Culture change begins by building authentic stories.

Your stories are authentic when they reflect your deeply held values and beliefs about who you are as a leader, your commitment to the well-being of your employees and other stakeholders, and how these are related to the ability of your firm to implement your strategies. In this sense, authentic stories reveal to your employees something fundamental about who you are and what you want to accomplish.

For this reason, authentic stories reassure your employees that your commitment to cultural change is real and unchangeable. They know that your efforts to change the culture are not a whim, ego-driven, or a transitory commitment but instead are a manifestation of who you are as a person. When they hear the authentic stories you have built, they are more likely to join with you to co-create your organization’s new culture.

But when the stories you build are inauthentic, they can have exactly the opposite effect. Your employees can smell hypocrisy miles away, and if the stories you build do not reflect who you are as a person, they will be dismissed by your employees as manipulative and dishonest. These employees will not work with you to co-create your organization’s new culture.

How do we remain authentic when we fall short of living our own values?

Creating a new organizational culture is always aspirational. It’s aspirational for your organization since you are asking members of your organization to put aside the familiar for the unfamiliar. But it is also aspirational for you because maybe you don’t fully understand all the values and beliefs that will be part of this new culture. And maybe, even if you do understand these values, you don’t always live up to them.

If culture change required that you fully understand and perfectly live the values of the new culture you are trying to create, then culture change would never occur. All business leaders, at all levels of an organization, sooner or later fall short in understanding what the new culture they are trying to build is and fall short in living the values of this culture, even when they understand them.

Because of these personal limitations, the stories you build that pretend you fully understand and live the values of a new culture are—by definition—inauthentic. Your people won’t believe these stories. They will dismiss them as manipulative and dishonest.

However, these weaknesses do not disqualify you from leading cultural change. Indeed, how you respond to your personal shortcomings can help you build a story that can actually facilitate cultural change. Your failings can be used to demonstrate your authenticity because they increase your vulnerability.

Some CEOs think that if they ever slip up on the cultural values they are trying to create in a firm, their hypocrisy will be found out, and their efforts will come to naught. Some have concluded that, given this threat, it is better not to try to change a culture at all than it is to try and fail.

But these kinds of missteps are inevitable. The point is not to pretend that they will not emerge; the point is to minimize them—of course—but when they occur, use them as an opportunity to reinforce the cultural change you are trying to create. Your mistakes can become stories that give everyone permission to try and fail but then to try again to live a new set of values.

In your effort to change your culture, are you willing to be fully authentic?