Leaders charged with righting foundering organizations often claim “the culture is broken.” However, just as you cannot fix people, experience tells me that focusing on fixing a culture is a fool’s errand.

Decision-making processes, communications, structure, strategy, and finances are all fixable. An organization’s culture evolves over time and not by command. When facing a turnaround or need for strategic change, there are better levers to push and pull than the one protected under glass labeled ‘culture.’

Fixing struggling organizations isn’t complicated; it is complex

While it’s unlikely you’re working with anything the scale of Boeing or Starbucks—two struggling firms in the news, every turnaround is complex. No single solution offers the perfect answer.

Imagine being called upon to fix Boeing. The organization’s decades-long devolvement from a bastion of quality and excellence in manufacturing to a firm that bungles product delivery and offers a tragic course in quality disasters reads like an organizational horror story. The crashes and doors flying off midflight are horrifying. The bungling of the entire manufacturing and supply chain processes is impressive in a negative way. Leaving astronauts stranded in space with your space vehicle is just mind-blowing.

Starbucks’ seeming struggles to make and serve a timely cup of coffee with a smile are exacerbated by an overly complicated menu and questionable operational programs and decisions. A new CEO faces the complex issue of untangling the mess.

The challenge for both new CEOs at these organizations is to uncover root-cause issues and then use the people and culture to explore and experiment with potential solutions.

‘Just one thing’

I learned some priceless lessons in guiding turnarounds from someone who was an accidental CEO. He didn’t want or ask for the job; he was drafted. Partnering with a business-savvy, pro-growth CFO, the two made fast, tough decisions on divestitures and corralling costs to create breathing room. Their focus as they worked with team members to identify things to stop doing was cutting fat and fluff but never cutting muscle.

Once the firm stopped foundering, they focused on getting the organization on a trajectory for health and growth. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m convinced their focus on appealing to and leveraging the culture was the difference-maker in what became a great success story.

One of the CEO’s initiatives was to encourage us to identify ‘Just One Thing’ every week, where we could improve communication, smooth out rough processes, identify efficiencies, and find ways to serve customers better. At the same time, these leaders supported the selling and marketing functions with additional investments. They protected the engineering and support organizations as if they were guarding the gold in Fort Knox.

The trust earned through their embrace of the culture, fierce listening, and transparency in their actions proved priceless. People were excited to experiment, learn, and challenge convention as they pursued ‘Just One Thing.’ The organization worked hard to write the next chapter of this firm’s history.

While the organization’s culture ultimately evolved as the firm pursued new markets and an eventual sale to one of the world’s largest software firms, ‘fixing the culture’ was never a tactic.

Nine rules turnaround leaders can live by that don’t involve ‘fixing the culture’

1. Never view the people as the root problem

An organization’s people are your only hope as a leader to stop the foundering. While turnover — voluntary and otherwise is inevitable in turnaround situations, don’t start with the assumption that the people are broken. Work hard to find the root cause of issues.

2. You cannot cost-cut your way to success

Take the lead from my example above and find fat to excise and opportunities to stem the bleeding, but never cut muscle. Instead, invest in developing muscle.

3. It’s tempting and easy to treat symptoms. It’s wrong

Too many flavor-of-the-moment initiatives sound like quick fixes when, in reality, they are putting surface dressings on more extensive wounds. Initially, I thought the ‘Just One Thing’ initiative was one of those. I was wrong. Individuals rallied around it to do their part in fixing what was broken.

4. Beware of listening to just the noisy people in your organization

In any turnaround situation, some individuals are busy jockeying for positions and make a lot of noise. That’s fine. You should recognize it for what it is and then double your efforts to tap into the ideas of everyone, especially the ones watching quietly. Chances are they are overwhelmed by the noise. Give them some quiet and a chance to talk and share.

5. Don’t default to throwing the strategy under the bus

A failed or failing strategy might be the issue. However, leaders need to look hard to see if poor execution is undermining sound ideas. Take the time to evaluate where the barriers and blockers are on execution and gain support for removing them. If the strategy is potentially viable, focus on accelerating and decentralizing decision-making.

6. Resist the reflex action to restructure

This tired cliché of tactic for fixing struggling organizations is wrong. Structure is a powerful tool. However, it needs to shift for the right reasons — enabling agility, getting closer to customers, improving execution, enabling a new strategy, and accelerating learning.

7. Beware the internal echo chamber

The truth is out there in the markets, yet getting caught up in the internal swirl is easy. Base your decisions on the ground truth where customers and partners put your offerings to work.

8. Emulating your competitor is tempting and mostly wrong

Playing follow-the-competitor is a losing proposition. Instead of identifying unique ways to meet your customers’ needs, you burn energy and waste time trying to be like them. Focus on tapping into your organization’s creativity and strive to create meaningful differentiation from your competitors.

9. Lead by the values

Turnarounds are the right time to strengthen and bring organizational values to life. Good values define and describe the essential behaviors that ultimately form the culture. Make the values more than artwork on a conference room wall — leverage them for making decisions, coaching, and advancing people.

The Bottom Line for Now:

In struggling organizations, the culture isn’t broken; it’s just been distorted by poor leadership and flawed decisions. Your job as the leader is to respect and leverage the culture, not fix it. Not surprisingly, by focusing on the real issues, the culture will evolve on the road to renewal and growth.

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