How Leaders Champion Culture: Six Essential Lessons

Core values are ubiquitous — but unfortunately, in most organizations, core values are also irrelevant.   Only a handful of companies, which the authors call the Culture Champions, buck the trend and consistently walk the talk of their espoused core values, according to employee reviews. In a series of podcasts, the authors have spoken with leaders of several of these companies, including HubSpot, the Lego Group, Bain & Co., Hermès, and Cummins, to understand how the leaders embed core values and leadership expectations throughout the organization.  You can learn from these six key insights that they shared on how to champion your organization’s core cultural values.

1. Involve employees in articulating core values to ensure authenticity.  Managers sometimes cherry-pick cultural elements from other companies and attempt to impose them on their own organization. Unfortunately, those values are often divorced from organizational realities and fail to resonate with employees. A better approach is to include employees in the process of surfacing and articulating values to ensure that they’re rooted in the company’s distinct history, leadership style, size, location, and other factors that shape corporate culture, Burke advised.
2. Enlist volunteers to embed culture throughout the organization.  A bottom-up process is a powerful way to not only articulate leadership principles but also embed them throughout the organization. “You need buy-in,” said Loren Shuster, chief people officer at the Lego Group, and “there’s only so much you could do at the top of the organization.” You need as many employees as possible to be truly committed to upholding the organization’s purpose and executing the strategy, he said.
3. Coordinate your people processes to reinforce cultural values.  A common feature among the strong cultures the authors have studied is that leaders use their people processes as tools to reinforce desired values and behaviors. Recruiting and training, for example, are not only deployed to hire great talent and build skills but also to reinforce corporate culture. These people processes are most effective when they heavily involve leaders who embody the desired culture.
4. Use core values as a framework to make key business trade-offs.  For Sharon MacBeath, group human resources director at Hermès, one of her first initiatives after joining the luxury fashion company was a leadership program for senior managers called Leading With Art. “Leading With Art was a lot about dialogue with tradition,” she explained. “How can we stay within the culture of the company and at the same time make sure we’re moving forward, make sure we’re anticipating the way societal expectations and the world [are] changing?” 
5. Provide basic skills training on how to have critical conversations.  Encouraging constant debate helps organizations navigate uncertainty, but it can be hard on leaders: They must listen to a continuous stream of critiques, manage emotional debates that can boil over, and avoid taking negative feedback personally. Jim Whitehurst, former Red Hat CEO and IBM president, helped build these leadership skills with his team at IBM by introducing a framework to help structure and lead difficult discussions. All people managers received training on using it.
6. When someone is a poor cultural fit, recognize it and address it.  Few companies are more intentional about building and maintaining corporate culture than Cummins, a manufacturer of diesel engines and integrated power systems.  “We have had people self-select out, and we’ve also selected people out when their behaviors … have not matched with what we believe is important,” he explained. “You know, when we’ve had situations where we had to say, ‘This is not working,’ most of the time, it’s not been based on their ability to achieve results. It’s been based on how they go about doing it within the organization. And we make that very clear.”