Scott McInnes founded Inspiring Change in Dublin and hosts Building Better Cultures. He joins Dr. Joey on why your brain files the unfamiliar as negative, why culture is a vehicle for strategy, and why values hold weight only as behaviors.
The Hook
Seven out of ten people choose a job based on culture when everything else is equal. So why do most organizations still leave theirs to chance?
Scott McInnes helps leadership teams answer that question. He founded Inspiring Change, an organizational culture and internal communications consultancy in Dublin, hosts the Building Better Cultures podcast, and authored original research on the culture gaps holding organizations back today. His clients include the Football Association of Ireland, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and Enterprise Ireland.
He tells us why the soft stuff is, without question, the hard stuff.
Key Insights
- Your brain guards the familiar by design. Scott traces the resistance to the campfire. Our ancestors plant where crops always grew and walk the path with no sabertooth tiger on it. That circuitry still runs your team. In his words, "The unfamiliar gets labeled as negative and gets cast out of our brains pretty quickly because there's just no existing folder for it."
- The resisters deserve a hearing. The people the change curve labels laggards "often get a bad rap," Scott observes, when what they actually say is that they remain unconvinced this will work. Sometimes they are right. The enthusiasts run toward the cliff edge with jazz hands while the laggard asks about the parachute. "We really need to keep the resistors close and listen to them, because they make us slow down a little bit and think."
- Culture earns its budget as a business instrument. Scott dissolves the fluffy-and-amorphous objection in one move. Culture is processes, systems, values, and behaviors lined up so everyone rows behind them. He says culture "is a vehicle for corporate strategy." Anyone selling a culture initiative internally opens with what it does to the bottom line.
- Six months of strategy, ten minutes of telling. Scott sees senior leadership teams spend six months creating the strategy, ten minutes telling the organization on a webinar, and then grow angry as the organization struggles to understand it.
- Momentum is the thing people love. We resist change and yet we love moving forward. Which makes the story of progress something told continually rather than announced once. Scott's test: did JFK name the moon and then drop the subject until the landing? Helmets, suits, rockets. Every bit of it got told.
- The strategy arrives in the wrong language. His firm boils client strategies down to five or six hundred words people actually use, because the corporate original fails to travel.
- Middle managers carry the strategy or bury it. The layer unfairly nicknamed the permafrost and the flabby middle lacks the training, tools, and confidence to translate a high-altitude plan into the three sections that matter to their team. "These people are the most important people in your organization."
- The fix respects the calendar. Rather than a three-hour values workshop dropped onto teams, Scott creates five 20-minute team talks a manager folds into meetings already on the books.
- Values hold weight only as behaviors. Two people describe respect and produce mint chocolate chip and chocolate. Close yet different. So the organization defines what the behavior looks like here, then embeds it in performance management, where Scott says "the rubber hits the road with values." Absent that definition, "you were disrespectful" invites a fair question back: what does respect mean here, and what did I do?
- Prove your culture to a skeptic by naming consequences. Showcase the stories of values lived well, and explain what follows when someone fails to live them. A high performer hears that and understands the values carry weight.
- Hybrid needs a better conversation than where. Scott declines the nuclear button of five days back in the office. One client calls the alternative smart working, a phrase he prefers. A senior HR leader complains that deep thinking is impossible at an office desk, and Scott inverts the premise: do the thinking at home, and spend office days connecting with other human beings.
- Three legs hold that stool up. The organization sets policy and frameworks. The people manager asks what the team needs to accomplish this week, this month, this quarter, and how. The employee protects the core days. Add four generations at work, maybe five once apprentices arrive at sixteen, and one size fits all becomes, in Scott's word, dangerous.
- Busyness blocks connection. Scott's research with chief people officers found work rose during the pandemic and stayed at a million miles an hour, with shoulders still against the wheel.
Do One Thing
Scott's Do One Thing for the Work Positive community:
"Be very clear in your ambition about where you want everyone else to be."
He recalls Alice at the fork in the road. She looks up at the Cheshire Cat and admits she has no idea which way to go. The cat asks where she is going. She has no answer. So the cat tells her to take any road, because they all go there.
"We need to be a lot more intentional about where we're going when it comes to culture, so that everybody can follow along behind us." That intentionality creates the familiarity the brain looks for, which becomes the security and the psychological safety people need in order to follow you anywhere.
Connect with Scott McInnes
- Scott created a page for the Work Positive community: inspiringchange.ie/workpositive. You will find the company overview, his connection research, his podcast, and a calendar link to reach him directly.
- Send him a DM on LinkedIn. He loves to chat.
- Catch every episode of Building Better Cultures.
Your Next Step
Culture left to chance still produces a culture. Just rarely the one you want.
Discover the one you have today. Take the free Work Positive Culture Assessment at workpositive.today.
Grow Culture, Grow People, Grow Profits
Connect with Dr. Joey & Work Positive
Work Positive Podcast: workpositive.today/podcasts
Free Work Positive Newsletter: workpositive.today/newsletter
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