The Culture Ceiling | 120 Seconds to Better Leadership
*Video Transcription*
I want to talk today about cultural ceilings. A cultural ceiling is not a glass ceiling, but it feels about the same when you’re hitting one.
What’s a Culture Ceiling?
A cultural ceiling usually occurs when a leader is brought in to instigate significant change in an organization, and they find that they hit a wall of resistance throughout the organization that is too cumbersome for them to overcome.
A real-world example
An example of this: I had a CTO that I was supporting in his role assimilation. He had full support from the CEO. I mean literally, blank check, anything you need to be successful you’ve got (which he was prone to sharing, which didn’t help him much – he learned to stop doing that).
But even with that level of support – all the resources that he needed, as many people as he needed, as many consultants as he needed – what he found over time was that the resources weren’t going to get the job done.
Because he couldn’t win the hearts and the minds of enough people to gain momentum. And so, he couldn’t really create the dramatic shift in results that he was hired to.
He would have had to change the whole culture of the organization to have made that happen. And, of course, one man can’t do that.
How to Avoid Hitting the Cultural Ceiling
When organizations bring in folks, particularly from the outside to create major culture change, they should think about preparing for change. It shouldn’t really be the new person coming in, saying, “Hi, I’m here, I’m new, and I’m going to change everything that you’ve been doing.”
The organization really needs, from the top down, to be conditioned for change. They need to be prepared for change.
They need to let people know what it is, let them know what it isn’t. Let them know who’s in charge. Let them know they’ll be consulted on how the change unfolds so that people can mentally get their heads in the game around preparing for significant change.
People think people are change-resistant and that they don’t like change. It’s not true.
People like change if it benefits them and if they see a benefit to the organization. It’s change that they don’t understand or are not prepared for that they can’t handle.
And if you’ve got the largest portion of your organization that’s not prepared for change, one person can’t make that happen. It has to be a group effort.
There has to be buy-in across the organization with the prep work done before the executive is hired. That way, they can come in and experience less resistance, and they won’t hit that cultural ceiling that makes them unable to succeed.
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