Understanding the "Buck" of Change
The Responsibilities of the CEO
by Alan Scheffer
"The Buck Stops Here" was an expression and a concept made famous by President Harry Truman in the mid 1940s. It was carved into a wooden sign prominently displayed on the president's desk in the Oval Office. Its implication was simply that President Truman understood there were certain things - decisions, tasks, responsibilities - that could not be delegated to anyone else: for these, the buck could not be passed.
Like Truman, business CEOs also understand that the buck stops with them. Even while crediting the efforts and teamwork of others, they readily acknowledge that they themselves are ultimately responsible and accountable for their organization's performance and achievements, no one else. This reality, and this understanding, constitute the genuine burden of the job of the CEO.
One such buck that, indeed, does stop on the CEO's desk is the responsibility for leading the organization through significant change. There is no one else to whom the final responsibility for the transformation of an organization's culture can be passed. Ultimately, only the CEO can achieve it.
The problem is this: while most CEOs understand this leadership buck stops with them, and are absolutely willing to shoulder that burden, they do not fully understand or appreciate exactly what "the buck" is.
We have found that confusion regarding those essential tasks that the CEO must perform to effectively lead change and build culture - the bucks - springs from a more basic misunderstanding, or under appreciation, of two fundamental aspects of the job and functioning of a CEO. CEOs consistently underestimate their own personal importance and impact.
Most CEOs do not understand their own importance, the weight they carry, and the impact they have on all the employees. They do not recognize, let alone appreciate, the constant, pervasive influence they personally have on, and throughout, the organization. They do not understand that their influence is personal and transcends the policies that they may enunciate or the strategies they may devise.
Simply put, CEOs have tremendous interpersonal importance and power - more than they think, more than they understand. Even though they themselves may at times feel powerless, they are always, in the eyes of employees, a person of awesome power and commanding, sometimes fearsome, influence.
CEOs need to recognize and accept the magnitude of this unavoidable influence. Once accepted, important questions clarify themselves: What should be done with this power? How should it be used? To what ends should it be turned?
These questions lead to the second source of misunderstanding.
CEOs fail to appreciate that developing and maintaining an effective organizational culture is the most important focus of their power.
CEOs must understand the most important responsibility of their job -one which can be neither avoided nor delegated - is to create and maintain an effective culture.
CEOs, whether they undertake developing culture to be a core part of their job or not, whether intentional or not, even whether beneficial or not, have a profound and inescapable impact on their organization's culture. Most, however, are unaware of the scope and pervasiveness of their cultural influence. Most do not realize that because of the personal power they wield, they are - albeit, often in accidental, inadvertent, and unplanned ways - daily shaping and creating the organization's culture.
Because of their power and authority, people are constantly trying to figure CEOs out, watching every move they make, attending to everything they say, noting every inflection, observing every gesture, and trying to determine what's really important around here. Top people tend not to understand that they are under constant observation and scrutiny, and because of that, they are unwittingly and unavoidably a continuous broadcaster of the culture. The CEO's moment-by-moment actions (and inactions) shape and proclaim the culture more clearly throughout the organization than any other single thing.
Recognizing the unavoidable impact they have on their organization's culture, CEOs must consciously make the design, development, and maintenance of their organization's culture a core responsibility of their job. They must understand that perhaps the most important and legitimate use of their power and influence is to build an organizational culture that draws out its human potential, unifies its elements, and taps the collective excellence of the people within it.
UNDERSTANDING THE "BUCKS"Because of the stature they hold within the organization, it becomes clear that a CEO must personally, consciously, and consistently take on certain responsibilities and certain tasks to achieve transformational change in the culture. These constitute the bucks that can neither be passed on nor overlooked.
These bucks can be grouped into several key areas: PURPOSE, VISION
The first responsibility that the CEO must assume - the first buck - is primarily personal in nature, and involves internal effort and private work.
The CEO must develop and maintain a clear sense of purpose and vision for the organization which has personal significance and meaning, and in which he or she genuinely believes. The CEO must have a clear and personally compelling sense of preferred future that surrounds, and creates the rational for, the targeted changes.
