Culture Renovation: A proven blueprint for change

Colin Ellis
5 min readJun 26, 2024

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Many executives and HR leaders nowadays understand the power of strong organisational culture. (For the sceptics out there, just look at the data on engagement, retention, and performance.) But when it comes to actually renovating their culture, they often find themselves paralysed. Some treat it like a short-term project instead of an ongoing evolution. Others outsource the work to a firm of consultants who lack an insider’s view. It’s no wonder that so many leaders eventually give up, deeming culture change “too hard.”

Here’s the truth: With the right approach, continually refreshing your culture is relatively straightforward. It takes time, money and effort, yes, but these are the decisions that leaders make. After observing dozens of successful culture renovations over the past decade, I’ve identified a proven four-step blueprint that can start paying dividends in as little as three months. One frontline team I worked with did a complete overhaul in that timeframe. For most organisations, however, the full renovation takes around seven months using the same model.

So what are the four steps to reviving your culture? I’m glad you asked…

Step One: Intention

To drive real culture renovation, leaders can’t sit on the sidelines. They have to be all in — understanding the issues, owning their role in them, and resetting team norms from the top. This isn’t a fun off-site where they pay lip service to change over trust falls and campfires. It’s a profound commitment to personal and collective transformation in service of the organisation.

It takes remarkable patience, humility, vulnerability, empathy and discipline. Even when the initial spark of motivation fizzles and it’s tempting to abandon ship, truly great leaders stay the course. After all, stamina matters more than sheer strength.

Sometimes that means making tough, people decisions. I knew one CEO who ousted several longtime ‘lieutenants’ before launching a culture overhaul. As painful as it was, he recognised that they were too deeply invested in the old ways of doing things to fully embrace the new reality. While most leaders stumble here, protecting the status quo that protects them, real culture change demands courage over complacency.

Ultimately, leaders have to act with intentionality at all times. Just as parents who praise values like honesty have to model it, bosses can’t periodically demonstrate new cultural principles — they have to live them daily through their words and actions and then uphold them over the long term. That’s the only way cultures truly evolve from stale norms to cherished practices.

Step Two: Knowledge

Too many leaders assume that after years in business, everyone intrinsically understands what culture is and how to shape it. They couldn’t be more wrong. Vibrant, high-performance culture isn’t something that spontaneously emerges — it’s deliberately built and curated through daily words and deeds.

And the people truly architecting your cultural blueprints? The ones with the profound power to translate dreams into reality? It’s middle managers.

These unsung culture catalysts don’t just communicate the vision and the values — they mobilise it into action. They’re the ones setting expectations, creating psychologically safe spaces, recognising great work, and guiding teams toward goals.

In shaping the lived experiences of employees, middle managers are the architects of cultural DNA. Yet the business world chronically underinvests in equipping them with the skills to be exceptional cultural catalysts.

It’s a mind-boggling missed opportunity. When you enable great management, you empower the force that dismantles siloed fiefdoms. You unleash the collaboration that unlocks collective pride in shaping an extraordinary organisational culture.

Senior leaders can be the impetus for change. But middle managers are the catalysts that can make it happen. By arming them with the right cultural tools, you can forge an organisation of ambassadors committed to co-creating something extraordinary together.

Step Three: Action

Intention and education are a fantastic way to get started, but it’s only through action that cultural renovation is achieved. Year after year, employees invest time and effort in providing feedback — both formally through surveys and informally through the hallway whispers that make up the organisational grapevine. And year after year, their ideas fall into a black hole, leaving them disillusioned about whether their voices really matter.

When culture work is treated as a side hustle, an optional extra on top of people’s “real” jobs, they’re doomed from the start. Renovating culture requires more than carving out a few hours here and there. It’s a massive undertaking that deserves serious attention and sustained effort. If a few half-measures are scattered across too many fragmented priorities, you’ll end up with the organisational equivalent of lipstick on a pig.

That’s where leadership comes in. Senior leaders need to own the cultural vision, ensuring that decisions align with values instead of undermining them. They need to give middle managers the confidence to tear down the bureaucratic barbed wire that makes it so hard to get work done. And they need to unleash frontline employees’ creativity and autonomy so they can bring their full selves to work.

When we create cultures of psychological safety, where risk-taking is rewarded rather than punished, amazing things happen. People share their unique perspectives without fear of rejection. They come up with wild ideas and have the courage to put them into practice.

They solve problems instead of preserving dysfunctional traditions. Over time, vibrant cultures of risk and renewal become a magnet for other talented people. That cycle of energy is the difference between a company that’s all talk and no action, and one where they walk their cultural walk.

Step Four: Impact

When action is taken, there will inevitably be consequences. Sometimes those consequences are negative, and leaders have to draw on their experience and wisdom to chart the best path forward.

But in my experience of working with teams, the impact is profoundly positive. As Jim Collins memorably observed, “What gets measured gets managed.” The strongest cultures don’t just pay lip service to ideals like productivity and engagement — they relentlessly track their progress so they can course-correct in real time.

And here’s the crucial part: They do it in a way that amplifies people’s intrinsic motivation instead of dampening it. They don’t treat measurement as a form of heavy-handed oversight, but as a tool for enhancing active participation and collaboration. They recognise that when people feel empowered to shape the metrics and processes, they’re more likely to own the results.

And when people can see that the work they do is having an impact, it becomes the catalyst for pride, self-actualisation, continual cultural evolution and achievement.

I’ve helped many teams to reach this point and become culturally self-sufficient through this four step process over the last 10 years. Some took longer than others, but through their commitment, dedication, resilience and willingness to do something different, they all achieved the renovation that they were looking for. For these teams culture is no longer a ‘too hard’ initiative. It’s business as usual and people are excited by it.

Where do you need to start?

If you would like your own customised Culture Blueprint, simply schedule a free call with me. My business manager Aileen can set that up for us, email: hello@colindellis.com

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Colin Ellis

Global culture consultant | Best-selling Author | Keynote Speaker | Podcaster | Evertonian | Whisky Lover | Likes to laugh, a lot www.colindellis.com