Changing People Can Be the Quickest Way to Change Your Culture

So much has been made of corporate culture these past few years, and it has proven to be a vexing problem when the culture does not support an incoming CEO’s vision for where he wants to take the company, or worse, is just plain toxic.

Over my years working with CEOs and Boards in shaping leadership teams, the one question I always ask clients is, “If you had to do it over, what is the one thing you’d do differently?” Invariably, the answer is, make the tough people decisions sooner. When deciding to fire someone and bring in new talent, it can be a very taxing decision, fraught with concern for the individual as well as the reaction of the team. But the fact is, the most typical reaction is that of relief; a collective “what took you so long”! And the outgoing executive is released to find new challenges and opportunities. It can and should be a win-win.

This was recently corroborated by Levi Strauss’ outgoing CEO, Chip Bergh when he went public about the one thing during his 13-year tenure that he wishes he'd done differently.

While he knew that the best way to turn around the stale company was to refresh its leadership team, leading Bergh to remove more than half of his executives, his biggest regret is not terminating the people soon enough when he knew there was "something not right."

In fact, Bergh admitted that the business lost some of its best leaders because he was too slow in acting on getting rid of employees who needed to go and promoting other talented people.

“The easiest way to change the culture is to change the people. I had 11 direct reports, and in the first 18 months, nine of them were gone,” he said. “My biggest regret is that we didn’t lean into some of these great leaders, and we lost some because I held on to somebody longer than I should have.”