The achievement of planned cultural change requires a tremendous and sustained effort on everybody's part. To succeed, the purpose behind it and the vision animating it must be clear, meaningful, significant, and compelling to the people involved on both an intellectual and emotional basis. Here's the rub: for the change to be significant and meaningful to the people, the vision, and its achievement, must first be the clear, driving force of the CEO.
The CEO must simultaneously be the first believer in, as well as the guardian of, the organization's vision and purpose. The life and health of the organization's vision of the future is a responsibility that can neither be delegated nor neglected.
Developing and maintaining personal belief in the vision and mission of the targeted culture is a prerequisite for the next buck that stops on the CEO's desk.
COMMUNICATION
To effect a change in culture, the CEO must immerse the organization in communication about the change, its vision, its purpose, and the dynamics of the envisioned culture. And the system must be immersed, not just once, in a communication blitz, or even twice, or three times, but immersed constantly and fully and for a very long time. The system must be continuously saturated with information over an extended period about where it is going, how it is going to get there, why the changes are targeted, and how it is doing.
This long-term saturation is important because in any organization, culture - some culture - is being communicated 100 percent of the time, both verbally and nonverbally. It is an inescapable reality. The challenge in leading a culture change is to recognize that when the preferred, envisioned, and targeted culture is not being communicated, the old culture is.
The problem with communications related to most substantial change initiatives is not what is being said about the new culture, but how frequently it is being said, how much it is being discussed, how consistently it is being expressed, and how clearly the new culture is being communicated, both verbally and non-verbally.
In many transformation efforts we have witnessed, sincere efforts were made to communicate effectively about the change: its vision was clearly expressed, its values were articulated, the goals of the new culture were plainly outlined, and the importance of its achievement was clearly stated. Meetings were held, good meetings. Sincere and impassioned speeches were given. Articles were published in the in-house newsletter. Signs and posters were put up. The efforts to communicate were genuine. And yet, the results were meager; little momentum was generated.
In these situations, the communications surrounding the change initiative simply did not reach the minimum threshold required to stimulate and sustain significant change. The communications were not bad at all. They were simply insufficient - insufficient in terms of their amount, their consistency, their frequency, and their duration over an extended period - to significantly impact and overwhelm the old, entrenched, culture. It has been estimated that, in failed transformation efforts, the vision of the new culture was under communicated by a factor of 10! In other words, achievement of the desired cultural changes required 10 times more communication than was actually provided.
It is a clear imperative that the desired culture, its values, its attitudes, its beliefs, its processes, not just be announced and rolled out. They must permeate every meeting and discussion. They must be obvious in every decision and strategy. And perhaps most importantly, they must be reflected in every action and every behavior.
CEOs must understand that this communication imperative applies first, and most directly, to themselves. Unless and until the new culture is being constantly articulated in the words, and clearly demonstrated in the actions, of the CEO, the old culture will remain the standard, undercutting any significant change or transformation efforts.
URGENCY, SERIOUSNESS
To succeed, transformation initiatives must assume proportions of importance that command people's attention and energy. Tasks related to culture change can not be viewed by the organization as optional, or just one of the many things it should do if it ever gets time, or the latest in a series of development programs. For people to give the attention, time, and effort required to truly effect change, its achievement must assume such a sense of seriousness, even urgency, that its pursuit will not fade into the background of routine.
This compelling sense of importance must begin with, and emanate from, the CEO. No one else has the perceived influence and power to make its accomplishment an urgent focus of organizational attention. If he or she does not vest the effort with the requisite importance, it will fail. Period.
In practical terms, this means that transforming the organization and developing its culture cannot be something done in the CEO's spare time. Many things make legitimate demands on a CEO's time and attention, but the whole system health of the organization and its culture must assume a commanding position of importance and priority. Optimizing the system, developing its processes, embedding its values, and, refining the quality of its internal dynamics and relationships to correspond with the vision, must become a dominating part of the CEO's job. And he or she must make it, in turn, a compelling and central part of the organization's focus.
MEASURE, MONITOR
Two important facts have core relevance here.
First, we human beings pay attention to, and measure, what is important to us. The targeted culture will not assume importance until progress toward its accomplishment is carefully monitored and frequently measured.
