We recently hosted people and organizational leaders at roundtable events in Toronto and Vancouver. We often tailor our roundtable discussions around a point of view, observation or known challenge (see our past posts on public sector, AI and hybrid work experiences). Defining these topics ahead of our breakfast sessions allows participants to consider their personal and organizational perspectives and arrive prepared; however, the trade-off is that by narrowing the focus, we may miss out on some spontaneous magic.
In this latest roundtable series, we encouraged attendees to come to the events with the challenges and issues that are most top of mind in their organizations and would benefit from peer perspectives. We facilitated the conversation in real-time, which makes the discussion dynamic, sometimes a bit unpredictable, but always meaningful.
This emergent approach allowed us to unearth just-in-time topics that, while not intentionally connected, ended up aligning around a single theme: the critical role of leadership in culture and change.
Compelling executives to prioritize culture
Attendees shared their experiences in rallying CEOs, executive leadership teams and boards around the culture imperative. It was clear that organizational alignment, confidence, maturity and action related to culture varies widely. For some organizations, culture is seen as a critical business driver for delivering on strategy, while for others it is characterized as a vague and reputationally risky endeavour to sponsor, especially when the organization's primary orientation is governed largely by fiscal constraint.
Participants offered stories and insights and discussed several opportunities for supporting executive confidence in prioritizing culture.
Opportunities
Developing a shared understanding of what culture is and how to shift it
There can be a surprising disconnect between what leaders think culture is (and isn't!), the role it plays in organizational performance and how to change it. Taking the time to create a shared understanding across the leadership team, regardless of where they are starting from, helps to build pathways of understanding between strategy (what an organization needs to do), culture (how they do it) and business performance.
Integrating culture into the business structure and process
We heard resoundingly that the best way to compel senior teams to prioritize culture is to integrate it into the rhythms and language of the business rather than isolate it as a separate workstream. This avoids distancing culture into an “HR problem” and connects it to an organization's existing systems.
One participant offered a helpful organizational alignment framework from Tosti and Jackson (2001), which was effective in building external credibility for understanding the integration between strategy and culture. The tool helps leaders appreciate that culture isn't over and above what they’re already doing. It is what they are doing now. Performance or results follow if the culture is designed intentionally to support the strategy.
Creating belief and setting expectations
The people who attend our roundtables tend to be drivers of culture who are motivated to bring their colleagues and executive team members along in becoming not just sponsors but champions and models for change. Their responsibility is to coach their CEOs to become more fluent and confident in culture’s potential as a lever of performance and speak persuasively to this priority with their boards and all levels of the organization.
As they help build momentum for culture prioritization, attendees recognized that it is critical to set expectations for the adaptive, often non-linear path through this complex work. It requires a shift from thinking about culture as a problem to be fixed to building new capabilities and mindsets to support acontinuous, never done approach.
Driving towards transformational leadership
Coaxing leaders into supporting culture change when competing interests are noisy and demanding can be challenging. Our roundtable attendees stood firmly behind the strategies mentioned above to build momentum for bringing senior executives along. However, one of the richest conversation topics emerged when we dug into the kind of leadership they need from individuals around the executive table – and what's missing – to meet today's uncertainty and complexity.
An organization's emotional economy – what they value and how they act – is revealed by who sits at the executive table. If a company's leaders value being right or perfect, being profitable at all costs, or if they accept fear and confrontation over vulnerability and safety, these traits become the limiting, lowest common denominator for the entire organization. And they are the antithesis of what's needed to transform.
In organizations where the executive makeup reflects this style of transactional leadership and the mindtraps of certainty and agreement, participants were aligned around the imperative to shift those executives towards more transformational thinking and behaviour.
Opportunities
Creating self-awareness for leaders
The shift toward transformational leadership must start with leaders’ self-awareness about where they are in their own development journey. This involves thoughtful, authentic personal exploration and reflection, so leaders understand their limitations, patterns and fears. Transformational leadership requires a new skillset that will allow them to respond to complexity and react to problems and challenges that can't be muscled through based on best practice or past experiences. Participants agreed that leaders can struggle with recognizing the gap between their experience and the need for help in building new skills. It requires a type of vulnerability that is often not modelled or rewarded with senior leaders.
Normalizing not knowing
Executive leaders achieve their positions because when responding to complicated situations they've shown that they are capable experts. They delivered on many occasions, aligned a team around a vision and led from challenge through to results with effort and persistence. This works well when challenges are known, but in today's (and tomorrow's) uncertainty, we face scenarios where we don't know what's going to happen next, where cause and effect are really only visible after the fact and solutions aren't repeatable.
We heard from participants, and see from our own work, that today's emergent challenges demand different skills from leaders. They need to be comfortable moving from being experts to being experimenters and learners; from plotting linear plans to learning through experience; and from leaning on a few expert opinions and data points to gathering diverse stories and experiences to inform direction. This shift to not knowing takes intention and support. It has an exponential influence on the capabilities, empowerment and confidence of peers and employees throughout the organization who may adopt a similar mindset. While this shift can feel uncomfortable, it is amplified with further acts of vulnerability: being transparent with the organization about not knowing and modelling that not only is this ok, it's encouraged and in fact a superpower.
This transformative skillset is essential for leaders and organizations to thrive in a rapidly changing environment and address the complexity of changing culture. Participants raised the question: if their leaders can't adapt to a more transformational mindset, are the right leaders at the table to guide the future of the organization?
Leading through the AI transformation
One of the constant areas of change in our discussions over the past couple of years has been the impact of AI on business and the role of leaders in this change. Each time we gather for a roundtable, the context of AI adoption evolves (as of course the technology itself does). This time, we noticed distinct progress from our past roundtable where we discussed the impact of AI on culture.
Opportunities
Growing maturity in AI
Participants shared a notable maturity leap in the AI space, moving from a position of fear and control and basic guard railing to the application of AI's potential across many organizational dimensions. We heard a common perspective that much of the value in AI lies in finding the unique space in each organization where the technology can remove burden, such as supporting administrative tasks and creating agents trained on specialist tasks (i.e., compensation, customer complaints) while creating opportunities to rethink skills for the future.
One participant offered this model for breaking down the role of AI in their organization, which provides clarity and guidance for employees as they explore and experiment:
Choosing how to lead through AI transformation
Leaders play a significant role in deciding how to approach the continuously changing opportunity that AI introduces. They set the tone for how AI works alongside people and teams. Leaders can exercise choice in what the experience is for their people, noting that organizations can either take a combative and aggressive stance (i.e., Shopify's approach of having to prove that AI can't do the job before hiring/adding resources or headcount) or choose a more human approach.
Leaders around the table recognized that there is choice in how we envision AI's role: is it threatening and taking away jobs or is it about acknowledging that people's jobs are changing, and we need to work together to find the sweet spot of effectiveness and developing the skills of the future while balancing environmental impact and fear? There is a human way to lead through it this moment, and the heart of it is co-creation and leaning into the complexity skillset of experimentation, transparency and empathy noted above.
Leadership is the throughline
We saw through this roundtable series that transformational leadership is the most critical way for organizations to respond to today's complex environment as well as the unknowns of the future. Participants inspired each other through stories of their own struggles and successes, built connection and community and a find themselves in a like-minded community of organizational leaders and change makers.
