Culture is Not HR’s Job
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Culture is not HR's Job: Executive teams have to own it.
This week’s #culturedrop is about the reality that building and sustaining culture is not just a function of HR. It needs to be a core competency of the executive leadership team. If you want culture to actually matter and be a tangible, living thing inside your organization, not just a poster on the wall, then it must to be owned at the very top.
Culture can’t be something that gets handed off to HR like a side project. Employee engagement surveys? Benefits? Legal compliance? Sure, those are functions of HR, but if you are on the executive team then culture belongs to you.
Culture starts at the top.
“Culture is cross-functional and it lives everywhere inside a company.”
In too many organizations, culture is a set of well-meaning buzzwords that live in isolation — values posted on the wall, employee feedback cycles, a few trainings here and there. But it is pretty much impossible for it to really stick and be real if the executive team isn’t aligned and committed 100%.
This isn’t like sales or finance that one department owns primarily. Culture is cross-functional and it lives everywhere inside a company. It belongs to every team and every department which has to start at the top. If the senior leaders aren’t fully aligned on what culture is, how it's defined, executed, and experienced, then it’s extremely hard to get it right.
Your leadership team doesn’t need to do all of the work to execute culture inside the organization, but they do need to be fully on the same page when it comes to culture in terms of:
Understanding what culture actually is
Agreeing on how it’s defined, communicated, and consistently lived inside your organization
Being committed to holding it as sacred; owning it and being accountable to reflect, uphold, and model the culture
“Culture is a promise to your people about how they will be treated by coworkers, managers, and what it feels like to be part of your team.”
Culture isn’t a campaign.
Culture isn’t an internal marketing campaign. It’s not a way to keep lower level employees “in-line.” It’s not a mission statement or a nice-to-have. Culture is a promise to your people about how they will be treated by coworkers, managers, and what it feels like to be part of your team.
When leadership talks about cultural beliefs, but either behaves, or allows behaviors that are counter to what is said, it obliterates trust and good-will. Gossip, politics, inconsistency aren’t just morale-killers, they erode belief in the very foundation of your organization’s identity.
“When leadership talks about cultural beliefs, but either behaves, or allows behaviors that are counter to what is said, it obliterates trust and good-will.”
That’s why alignment and accountability matter. If your values include integrity, collaboration, teamwork, or respect, and you have senior leaders violating, or allowing any employee to violate those norms with no consequences, it sends a loud and clear message to everyone: “This isn’t real.”
Culture as a core competency.
The executive team needs to be aligned on how to build and sustain culture, and their role in it.
They need to be crystal clear about what your culture is and what it looks like in action.
They need to be fully committed to it, Not just that the idea and concept of culture is important, but that it can’t be optional and that no one is exempt if you want employees to care and buy-in.
They need to understand that it has to be operationalized. It can’t just be a poster on the wall and something that gets pulled out once a year at a performance review. It has to get woven into all aspects of employee experience.
“When leadership owns culture 100%, people can feel it. And when they don’t, people feel that too. Employees know the difference between genuine commitment and performative values.”
You can’t fake this.
When leadership owns culture 100%, people can feel it. And when they don’t, people feel that too. Employees know the difference between genuine commitment and performative values.
If your culture is real, it becomes a powerful strategic advantage to boost performance, morale, attract talent, and retain great employees. If it’s not, it becomes background noise and a huge credibility gap that lets the air out of each of those areas of employee engagement.
I will die on this hill: Culture is not an HR project, it’s an executive team’s shared responsibility. If your executive team isn’t speaking the same language about culture and acting as a united front, then culture will always struggle to varying degrees and have a hard time taking hold.
Align on it, own it, live it. That’s how culture becomes real.
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop
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