Because of the power and authority of a CEO, what the he or she monitors and pays attention to becomes serious, and its accomplishment becomes urgent. If a CEO sets cultural goals but does not then clearly pay attention to them - does not measure performance against them, does not follow-up with them, does not ask questions about them, etc. - people will observe this to indicate obvious lack of interest or importance, and will therefore consider the transformation initiative itself to have little real meaning.
Second, but closely related, we cannot effectively transform something we do not know or understand. Understanding the current culture from the conference room is impossible. Gauging its health and current requirements only through reports is grossly inadequate.
To understand the culture, the CEO must visit people where they work and when they work. He must talk with them. She must observe them. The people know the culture. They know the conditions in which they work. They understand the real values that shape the workplace. They understand the systems that operate. They appreciate the dynamics which daily confront them. One cannot know or understand the current culture, let alone change it, without paying close attention to the people within it, measuring their attitudes, soliciting their opinions, monitoring their thinking.
RESPOND, REACT
It is not enough to just pay attention to the changing culture, monitor its progress, and measure its movement towards transformation. The CEO must react quickly and clearly to what he or she sees and hears.
The CEO's reactions - what this influential person praises, and what this powerful person punishes - shapes and organization's culture. A CEO's minute-by-minute reactions and responses to the daily details of organizational life communicate more clearly about that person's values and the culture they are building, than all the meetings they may hold, all the talks they may give, and all the memos they may send. It follows then, that to effectively lead and facilitate a transformational change, a CEO must be constantly mindful of what his or her reactions are.
The challenge is this: in all likelihood, the CEO's natural, habitual, and comfortable reactions may be more supportive of the old culture than the new. In fact, many of the CEO's traditional responses may even be inappropriate or ineffective to the establishment of the new culture. These patterns of habitual response will require conscious modification. The CEO will have to choose responses and reactions more carefully, with greater mindfulness, and with greater appreciation of the impact his or her behaviors are constantly having on the culture of the organization.
TEACH, MENTOR, COACH
Significant cultural change makes demands upon most managers, often challenging their traditional skills and habitual behaviors. Recognizing this, the CEO must pay attention and respond not only to what subordinate executives and managers achieve - their bottom-line results or lack thereof - but how and why they achieve them. It is, after all, the "how" and "why" people do things that constitutes culture. In healthy organizations, the means are as important as the ends.
How managers manage must be raised by the CEO to a point of critical importance. To facilitate cultural change and ensure whole system alignment and optimization, the CEO must take ultimate responsibility for management development. It is the last major buck.
The CEO can be assisted in this task significantly by efforts of the training and OD department, if one is available, or by utilizing outside training resources focused on management development. Formal management training sessions can be extremely useful and important, but they are just a beginning; and the CEO must understand that. The training buck cannot, and does not, stop with the training department.
Any management development efforts will have little impact if the CEO is not personally guiding and assisting subordinate managers to understand and adopt new management behaviors that are more aligned with, and supportive of, the envisioned culture. Training provided by any other source, whether internal or external, should be nothing but a reflection of, and an expansion on, the training, coaching, and mentoring that the CEO is already doing to achieve the desired management culture.
These "bucks" - these ultimate CEO tasks and responsibilities when leading a culture change - operate in an interconnected and synergistic fashion. They are a system of actions designed to complement and reinforce each other, not a list of separate and independent duties. Neglecting any one of them would reduce a transformational effort far more than might be assumed. To omit developing the vision, or providing the required communication, for example, would essentially be fatal to any transformation initiative.
This series of interconnected responsibilities must be shouldered by the CEO. They can be done by no one else. Others can help - indeed, others must help - but only if their assistance is supplemental in nature. If other people assume these responsibilities instead of the CEO, any transformation initiative will fail. Only the CEO, focusing his or her power and influence on the culture of an organization, can unite and transform the whole system. These responsibilities - these bucks - do, as President Truman declared, stop on the CEOs desk.
NOTE: I want to acknowledge the contribution that the thinking, research, and writing of John Kotter (Harvard), and Edgar Schein (MIT's Sloan School of Management), have made to this article. Each had significant and overlapping insights into the dynamics of organizational culture and what their transformation requires.
