Dustin Seale has spent over 20 years working alongside CEOs on achieving cultural change. While the pace of change has never been faster, it is all about creating the right growth mindset, he says.

Article by Dustin Seale – Managing Director EMEA with Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company, recognised as a leading authority and practitioner of culture shaping that enhances organisational performance.

It’s a moment that you might well dread as an HR leader. Your chief executive officer has emerged from a board meeting with a clear mandate to change the culture in the business. He or she has been inspired to grasp the nettle and drive dynamic change. You are about to sit in the front seat of a corporate roller-coaster ride.

As an HR leader, your job is to work with the CEO to find ways to get the organisation to where it needs to be, so it can compete effectively. For sure, you both appreciate it is about having the right talent and ensuring that the right teams are in place. However, a lot of what goes on inside the head of the CEO is not always clearly or easily articulated to the HR leadership.

At Senn Delaney, a Heidrick & Struggles company, we have spent a lot of time in conversation with CEOs. We ask them what keeps them awake at night. A recurring theme is ‘We are stuck doing the things we do and we’re slow to move and change’.

In an organisation contemplating change, there are a lot of moving parts to consider. There are new types of employees, such as Millennials, with different attitudes and levels of expectation.  There is tighter regulation and greater compliance. Your clients and customers expect an ease of access and a commitment to service. Meanwhile, amid global uncertainty, the political complexion is changing, with many CEOs admitting they have been blindsided by Brexit in the UK and the unexpected outcome of the US election.

Most organisations have a five-year strategy – and this is not a bad exercise.  However, it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Your strategy will need to be reviewed every six months to a year because the world is changing so quickly.

The question we hear from CEOs is: how can my organisation survive in this environment? The answer is really about building the requisite agilities in response to the ripples of change and having the ability to adjust quickly to new circumstances. The concept of agility and how to move and pivot is keeping leaders awake at night.

Just how important agility now is has been highlighted by my colleagues Colin Price and Sharon Toye in their new book, Accelerating Performance: How to Mobilise, Execute and Transform with Agility, which examines what sets top-performing companies apart and why some deliver so much more than others.

They point out that despite sharing the same goals and near-identical strategies, the performance of companies competing in the same sector varies dramatically (by up to 34 per cent).  What sets the top-performing companies – dubbed “superaccelerators” – apart is that they have worked out how to be both big and agile. They can build and change momentum more quickly than their competitors. And they have achieved this because they understand that this agility is dependent upon the ability to execute – something that is down to the mindset of the CEO and the way this is passed into the values and culture of the entire organisation.

So the onus for helping to push this cultural change is now being placed firmly in at the door of the HR leadership. The CEO sees the Chief Human Resources Officer as an ally in this need to change. The HR leader must encourage calm and consideration before allowing the CEO to dive into strategic change simply for the sake of it. But how does an HR leader assert their authority? In previous times, the HR professional was the person ‘taking the orders’. They were told by the board what was required and instructed to ‘make it happen’.

However, we now see the balance of power has shifted as people and culture take centre stage. Increasingly, HR leaders are playing a dominant role in driving change through the business.  The big question to answer: is this business led or HR-led? Both parties must reach the paradoxical thinking that “the answer is ’yes’”.

What is required is simultaneous leadership from HR and CEO. It is a both-ends equation. It is about balancing both sides. So where can HR help most? The most obvious elements to achieve agile processes is to keep it simple and direct. Firstly, it is about transmitting great quantities of information from the market back to where decisions and adjustments are being made. This has to be rapid and unfiltered information. The HR leader is in the business of supporting the creation of this process. The business is likely to hold essential customer and employee data and this can be used to make better business decisions, faster.

The second obvious area is talent. If you are going to move quickly, you need people with fast-moving minds and real capability. This requires a true assessment of your talent inside your business. You must build the talent you have, but you must bring in the right talent.

Furthermore, this is all about mindset – and changing the mindset of individuals within the organisation. That is the toughest nut to crack. You can always change a process and put in the data analytics and search for the right people to bring in, changing mindsets is far harder, and messier.

You need to move your people away from a fixed mindset. Organisations with fixed mindsets struggle to remain agile. It is about breaking old habits and norm and this does not work well in an organisation with a fixed mindset. You require a growth mindset where people are stretched and where a fear of failure is consigned to the past.

Dominique Leroy, the CEO of Belgacom, the state-owned Belgian telecommunications company, has been working with us. The company, now called Proximus, is headquartered in Brussels, employs more than 14,000 people, providing mobile, fixed line, internet and television services to residential and business customers. Dominique was appointed in January 2014 after a 24-year career at Unilever, most recently as managing director of Unilever Benelux. Her main objective was to return Belgacom to growth and profitability. It has been languishing for ten years.

“I thought if we could only unleash the power of all this talent in Belgacom in a consistent way with one vision and a good collaborative spirit, we could get much better results out of the company,’’ she says.

We worked with her to create a ‘Fit for Growth’ strategy, looking at infrastructure, networks, solution and people. It has been about creating the right environment to build and support a growth mindset.

“We began simplifying the organisation and becoming more efficient. We went from two brands to one, making sure that we put the customer in front of everything we do. But we also needed to transform the company to make sure that we could unleash this growth.’’

Proximus has been able to deliver a transformation in its level of service and customer satisfaction, while managing its costs. However, it has not been an easy and simple ride.

“I think the old habits always come back. We still need to be vigilant to make sure that we can continue to evolve in the new culture,’’ she says.

When the CEO decides that your culture needs to change, remind them this is one of the toughest journeys your business is ever likely to take.

Accelerating Performance: How to Mobilise, Execute and Transform with Agility, by Colin Price, executive vice president and global managing partner at Heidrick & Struggles and Sharon Toye, a partner in the firm’s London office, was published by Wiley in January 2017.