by the group as a whole, creating a sense of ownership. Pair this with a set of clear Non-Negotiables – minimum standards, collectively agreed, that outline what you expect of yourselves, and of each other, every day. By doing so, you raise both the bar of what’s expected and the floor of what’s accepted.

After each transition, it’s normal for companies to want to move faster, perform better and achieve more. To raise the level of performance, it’s crucial to put tighter, more focused performance cycles in place. This isn’t about micro-management, but providing clarity, alignment and direction to your team. Once you’ve agreed overall company objectives, and broken them down into individual goals, your next step is to review progress regularly in order to adjust, reprioritise, deal with issues and provide support. Ideally, you’ll have informal check-ins at least once a week between a line manager and their reports, with broader progress updates on a monthly basis and formal reviews each quarter. Your goal in these reviews should be to keep each member of the team on track with delivering their personal objectives, identify and address challenges, and to connect them with other members of the team or organisation as needed. Regular 1 to 1s are among the most powerful tools in a line managers’ repertoire and have been shown to have significant positive impact on both engagement and retention, making them central to a high-performance culture.

Going further faster typically requires people to develop new skills. Ensuring your employees have the support they need, tied to their personal objectives, will help them to deliver those goals more effectively as well as increasing their capacity to take on new responsibilities. Development plans should be practical – the majority of actions included in them should be focused on helping the individual deliver in their current role. By setting stretching goals, reviewing them regularly, and providing the development support required to achieve them, your team will become stronger and more capable in very short order.

As you implement these four key steps, there are some common challenges to watch out for. Given the scale of change during transition periods, it’s likely that some initiatives won’t work as expected. Make sure you’re listening for and attending to the feedback your team provide – not only will they see things you don’t, but failure to include them and engage with their concerns will create more resistance.

Similarly, you and the rest of your leadership team need to be both patient and persistent in driving change. Real cultural transitions take time, require ongoing reinforcement and iteration, and live or die on how well leaders role model the changes they expect from others – don’t rush the process, but remain consistent in your efforts. It will be painful at times, but the worst thing you can do is leave change halfway done.

A successful cultural reset will mean that your transition period ends with improved engagement, resilience and energy, positioning you for further growth and progress. It’s challenging to pull off, but remember that at these point of change, your culture will shift – the key question is whether you’ll guide it, or just let it happen.