Human Resources are responsible for the corporate culture in many companies. Generally, the HRM Function can be responsible for monitoring the status of the corporate culture, several policies and procedures around the corporate culture, but the HRM Function cannot be responsible for the development and implementation of the new corporate culture.
The top management takes the high performance corporate culture as a nice extra usually, but in reality, the corporate culture drives the whole organization. The organization, which values the goals of the individuals most, has a better chance of not failing, when implementing the change project with the impact on the whole organization. As the employees feel, the goal is very important and not reaching the goal will have an immediate impact on their own career in the organization.
The top management of the organization always owns the corporate culture and the changes of the corporate culture have to be started by the top management itself. The corporate culture cannot be changed by the new set of policies and procedures; the corporate culture can be changed just by the behavior of the top management in difficult situations.
The danger of the implementation of the new corporate culture is always hidden in the real steps taken by the top management. When the times are good, the top management can do “tough” decisions, but in bad times, it is always difficult to make a decision compliant with the “new corporate culture”.
When the company decides about the design and implementation of the new corporate culture, it has always to start a big project aimed to the top management behavior and to address the real decisions, which have to be done differently. The top management has to commit to the new corporate culture and it has to demonstrate the behavior aligned with the new corporate culture.
As the middle management sees a completely different set of behavior, the middle management starts the alignment process as well. When the middle management sees a conflict between the “proclamations” and the real actions, they do not change, as they know, the corporate culture does not really change.
The implementation of the high performance corporate culture is not about the set of the presentations, it is about real actions of the top management as the employees can see real examples of changes and the rest of the implementation is done automatically.