Back to publications page
© Copyright 1999 Management Associates. All rights reserved.
"The Buck Stops Here" was an expression and a concept made famous by President Harry Truman in the mid 1940s. It was carved into a wooden sign prominently displayed on the president's desk in the Oval Office. Its implication was simply that President Truman understood there were certain things - decisions, tasks, responsibilities - that could not be delegated to anyone else: for these, the buck could not be passed.
Like Truman, business CEOs also understand that the buck stops with them. Even while crediting the efforts and teamwork of others, they readily acknowledge that they themselves are ultimately responsible and accountable for their organization's performance and achievements, no one else. This reality, and this understanding, constitute the genuine burden of the job of the CEO.
One such buck that, indeed, does stop on the CEO's desk is the responsibility for leading the organization through significant change. There is no one else to whom the final responsibility for the transformation of an organization's culture can be passed. Ultimately, only the CEO can achieve it.
The problem is this: while most CEOs understand this leadership buck stops with them, and are absolutely willing to shoulder that burden, they do not fully understand or appreciate exactly what "the buck" is.
We have found that confusion regarding those essential tasks that the CEO must perform to effectively lead change and build culture - the bucks - springs from a more basic misunderstanding, or under appreciation, of two fundamental aspects of the job and functioning of a CEO. CEOs consistently underestimate their own personal importance and impact.
Most CEOs do not understand their own importance, the weight they carry, and the impact they have on all the employees. They do not recognize, let alone appreciate, the constant, pervasive influence they personally have on, and throughout, the organization. They do not understand that their influence is personal and transcends the policies that they may enunciate or the strategies they may devise.
Simply put, CEOs have tremendous interpersonal importance and power - more than they think, more than they understand. Even though they themselves may at times feel powerless, they are always, in the eyes of employees, a person of awesome power and commanding, sometimes fearsome, influence.
CEOs need to recognize and accept the magnitude of this unavoidable influence. Once accepted, important questions clarify themselves: What should be done with this power? How should it be used? To what ends should it be turned?
These questions lead to the second source of misunderstanding.
CEOs fail to appreciate that developing and maintaining an effective organizational culture is the most important focus of their power.
CEOs must understand the most important responsibility of their job -one which can be neither avoided nor delegated - is to create and maintain an effective culture.
CEOs, whether they undertake developing culture to be a core part of their job or not, whether intentional or not, even whether beneficial or not, have a profound and inescapable impact on their organization's culture. Most, however, are unaware of the scope and pervasiveness of their cultural influence. Most do not realize that because of the personal power they wield, they are - albeit, often in accidental, inadvertent, and unplanned ways - daily shaping and creating the organization's culture.
Because of their power and authority, people are constantly trying to figure CEOs out, watching every move they make, attending to everything they say, noting every inflection, observing every gesture, and trying to determine what's really important around here. Top people tend not to understand that they are under constant observation and scrutiny, and because of that, they are unwittingly and unavoidably a continuous broadcaster of the culture. The CEO's moment-by-moment actions (and inactions) shape and proclaim the culture more clearly throughout the organization than any other single thing.
Recognizing the unavoidable impact they have on their organization's culture, CEOs must consciously make the design, development, and maintenance of their organization's culture a core responsibility of their job. They must understand that perhaps the most important and legitimate use of their power and influence is to build an organizational culture that draws out its human potential, unifies its elements, and taps the collective excellence of the people within it.
UNDERSTANDING THE "BUCKS"Because of the stature they hold within the organization, it becomes clear that a CEO must personally, consciously, and consistently take on certain responsibilities and certain tasks to achieve transformational change in the culture. These constitute the bucks that can neither be passed on nor overlooked.
These bucks can be grouped into several key areas: PURPOSE, VISION
The first responsibility that the CEO must assume - the first buck - is primarily personal in nature, and involves internal effort and private work.
The CEO must develop and maintain a clear sense of purpose and vision for the organization which has personal significance and meaning, and in which he or she genuinely believes. The CEO must have a clear and personally compelling sense of preferred future that surrounds, and creates the rational for, the targeted changes.
