Insist on collective ownership of the changes

One common trap is to make the HR department the owners of cultural change, while the CEO and the senior management team own the changes in business strategy. This type of functional decomposition of a change initiative is doomed to failure. This generally leads to senior managers becoming detached from the cultural issues, and thus neglecting their role modelling responsibilities. Employee cynicism grows (quite rightly!), and this can become a very powerful force for resisting change. This division of labour also leads to HR people being lumbered with programmes and initiatives that look like unnecessary overheads to the local line leaders, which HR people end up having to ‘push’ and ‘sell’. This can be a very disheartening outcome, especially when the initial ideas are often entirely sound.