In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, what enables a leader to cultivate a culture that positions the organization for success? While culture is created and sustained at all organizational levels, leaders play a pivotal role in shaping and nurturing norms and behaviors. Leaders across various sectors face unique challenges in shaping culture, from family businesses to healthcare to academic institutions, yet in all cases, this work requires intention, attention, and persistence.
Family Businesses
CFAR often works with family business leaders to grapple with the pivotal role culture plays during generational transitions. They must consider how to keep elements of the legacy culture while introducing practices and values relevant for the future.
A recent case study illustrates this: a 74-year-old founder of a large privately-owned industrial chemical company passed the reins to a non-family CEO and came to CFAR for help. His primary focus was on preserving the company’s core values while positioning it for future success and how to sustain the culture of the business beyond his succession as his children and, eventually, grandchildren guide the company’s future. The solution involved engaging family members across generations in open communication about culture and ways of working in the company, aligning diverse perspectives around a shared vision, and developing a robust governance program to deepen shared values that honored the culture of the past while positioning the organization for future success. The outcome was a clearly defined set of values to guide the company into the future and the behavioral supports needed to sustain them. We recommend reading our colleagues Debbie Bing and Eliza Orleans’s recent article in Family Business Magazine to learn more about these ideas.
Healthcare
Within a large healthcare system, CFAR worked with a physician leader who struggled to help their high-stakes clinical department make essential shifts in identity and focus (described well by Tom Gilmore).
This unit faced issues of workforce burnout that complicated dynamics in multiple areas — between senior and junior physicians, between clinical and research priorities, and generational shifts in expectations and incentives. The intertwining of diverse demographics, group dynamics, and financial pressures on the department all interacted in challenging ways. The solution: build a collective vision for the future. Knowing where the department was headed enabled the leader to clarify performance expectations, new ways of working, and structural supports to make it easier for faculty and staff to do what was expected. This became the foundation of a more engaging culture that brought back some of the joy in the clinicians’ work across the department, along with an ability to see their impact on the patients and trainees they served. We work with leaders in these complex settings to understand their journey along a trajectory of organizational maturity and emphasize the importance of culture and psychological safety along the way.
Higher Education
Leaders in higher education are navigating significant cultural challenges, particularly given the current political environment of strife and tension concerning social issues and how these divide campus communities by identity, role, and political belief.
Brian Rosenberg’s recent book, “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education,” explores the challenges of change in higher education and the forms of resistance presidents and other leaders face while advancing transformative change. The former president of Macalester College, Rosenberg presents a look at how academic cultures and systems work to resist significant change, whether through structures of faculty governance, tensions between board and campus leaders, the need for consensus decision-making, or, more broadly, the protected place many colleges occupy behind their institutional walls. Rosenberger confesses that he was unable to make much significant change during his 17-year tenure at Macalaster even though he feels he was a successful leader, a sense of despondency we often encounter in leadership groups in higher education. One way forward is to help envision a more inspiring future using structured tools (see CFAR’s Briefing Note: Tools for Future Thinking in Turbulent Times). Rosenberg cites innovative leaders like Michael Crow at Arizona State University and Freeman Hrabowski, the former president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (both institutions where we were privileged to work) as innovative thinkers who managed to create change in culture and identity through programs and initiatives that reshaped their institutions and higher education more broadly. No easy task!
Conclusion
Leaders can create the territorial conditions that allow a thriving culture to grow by focusing on relevant levers that orchestrate cultural change. A culture that supports excellence, innovation, and adaptability does not happen by chance — it is cultivated through intentional leadership at multiple levels. What the leaders in the cases above have in common is the ability to move the organization towards a new cultural future by empowering others to engage in that work. Whether leading a family business through a generational transition, guiding a clinical department toward greater collaboration, or steering an educational institution through complex societal changes, the leader’s role in shaping culture is critical and nuanced, as their actions, decisions, and communication all contribute to the cultural fabric of the organization. By embracing this responsibility with thoughtfulness and strategic intent, leaders can guide their organizations toward a culture that bridges from the current to a successful future.