You can’t delegate culture. You have to lead it.
“I hired you to fix the culture.”
It sounds like a reasonable thing for a CEO to say to a new Chief People Officer. But behind that sentence is a subtle trap. One that stalls transformation, demoralizes HR, and keeps toxic patterns alive far longer than they should be.
Here’s the truth: culture is not something your People leader can fix for you. It’s something your executive team must commit to owning—starting with you.
Culture Problems Are Leadership Problems
When morale is low, silos grow, and trust erodes, it’s tempting to outsource the solution. Hire someone “brilliant.” Launch a values campaign. Run a few pulse surveys.
But culture doesn’t change because you hire the right person. It changes because leaders start modeling the right behaviors.
If you reward results over relationships, avoid feedback, or let dysfunction fester in your senior team, no HR strategy will overcome it. Culture reflects the worst behavior leaders are willing to tolerate. And that always starts at the top.
Why Culture Work Stalls
We’ve seen it too often: a capable Head of People is brought in to clean up years of cultural drift. But no real authority is given. No executive alignment is built. No modeling happens at the top.
The result? Great strategy, stalled execution. Mistrust lingers. Turnover grows. And the CEO quietly starts to blame the People team.
But it’s not the People team’s job to drive culture alone. Their role is to support and scale what the executive team is willing to lead.
What Culture-First CEOs Actually Do
Here’s what we see in organizations that successfully shift culture:
- They own it. The CEO doesn’t just sponsor culture work—they embody it, every day.
- They align their team. Culture shifts when the executive team is united in how they lead, decide, and behave.
- They model what they want repeated. Feedback. Clarity. Vulnerability. Accountability.
- They embed it in systems. Hiring, feedback, promotions, meetings—all of it reflects and reinforces the culture they want to build.
You can’t “People Ops” your way out of a leadership problem. But you can lead your way into a healthier culture.
Where Leaders Rising Network Comes In
At Leaders Rising Network, we don’t run culture workshops in a vacuum. We work with executive teams to lead culture on purpose—with systems that stick and leadership that scales.
That starts with our People Development GPS, a focused diagnostic conversation designed to uncover where your culture is helping or hindering progress. We look at where your people systems are aligned, where trust breaks down, and how leadership behaviors shape the day-to-day experience of your team.
From there, we build a plan. Not a branding exercise. Not a motivational speech. A real plan for equipping leaders, aligning systems, and reinforcing culture through every layer of your organization.
The Bottom Line
If you’re the CEO, you set the tone. You shape the culture every day by what you reward, what you tolerate, and how you lead.
So before you hire someone to “fix the culture,” ask yourself this:
Am I ready to lead it?
💬 Ready to Lead Culture, Not Just Talk About It?
We help executive teams align their leadership and build culture systems that actually change how teams work together. Let’s talk about what that could look like for you.
