Cause, Curiosity, Confidence, and Case: Your Journey to Impact (Part 3)

There is a point in every HR leader’s journey when you stop measuring success by the activities you deliver and start measuring it by the change you help shape. In the context of organizational culture, that means striving for better synergies, narrowing the gap between what we say we value and what people actually experience day to day.To shape your transformational impact, you need to consider four key ingredients: a clear personal cause, deep curiosity, grounded confidence, and a use case that presents a meaningful opportunity to make a difference in the organization.This blog includes practical steps to help you get started, along with common use cases to inspire your work.Personal note: If you’re tempted to skip to the bottom line, go ahead and start with Confidence and Case, but don’t stop there. Cause and Curiosity

are what give your work depth, direction, and meaning.

Let’s dive in.

Cause – The Why Behind Your Work

The path to meaning is different for every professional and the road to increased influence and impact is never smooth.

You might approach it from a place of fear of things going wrong or falling apart, or you might approach it from a place of insight: wanting to grow and educate others. You may even have a vision for the organization and how you see your role shaping it. Whatever your motivation is, have a clear cause. It will anchor your efforts when things get challenging and help you find a path through the messiness of organizational life.

What’s your purpose?

Curiosity – The Openness to See Differently

Curiosity is often misunderstood as simply wanting to know more. In the context of organizational culture work, it’s about seeing more and seeing differently, noticing patterns, questioning assumptions, and being willing to learn even when you think you already know.

Curiosity is fueled by knowledge. Without some grounding in how organizations function, your questions can remain superficial. Understanding how systems interact, how people respond to change, and what shapes behavior gives you the starting point to ask sharper, more meaningful questions.

Curiosity also means learning to see the whole from the parts. It’s what systems thinkers do naturally: connecting behaviors, choices, and small events to the wider dynamics that create them. You work with the Sales Organization? Great. What’s happening in Marketing?When something feels “off”, it’s rarely about one person or one team. It often reflects something bigger. Practicing curiosity in this way, means tracing the threads and asking questions such as, “What does this reveal about how decisions are made?” “How is trust built?” or “What does the organization reward?” It’s about understanding how things connect.

And then there’s humility, perhaps the hardest part. True curiosity asks you to step back from being the expert and instead listen to understand, not to prove. When you engage with someone who’s genuinely curious, you can feel it, in their attention, their thoughtful questions, and their presence. It’s rare, and for that reason exactly, its so profound. Choose to that person.

And when you’re stressed, and often we are, what I’ve found most helpful is returning to good, curious questions about organizational culture. It slows your thinking just enough to increase your capacity to notice what others might overlook.

• What is really going on here?

• What assumptions am I making right now?

• What might look different from another perspective?

• What change is actually needed?

Confidence – How to Step Up to Where you want to be

Confidence is not something you either have or don’t have. Like a muscle, it grows through stretching (experience), and it looks different depending on the situation. You might feel confident leading a conversation with leaders about the gap between the values they promote and what people actually experience in communication, yet hesitate when tackling friction in a team.

Confidence is built in stages and shows up in your ability to demonstrate certain capabilities as a professional. And then there’s mandate, where you’re asked to contribute. Be at least as confident and capable as your mandate. Otherwise, it’s like getting an invitation to the best event only to realize you’ve got nothing to wear

Level 1: The X-ray (Sense Making)

Every strategic HR leader needs to be able to operate at this level to become a strategic advisor.

At this level, your focus is on seeing clearly. It’s about stepping back from the noise and observing the patterns that shape how things work. You should know enough about organizational culture to start spotting contradictions or sensing unspoken tensions that quietly shape performance. You’re not fixing anything yet. This is the stage where you move from reacting to understanding the organization beneath the surface. That understanding builds your confidence.

Level 2: The Translator and the Designer (Engaging in Varied Ways)

Once you have a clearer sense of what’s going on and a solid foundational understanding, your confidence allows you to engage more effectively, through two distinct mechanisms: translation or design.

As a Translator, your strength lies in helping others explore the practical application of culture more clearly. If your company talks about “innovation”, what does that mean for a local team? How does it show up? How do we think about risk in our specific business environment?

More often than not, we address organizational culture as a “big bang”: a launch, a major communication. Yet, bringing it to the reality of work is crucial to drive alignment, clarity, and impact. Making it tangible, or contextualization, has a significant effect on how culture is shaped and how lasting and real it becomes.

As a Designer, you’re shaping experiences: moments that bring culture to life, such as how meetings and other ceremonies are run, how processes like recognition, feedback, and change are designed. These can all be delivered with intention to align with what you want your culture to achieve for the business and its people. Let’s say speed and quality are key values in your business, then in the context of onboarding new employees, the values should extend beyond the efficiency of the process to include how quickly people start delivering results.

Designers are culture shapers in action. They work through tangible artifacts, processes, communications, and rituals to make culture visible and repeatable.

Level 3: The Challenger (Working with Proactive Feedback)

This level requires more than capability. It requires some courage. You start to challenge the way things are, from how leaders show up to how processes and communications are designed. This isn’t about disruption for its own sake but about addressing what holds the organization back.

When thinking and acting at that level, you should ask yourself a crucial question: Is the tension you’re seeing intentional or accidental?

Some cultural tensions are deliberate. For example, leaders may intentionally promote “best in class” and “speed”, even though the two may conflict. They may believe that creating tension between values fuels innovation and pushes people to step out of their comfort zones. In this case, your role isn’t to remove the tension but to make trade-offs visible and applicable.

Other times, tensions aren’t deliberate: conflicting goals, inconsistent leadership messages, or outdated processes. Those are the ones worth bringing to awareness and reshaping.

Choosing

Everything is a choice. Where do you want to operate?

Case

When it comes to working with culture as input, not every moment calls for a full reset. Some opportunities emerge quietly, in subtle exchanges. Others appear during transitions or disruptions, when all eyes are on the ball.

Both in the rhythm and at the inflection point are essential for your strategic work.

In the rhythm culture interventions (see Table 1 below), shapes the day-to-day: meetings, feedback conversations, hiring decisions, how teams handle tension, or how they celebrate wins. These small but meaningful opportunities influence how work gets done. You might notice that a team avoids open debate or that a process rewards speed over collaboration. There are numerous ways to influence in these situations. See table 1 below for some ideas.

At the inflection point culture interventions (see Table 2 below)

the organization pauses or focuses on shaping something new. These are bigger, more intentional, often formal opportunities: a new strategy, a leadership transition, a post-merger integration, or an organizational redesign. Inflection points carry urgency and often a broader mandate to align on what needs to evolve next.

The foundations of both “in the rhythm” and “at the inflection point” are similar: feeling confident to engage and seeing the bigger picture.

Yet work in the rhythm is more subtle and calls for presence and constant engagement. Inflection points are sprint-like when energy is high at the start but can fade quickly, so you need to catch the moment.

To help you get started, I’ve created a few use cases which are shared below. The opportunity is there.My advice? Get stuck in, start playing with it. That’s the only way.

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