Culture in Motion: How HR Leaders Influence What Can’t Be Managed (Part 1)

For many HR professionals, working with culture hasn’t always felt like a clear or confident space, yet it has become one of the most critical areas in strategic HR today. Every few years, a new “culture” program is introduced through the organization. A new CEO wants to rewrite the values shaped by the previous CEO, culture ambassadors are internally ‘recruited’ to lead change, each initiative with its unique flavor. Much of that is “Branding & Marketing” rather than deep, enduring change as at the heart of what shapes culture is the way leadership shows up and how work gets done. It is in this space that the work of HR leaders and HRBPs can play the biggest role.

This blog is about this opportunity.

Why should you care?

Because at least 50% of your work is shaped, directly or indirectly, by organizational culture. Whether you address frictions and tensions within groups, lead a transformation project (tools, processes, solutions), or advise leaders on an individual basis, you already work with culture.

How well you do that?

First things first – Culture is an INPUT as much as it is an OUTPUT

Organizational culture is the sum of all things, the integrated lens through which we see ‘organizational life’. Leadership, change, transformation, communication, and processes all have a cultural display. It is shaped by the organization’s history, beliefs, and common practices that exist today. It’s the decisions people make under pressure, the tone leaders use in a crisis, the way colleagues respond when someone fails.

It’s a living system of meaning, interactions, and messages. Organizational culture is not even one. There are subcultures within culture that interact, and it’s something everyone can feel and see (although we’d rather they did not, sometimes).

As such, knowing how to work with organizational culture is not only a crucial but a timeless skill in HR. More so, it is not only timeless but, in my view, irreplaceable, at least for now, in spite of the wave of automation and augmentation that is here to challenge all work and us all.

What do I mean by ‘culture is an input as much as it is an output’?

You are working with a leader who wants to bring their leadership team together and maximize their joint value as a team, yet you feel powerful resistance. The source of this resistance could be traced back to several root causes, one may simply be the organization values a highly individualistic, competitive culture. In such an environment, it is harder to drive collaboration by choice, and it is harder to rely on others when the message hanging over everyone is to ‘be their own boss’.

It is cultural.If you take that as input, rather than trying to bend the system, you work with it.

The questions that come to mind are:

• What else is highly valued here?

• What other strong cultural elements can I harness to get people to work better together? And why?

That’s what I mean by input, and it is a great way to work within environments where your level of impact is limited (which is almost always the case, unless you are the CEO) yet, you are expected to enable leaders in a meaningful way.

The limitations of seeing culture as driven from the top

In most organizations, culture is driven or highly influenced from the top. Leaders want to set a cultural direction using their past experiences, both good and bad, to create a unique blueprint, unify effort, and shape identity. All of those are solid reasons to shape what leaders feel are ways to achieve the best results and flourish as an organization, and it is, for sure, driven by a very good intention. And sometimes, by fear.

The problem isn’t that; it is a combination of two elements: reality and agency.

• Reality is how a certain culture meets the day-to-day context: the interpretations, actions, and messages that drive work. Sometimes, what comes from the top has unintended consequences. A call for “speed” can create anxiety. A push for “ownership” can lead to isolation.

• Agency is how powerless or empowered people feel about their role in influencing culture. Even if we adopt a more traditional, hierarchical view that leaders have more influence over the organization, the way they see themselves in respect to culture (executors? influencers?) can completely change the dynamics of the organization.

And…as your organization grows and changes, what worked perfectly before can become your glass ceiling.

A pragmatic way to think about what fits, today, might be to consider what was the original intention of this cultural element, and is it serving us now? or

How does our culture drive the behaviors and practices that will take us to the next level?

Such questions can increase the thinking around culture and fit, reflecting not what leaders want to hear, but what they need to see.

Working with culture from the top isn’t about pushing the message down; it’s about giving it texture. Helping people see what “innovation” or “accountability” actually means here, in the rhythm of their daily organizational life.

It shouldn’t be confrontational either, but more framing through stories and observations that allow leaders to see the gap between the culture they want and the one people live.

So: What’s your mandate?

Understanding your mandate, or what you are expected to do and the freedom you have to operate, is a crucial step in taking the lead as an internal strategic advisor to your client. It will be the title of a future blog, but for now, let’s simply explore the range of possibilities.

• The X-ray – Sense making: You can be the one seeing the wood from the trees and making sense of it all. Do you experience contradicting messages, lower willingness to try and fail, tensions, and more? All are part of your X-ray tools of seeing.

• The Translator – Interpretation: Once you have made sense of the reality, you can help contextualize or translate it: top down (leadership messages to the team or area), bottom up (from the team to leadership) or to the sides. Messages can land as threat or opportunity depending on how we frame them.

  
  

• The Designer – Shaping lived experiences: You can shape the daily experiences: meetings, feedback loops, recognition, that either reinforce or contradict the stated culture. The designer doesn’t need to challenge the status quo directly but can start extending it to meet the needs of their client group in new ways.

• The Challenger – Feedback: At times, you will choose to face an existing unproductive or harmful culture head-on. That mandate is the strongest and most challenging, and it can come in different shapes and forms, strong or soft, direct or indirect. It’s a mandate to choose carefully, for the right moments, and when the opportunity is truly transformational.

The way you see your mandate shapes your “range” and so, your value.

The invisible hand

Adam Smith, the famous economist used the term “invisible hand” to describe how individual actions shape collective outcomes in markets. The same idea applies to culture.

Culture is the invisible hand of the organization, the force that guides behavior without formal rules.And HRBPs, by noticing and influencing the people and the everyday signals that feed it, can shift the hand’s direction.

Every time you help a manager hold a better one-to-one, shape an interaction, or question what a value really means in practice, you’re shaping what the organization pays attention to.That attention becomes belief.Belief becomes behavior.And behavior becomes culture.

You just need to see the system for what it is: alive, responsive, and always open to being gently tweaked forward.

Limor