We’ve Declared: “We Need to Change Our Culture.” Now What?

When leaders declare, “We need to change our culture,” it’s often said with passion, real insight, and a genuine belief that something must shift. However, what follows can be one of the most complex, challenging, and frustrating journeys a company will ever embark upon. In my experience, cultural change isn’t just about shifting behaviors—it’s about transforming values, beliefs, and mindsets on multiple levels.

Five Key Considerations For Your Culture Change Journey

Before diving headfirst into a cultural overhaul, here are five key considerations I’ve learned from working closely with great leaders over the last 20 years:

1. Culture Is About Mindset – Not Just About Behavior

   Many people view culture as a set of visible behaviors—how employees interact, the mood in meetings, and team norms. But culture runs much deeper. It’s driven by the underlying mindsets, beliefs, and values that shape those behaviors. Changing culture requires addressing these hidden layers. If you only focus on behaviors, you’re merely treating the symptoms, not the cause.

   In this context:

   • Values are the principles that guide behavior.
   • Beliefs are the convictions about what’s true or false.
   • Mindsets are the attitudes and approaches that apply those beliefs and values in daily actions.

   For instance, you might ask for more collaboration, but if people believe that competing against each other (or among other teams in the organizations) is the key to success, behaviors won’t change in any meaningful way. The collaboration you seek simply will not happen.

   Consider : Are you ready to dig into the values and deeper beliefs that drive the visible aspects of your culture?

2. Culture Change Is a Two-Way Street – Not a Top-Down Directive

   While leadership plays a crucial role in setting the tone for cultural change, bottom-up engagement is equally critical. Traditional thinking suggests that if leadership adopts new values, the rest of the organization will follow. In my experience, the view from the top can be a little hazy and you need to go deep to really understand what’s happening in the organization.

   Employees need to feel empowered to contribute to the culture conversation, which requires open dialogue, active listening, feedback, and visible actions. It’s worth saying the “listening” thing twice, so we don’t forget it.

   An approach to establishing two-way conversation includes:

   1. Creating a safe environment for employees at all levels of the organization to share their thoughts. Consider a combination of online, anonymous feedback mechanisms to gain trust, as well as moderated sessions where all feel comfortable contributing.
   2. Preparing leaders and moderators with tools they can use to encourage conversation while supporting them to avoid reacting to comments in a negative or emotional way.
   3. Reporting on what you’ve learned at various important phases of the process. This steps adds transparency to the process and helps employees feel heard.
   4. Implementing ideas gathered from the dialogue. Nothing says you are serious about this more than taking action based on feedback.

   Consider: Is your organization prepared to listen and involve everyone, or is it focused only on top-down directives?

3. You Can’t Change Culture Without Changing Structures

   Cultural change doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The systems and structures that support the existing culture must be addressed. This includes:

   • Incentive systems and performance evaluations
   • Office layouts in youf facility, as well as home and hybrid setups
   • Collaboration tool selection, such as email or Slack, Asana or Outlook
   • Ownership shares
   • Branded promotional items or meaningful giveaways
   • Self managed teams or close supervision

   These choices matter more than you might think. For example, if you want to encourage innovation but your reward system punishes failure, the culture won’t shift as expected. Right?

   Consider : Are you willing to overhaul internal structures and processes to reflect the new culture you’re aiming to create?

4. Patience and Persistence Are Non-Negotiable

   Cultural transformation isn’t a quick fix. It often requires years of consistent, persistent action. This is where many culture change initiatives fall short—they start with enthusiasm but lose steam as momentum slows or as “newer, shinier” work emerges. Culture isn’t transformed by a single campaign or leadership speech. It’s embedded over time and reinforced long after the town halls and corporate roadshows have ended.

   I recall interviewing young professionals who proudly claimed they had delivered significant cultural transformations within sizable teams in under a year. This always led to illuminating discussions, where we usually discovered that they had merely announced changes repeatedly without truly understanding the slow, messy nature of cultural evolution. True transformation isn’t about making grand announcements and moving on—it’s about committing to the process, even through resistance and setbacks.

   Consider : Do you have the patience and perseverance to stick with cultural change, even when results take longer than expected?

5. Culture Change Is Messy and Nonlinear

   Many assume cultural change is a linear process—set goals, align behaviors, and move forward. But in reality, culture change is often chaotic. People resist, systems break down, and unexpected challenges emerge. This is where you may be tempted to think: we’ve failed. But you haven’t, so don’t throw in the towel. Setbacks and chaos are part of the journey. I usually find that this is where the real learning and insight lies. Cheesy, but true!

   Consider : Are you ready to embrace the discomfort of the messy middle, or are you only prepared for a neat, step-by-step change?

Your Strategy Guide for Culture Change

Culture change can be quite powerful for an organization, and I hope the above outline has helped you put some structure to your approach. Now, let’s talk through what your strategy could look like so that you feel a sense of action as opposed to the need to make a big declaration of culture change. Consider these points:

1. Don’t leave your culture as some abstract concept. Make it tangible. What systems and processes enable it, and how effectively do they perform under the scrutiny of performance metrics?
2. Consider small, impactful changes. Your 2×2 axis of debate should be things that create “minimal organizational disruption & high positive impact”. Will small tweaks, scale to influence new mindsets or beliefs? Can simply focusing on a few key, measurable process changes or impacts make a sizable shift, rather than trying to change everything?
3. Ask what’s simply not needed or not designed for practical use and constricts the culture. Your shiny new performance management system might be so complex that it forces people to avoid important discussions. Your new best in class CRM that has so many screens and boxes your sales teams don’t want to use it and go rogue. Or what about the Long Service Awards that were implemented in the eighties, but don’t help your talent strategy in any visible way when you look at leaver and joiner data? The point here is to get tough on the stuff you’re doing that is either pushing against the culture you’d like, or neutral to it. Even if best practice tells you it’s uber cool.
4. Incorporate a few key measures into your business system related to the processes and structures that influence culture. These can serve as a bellwether to guide meaningful executive discussions, rather than the emotional debates or lost *sighs* that one frequently observes when teams discuss culture.

Final Thought: Culture Is Alive, Not Static

Culture isn’t something you change once and forget; it “happens” and will evolve and change with or without your influence. It’s alive and continuously shaped by the actions and attitudes of everyone within the organization.

Before declaring, “We need to change our culture,” make sure you’re prepared for the complexities ahead. Real, sustainable cultural change demands more than enthusiasm—it requires a commitment to deep shifts in mindset, ongoing dialogue, and the patience to let the transformation take root. However, by managing culture with a systemic, long-term view, that is informed by performance metrics and focused on systems and process, you’ll find that culture change feels less like a revolution and more like the natural evolution it should be.