Page 121 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

110 HBR Leader’s Handbook
Symbolic actions to model cultural behaviors

As a leader, you can have an outsized influence on your organization’s
culture by modeling the behaviors that you want to encourage. A study
by Angelo Kinicki and Chad Hartnell (described in Alison Beard’s article
“CEOs Shouldn’t Try to Embody Their Firms’ Culture”) found that CEOs
in the best-performing organizations actually behave differently from
the prevailing culture because their job is to bring new ways of working
to the table. They note, “Leadership styles are contagious. So, if a CEO
[who wants to drive more discipline around results] . . . does strategy
and implementation reviews with his top team every other week for a
year, it will have a trickle-down effect and eventually change the culture
of the whole enterprise.”
Leaders also can influence organizational culture through small,
subtle, and even symbolic actions. Jack Welch used to send personal,
handwritten notecards to employees as a way of reinforcing and recog-
nizing particular behaviors that he wanted to encourage. Robert Galvin,
former CEO of Motorola, often would have his lunch in the employee caf-
eteria to signal that executives were accessible and wanted to listen. The
new president of a large financial firm that we worked with prominently
displayed a “no whining” sign in her office to reinforce her emphasis on
solving problems and not just complaining about them—a message that
quickly circulated through the ranks. Other executives we’ve seen have
used their personal involvement in nonprofit causes as a way of encour-
aging their people to give back.
One reality of being a leader is that people infer messages and signals
from your behavior, whether you intend to convey these or not. Anne Mul-
cahy of Xerox told us that one of the toughest things about being a CEO is
that she had to be “always on,” and even things she said or ways she acted
in unguarded moments could be interpreted as important. The downside
is that the bad behavior of a leader (insensitivity, abuse, lack of account-
ability) can create a license for everyone else to act that way, which can
lead to an extremely dysfunctional culture. The upside, however, is that
the impact of your positive behaviors can multiply many times over.