8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture

Carolyn Taylor describes three mechanisms through which messages are communicated as a means of supporting changes of culture. The exam tests these as a set — most often as a NOT question offering a plausible fourth — so learn all three and be confident about what is not on the list.

The three mechanisms

Behaviours

What leaders actually do. Every action a leader takes is read by the organisation as a statement about what is genuinely expected, and where behaviour and words diverge, behaviour wins.

This overlaps directly with Schein's primary embedding mechanisms — how leaders spend their time, react to problems, allocate resources and reward or penalise people — and with the observation that words constitute only around 7 per cent of the message.

Symbols

Symbols are the patterns and stories that carry meaning beyond their literal content. CM3 gives two categories:

• Patterns — as Taylor puts it, part of 'a larger pattern', such as patterns in how leaders make choices about use of time or resource allocation. A leadership team that cancels the customer forum but never the budget review has communicated a priority, whatever it says about customer focus
• Storytelling — following a pattern, as in the values in fairy stories and national legends. Storytelling talks about the defining moments of an organisation's history, together with its heroes and villains

Organisational stories are cultural instruments. The story about the engineer who stopped the production line and was backed by the director, retold for a decade, teaches more about what is valued than any policy document. Change managers can work with this deliberately: identifying which existing stories support the change and creating genuine new moments worth telling.

Systems

Taylor describes these as "those mechanisms of management which control, plan, measure and reward your organization and its people". Examples include:

• The way HR systems, and especially performance management systems, operate
• Customer processes
• Organisational structure — how many levels? How easy is access to senior-level people?

Systems are the mechanism most often forgotten and the most powerful of the three, because they operate continuously and impersonally on everyone. A leader's good behaviour affects the people who observe it; a performance management system affects everybody, every cycle, whether anyone is watching or not.

Why the three must work together

The practical lesson is that culture change attempted through one mechanism fails. The recognisable failure pattern:

In each case the stated message is correct, the communication is professional, and the culture does not move — because a system or a remembered story is saying the opposite continuously.

This gives change managers a specific and unglamorous piece of advice: before designing a culture-change communication campaign, audit the systems. Ask what the performance management process rewards, what the approval structure permits, and what the organisational structure implies about access. If any of these contradict the intended culture, the campaign will fail regardless of its quality, and fixing the system is the higher-value intervention.

It also explains why sponsor responsibility 4 — aligning the organisation's infrastructure, environment and reward systems with the change, especially the way performance is measured and managed — is so heavily weighted. That is a systems intervention, and only executive authority can make it.

Applying the three mechanisms

A useful planning exercise for any culture-relevant change is to answer three questions:

1. Behaviours — what specifically will leaders do differently, visibly, starting when?
2. Symbols — what pattern of time and resource allocation will demonstrate the priority, and what story from the change is worth telling and retelling?
3. Systems — which measurement, reward, approval or structural mechanism currently contradicts the intended culture, and who can change it?

Answering the third question honestly is usually what determines whether the culture element of a change is achievable at all.

Using stories deliberately

Symbols include storytelling, and change teams under-use it because it feels less rigorous than a communication plan. It is worth being deliberate about three moves.

Find the stories already circulating. Every organisation has them, and they encode what people actually believe about change here. The story about the last programme that was cancelled after go-live is doing more work than any reassurance you issue. Knowing which stories are in play tells you what you are arguing against.

Identify existing stories that support the change. Most organisations contain a genuine precedent — a team that already works the new way, a past change that went well. Retelling a true internal story is far stronger than an external case study, because the audience knows the people in it.

Create moments worth telling. The defining moments Taylor describes are made, not narrated. A leader who reverses a decision because a front-line objection was right has created a story about whether challenge is safe, and that story will travel further than a statement about psychological safety.

The caution from the hearts-and-minds material applies here too: stories, like metaphors, must resonate with the audience or they undermine the message they were meant to carry.