How To Transform Your Culture By Hiring The Right Leader

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When organizations make senior leader hiring decisions they often focus on finding a leader who fits their unique culture as a major criteria. But, what if you are unhappy with the existing culture of the organization that the new leader will lead? What if you believe the current culture is negatively impacting the performance of the organization? Obviously, hiring a senior leader that “fits” the current culture is not the answer. It’s difficult to change an organization’s culture overnight. But putting the right leader in place is a great opportunity to change your organization’s culture over time. Many organizations when faced with replacing a key position or hiring a new position do not exploit this opportunity. There is typically an emphasis on short-term needs, hiring to fit the needs of the current organization today and not hiring to fit the needs of the organization in 3-5 years and the transformation that it will require. The challenge, of course, is understanding how you want the organization to change and hiring the type of leader that can drive that change.

To keep from missing this opportunity organizations should take the following 6 steps for each key hire:

Determine Your Current Organization’s Culture Objectively – Build an understanding of your current organization’s culture or in other words how the organization operates and gets things done. Every organization, like an individual, has a personality and tendencies for how they operate and what they value. There are a number of assessment tools and associated frameworks on the market that help you effectively do that.
Identify The Organization’s Performance / Competency Short-Falls – Attempting to change the culture for simply change’s sake or because of opinion is a mistake. Any change in culture should be driven by the need for change that either comes from current short-falls in performance or anticipated changes in the competitive or customer environment that will require changes in performance to compete. It’s important to work back from actual organizational performance improvement needs to determine what organizational competencies are lacking and if and how the culture contributes to these competency short-falls.
Identify The Ideal Culture for Your Organization / How You Need The Organization Change. Based on the changes your organization needs to make from a performance perspective, define the ideal future culture. This can be determined using culture assessment frameworks and also from looking at other businesses that have the culture you want to emulate and how they operate.
Develop Profiles For the Type Of Leaders That Fit The New Culture And Candidates. Identify the individual profile or profiles that will tend to operate in the way you want the organization to move. For example, if the organization needs to become more creative and adaptive to emerging changes in the industry, then the organization would want a leader that fits that profile. Again, leveraging assessment frameworks is important in this step. In some cases, hiring a “bridge” executive that has some characteristics of the current culture and some of the desired culture can be more effective for change management. Each candidate evaluated in the hiring process should be tested to determine if they are one of the targeted profiles.
Build A Framework For Evaluation That Weights Culture Appropriately. While hiring a leader that can change the culture is important, organizations should not optimize the hire for that alone. They should develop a framework that appropriately weights competencies and cultural fit for evaluating the candidates.
Involve All Hiring Decision Makers In Process. It’s critical to define and communicate to all decision-makers and influencers in the hiring process the objective of hiring a leader who can drive the appropriate culture change. This includes sharing the framework for evaluation of candidates and making sure that everyone is “on-board” with this objective approach for evaluating candidates to fill the roles. Without doing this the organization tends to gravitate to hiring professionals that are like them, like the person who was previously in the role and not the professional the organization needs for the future.

It’s difficult and sometimes inaccurate assessing what your organization truly needs in a new leader when a cultural transformation is needed. However, not taking these steps when hiring a new leader is a missed opportunity and simply leaving your transformation needs to chance. The organizations that need cultural transformation and get these key hires right greatly increase their chances of moving their organization to where they need to be to compete and win in the marketplace.