leading culture change – the role of the ceo and senior management team

Executive Summary

1.     The leadership of the CEO and senior management team is the single most important success factor in culture change programmes according to Business Intelligence's research.

2.     The senior management team must understand the need for, and business benefits of, culture change, otherwise lasting change will not occur.

3.     The research also finds that culture change roll-out requires corporate leaders to invest a significant amount of time and effort.

4.     Linked to the above, senior management must take an active lead in communicating the need for change throughout the organization.

5.     The importance of senior managers role-modeling desired new behaviours cannot be overstated.

6.     According to one theory, organizations are 'shadows of their leaders'. So a company's behaviour tends to be congruent with that of its leaders.

7.     Changing senior management behaviour can, our research shows, be difficult, but is vital if the rest of the employee-base is to be asked to change its behaviour.

8.     Corporate value statements can be powerful tools for aligning behaviour with the new cultural ethos. But such statements are often not effectively implemented within the organization and, crucially, too many senior managers do not align their own behaviours with these new values.

9.     Vision and mission statements can be powerful tools for aligning behaviour with strategic goals, but suffer from the same shortcomings in design and implementation as values.

10.   Culture change specialists Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group provide a useful model of 21st Century Leadership. This shows how winning behaviours in the future will be diametrically opposite to behaviours valued in this century.

11.   A case study on KFC demonstrates best practice.

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