The achievement of planned cultural change requires a tremendous and sustained effort on everybody's part. To succeed, the purpose behind it and the vision animating it must be clear, meaningful, significant, and compelling to the people involved on both an intellectual and emotional basis. Here's the rub: for the change to be significant and meaningful to the people, the vision, and its achievement, must first be the clear, driving force of the CEO.
The CEO must simultaneously be the first believer in, as well as the guardian of, the organization's vision and purpose. The life and health of the organization's vision of the future is a responsibility that can neither be delegated nor neglected.
Developing and maintaining personal belief in the vision and mission of the targeted culture is a prerequisite for the next buck that stops on the CEO's desk.
COMMUNICATION
To effect a change in culture, the CEO must immerse the organization in communication about the change, its vision, its purpose, and the dynamics of the envisioned culture. And the system must be immersed, not just once, in a communication blitz, or even twice, or three times, but immersed constantly and fully and for a very long time. The system must be continuously saturated with information over an extended period about where it is going, how it is going to get there, why the changes are targeted, and how it is doing.
This long-term saturation is important because in any organization, culture - some culture - is being communicated 100 percent of the time, both verbally and nonverbally. It is an inescapable reality. The challenge in leading a culture change is to recognize that when the preferred, envisioned, and targeted culture is not being communicated, the old culture is.
The problem with communications related to most substantial change initiatives is not what is being said about the new culture, but how frequently it is being said, how much it is being discussed, how consistently it is being expressed, and how clearly the new culture is being communicated, both verbally and non-verbally.
In many transformation efforts we have witnessed, sincere efforts were made to communicate effectively about the change: its vision was clearly expressed, its values were articulated, the goals of the new culture were plainly outlined, and the importance of its achievement was clearly stated. Meetings were held, good meetings. Sincere and impassioned speeches were given. Articles were published in the in-house newsletter. Signs and posters were put up. The efforts to communicate were genuine. And yet, the results were meager; little momentum was generated.
In these situations, the communications surrounding the change initiative simply did not reach the minimum threshold required to stimulate and sustain significant change. The communications were not bad at all. They were simply insufficient - insufficient in terms of their amount, their consistency, their frequency, and their duration over an extended period - to significantly impact and overwhelm the old, entrenched, culture. It has been estimated that, in failed transformation efforts, the vision of the new culture was under communicated by a factor of 10! In other words, achievement of the desired cultural changes required 10 times more communication than was actually provided.
It is a clear imperative that the desired culture, its values, its attitudes, its beliefs, its processes, not just be announced and rolled out. They must permeate every meeting and discussion. They must be obvious in every decision and strategy. And perhaps most importantly, they must be reflected in every action and every behavior.
CEOs must understand that this communication imperative applies first, and most directly, to themselves. Unless and until the new culture is being constantly articulated in the words, and clearly demonstrated in the actions, of the CEO, the old culture will remain the standard, undercutting any significant change or transformation efforts.
URGENCY, SERIOUSNESS
To succeed, transformation initiatives must assume proportions of importance that command people's attention and energy. Tasks related to culture change can not be viewed by the organization as optional, or just one of the many things it should do if it ever gets time, or the latest in a series of development programs. For people to give the attention, time, and effort required to truly effect change, its achievement must assume such a sense of seriousness, even urgency, that its pursuit will not fade into the background of routine.
This compelling sense of importance must begin with, and emanate from, the CEO. No one else has the perceived influence and power to make its accomplishment an urgent focus of organizational attention. If he or she does not vest the effort with the requisite importance, it will fail. Period.
In practical terms, this means that transforming the organization and developing its culture cannot be something done in the CEO's spare time. Many things make legitimate demands on a CEO's time and attention, but the whole system health of the organization and its culture must assume a commanding position of importance and priority. Optimizing the system, developing its processes, embedding its values, and, refining the quality of its internal dynamics and relationships to correspond with the vision, must become a dominating part of the CEO's job. And he or she must make it, in turn, a compelling and central part of the organization's focus.
MEASURE, MONITOR
Two important facts have core relevance here.
First, we human beings pay attention to, and measure, what is important to us. The targeted culture will not assume importance until progress toward its accomplishment is carefully monitored and frequently measured.
