What’s one of the biggest mistakes leaders make when it comes to culture? They leave it to HR, thinking that they are the ones who know about people, so it’s best left to them.

“In my opinion,” says culture change practitioner Andrew Saffron, “at that point, you’ve lost before you started because you’ve told the business that we are giving it to a team of people who, by definition, support the business, rather than lead it.”

Saffron has spent his career becoming an expert in this area. He studied psychology at university before joining a large American bank which, he says, loved the idea of him having a psychology degree. With this experience on his CV, he made the move into consultancy and over the past three decades has worked with some of the world’s biggest organisations.

More recently, he served as chief of staff for the NHS Nightingale Hospitals programme during the Covid-19 pandemic. He’s now written a book with the aim of showing that rapid organisational culture change is possible. He says: “It’s taken 20 or 30 years for businesses to recognise that culture isn’t a soft fluffy subject.”

“Culture change was the thing I loved,” he reflects, “because it makes such a big difference to business and individuals. But it was quite hard to persuade anyone sitting on an executive team that it was an important subject. It makes a massive difference to an organisation’s performance and, at the same time, it has this amazing byproduct of making life better for the people in the organisation.”

Instead of passing the buck to HR, leaders should actively show that culture is important, that time and resources will be dedicated to it and that it will be a focus across the organisation.

He recommends that businesses analyse their culture, but not by launching a review that takes weeks and costs hundreds of man-hours. Instead, he recommends a task that takes just eight minutes (and which you can discover more about in the video below). It’s founding principle? That the only reason to talk about culture is to determine whether a change is going to help a business achieve its strategic goals or get in the way.

Saffron stresses that it’s important to get as many people across the organisation involved as possible when doing this, for two reasons. First, because a senior leadership team won’t have the same perspective as the rest of the organisation. Getting a swathe of feedback across departments and levels of seniority will either confirm or bust views on what is actually happening.

Second, the simple act of asking people for the data in that eight-minute analysis is a basic intervention in itself. It’s a way of saying to your team that you care about their experience and their ability to perform.

However, a word of warning. If you don’t create the right environment, people will clam up. If you do, people will divulge. “Don’t go in as one of the suits,” says Saffron. “Go in and talk to them as grown-ups and you get grown-up data.”

Saffron describes in his book, Better Culture, Faster, what you need to do to clearly signal change after the culture analysis has been completed. What will emerge is up to five ‘cultural imperatives’. As the name suggests, these are the aspects of a company’s culture that you need to address to enable you to achieve your strategic goals.

As an example, Saffron talks about three cultural imperatives garnered from one of his clients. These were freedom, helpfulness and mastery. Each of these has its own reason, strapline and required actions for both the leaders and team members.

Take, for example, helpfulness. The reason the company has as to why it was chosen as a cultural imperative is the following: “We do not work effectively across organisation boundaries. Teams celebrate when they achieve goals, even when it is at the expense of other teams achieving theirs. We do not share performance measures, resources or ideas in service of common goals.”

Then they added a strapline. The strapline must capture both the essence of the change and signal that change is coming. They chose: We collaborate purposefully and serve consistently.

The guiding behaviours for leaders contain clear guidance to follow. They agreed, as leaders, to:

• Encourage positive challenge and feedback to continuously improve results
• Ensure that I am available to those who need my support
• Build a supportive environment where people can be themselves
• Place customers and service at the heart of decisions

And the guiding behaviours for everyone to follow were:

• I will act with openness, humility and respect
• I will exercise empathy in the face of disagreement
• I will challenge myself and others to get a better result

What emerges when followed across all agreed cultural imperatives is a playbook for every decision or action that takes place across the organisation.

Measuring whether or not these embedding activities are working is crucial. Saffron suggests a short pulse survey based on your cultural imperatives. If you have three imperatives, that’s three questions for everybody in the company to find out how the business is doing. Start with a baseline. Do it again a month later and then a month after that.

One of the biggest misconceptions about culture change is that it’s a process that takes years. “My clients don’t have years,” Saffron says. “Either they’re falling off the edge of a cliff and they’ve got to turn around performance really quickly. Or, they’re doing okay but they’re starting to plateau or they’re trying to be disruptive, in which case they want to get ahead of the game and don’t have years either.”

As a leader, you may look at this as just another thing to add to a burgeoning list of priorities. However, having worked with organisations that claim to have 29 priorities, Saffron says businesses need to see culture as more than just a focus. “Culture is the North Star that directs everything else,” he says. “Everything needs to be connected into it. If that means shutting other priorities down, either for good or for now, shut it the hell down.”

This North Star of culture isn’t stagnant. It constantly evolves with the organisation as it grows but the biggest obstacle to the introduction of a new culture is the old one.

Andrew Saffron’s book Better Culture, Faster: Because you don’t have time for bullshit is available now.