Because of the power and authority of a CEO, what the he or she monitors and pays attention to becomes serious, and its accomplishment becomes urgent. If a CEO sets cultural goals but does not then clearly pay attention to them - does not measure performance against them, does not follow-up with them, does not ask questions about them, etc. - people will observe this to indicate obvious lack of interest or importance, and will therefore consider the transformation initiative itself to have little real meaning.
Second, but closely related, we cannot effectively transform something we do not know or understand. Understanding the current culture from the conference room is impossible. Gauging its health and current requirements only through reports is grossly inadequate.
To understand the culture, the CEO must visit people where they work and when they work. He must talk with them. She must observe them. The people know the culture. They know the conditions in which they work. They understand the real values that shape the workplace. They understand the systems that operate. They appreciate the dynamics which daily confront them. One cannot know or understand the current culture, let alone change it, without paying close attention to the people within it, measuring their attitudes, soliciting their opinions, monitoring their thinking.
RESPOND, REACT
It is not enough to just pay attention to the changing culture, monitor its progress, and measure its movement towards transformation. The CEO must react quickly and clearly to what he or she sees and hears.
The CEO's reactions - what this influential person praises, and what this powerful person punishes - shapes and organization's culture. A CEO's minute-by-minute reactions and responses to the daily details of organizational life communicate more clearly about that person's values and the culture they are building, than all the meetings they may hold, all the talks they may give, and all the memos they may send. It follows then, that to effectively lead and facilitate a transformational change, a CEO must be constantly mindful of what his or her reactions are.
The challenge is this: in all likelihood, the CEO's natural, habitual, and comfortable reactions may be more supportive of the old culture than the new. In fact, many of the CEO's traditional responses may even be inappropriate or ineffective to the establishment of the new culture. These patterns of habitual response will require conscious modification. The CEO will have to choose responses and reactions more carefully, with greater mindfulness, and with greater appreciation of the impact his or her behaviors are constantly having on the culture of the organization.
TEACH, MENTOR, COACH
Significant cultural change makes demands upon most managers, often challenging their traditional skills and habitual behaviors. Recognizing this, the CEO must pay attention and respond not only to what subordinate executives and managers achieve - their bottom-line results or lack thereof - but how and why they achieve them. It is, after all, the "how" and "why" people do things that constitutes culture. In healthy organizations, the means are as important as the ends.
How managers manage must be raised by the CEO to a point of critical importance. To facilitate cultural change and ensure whole system alignment and optimization, the CEO must take ultimate responsibility for management development. It is the last major buck.
The CEO can be assisted in this task significantly by efforts of the training and OD department, if one is available, or by utilizing outside training resources focused on management development. Formal management training sessions can be extremely useful and important, but they are just a beginning; and the CEO must understand that. The training buck cannot, and does not, stop with the training department.
Any management development efforts will have little impact if the CEO is not personally guiding and assisting subordinate managers to understand and adopt new management behaviors that are more aligned with, and supportive of, the envisioned culture. Training provided by any other source, whether internal or external, should be nothing but a reflection of, and an expansion on, the training, coaching, and mentoring that the CEO is already doing to achieve the desired management culture.
These "bucks" - these ultimate CEO tasks and responsibilities when leading a culture change - operate in an interconnected and synergistic fashion. They are a system of actions designed to complement and reinforce each other, not a list of separate and independent duties. Neglecting any one of them would reduce a transformational effort far more than might be assumed. To omit developing the vision, or providing the required communication, for example, would essentially be fatal to any transformation initiative.
This series of interconnected responsibilities must be shouldered by the CEO. They can be done by no one else. Others can help - indeed, others must help - but only if their assistance is supplemental in nature. If other people assume these responsibilities instead of the CEO, any transformation initiative will fail. Only the CEO, focusing his or her power and influence on the culture of an organization, can unite and transform the whole system. These responsibilities - these bucks - do, as President Truman declared, stop on the CEOs desk.
NOTE: I want to acknowledge the contribution that the thinking, research, and writing of John Kotter (Harvard), and Edgar Schein (MIT's Sloan School of Management), have made to this article. Each had significant and overlapping insights into the dynamics of organizational culture and what their transformation requires.
Back to publications page
© Copyright 1999 Management Associates. All rights reserved.