Rebuilding Culture During a Leadership Transition Period

Our client had experienced significant executive turnover, including several Chief Administrative Officers, over a relatively short period. The team needed to rebuild trust, strengthen leadership, and establish a more intentional organizational culture.

While employees remained deeply committed to serving their community, years of leadership change had created uncertainty and skepticism about whether meaningful culture change was possible.

The municipality partnered with Allen Leigh for an 18-month culture transformation designed to create a shared vision, strengthen leadership, reinforce the desired culture daily, and build the internal capability to sustain change long after the engagement concluded.

• How do we rebuild trust following repeated executive leadership transitions?
• How do we create a shared culture across a large and diverse organization?
• How do we move employees from skepticism to ownership?
• How do we ensure culture becomes part of everyday leadership rather than another initiative?
• How do we build internal champions who will sustain momentum after the project ends?
• How do we measure progress and create accountability for change?

To start, we completed a comprehensive organizational culture assessment. This helped us establish a baseline understanding of the municipality’s culture.

Using those insights, we partnered with executives, managers, and employees over 18 months to:

• Assess the team’s cultural strengths and opportunities.
• Engage the entire organization to define the desired culture.
• Establish and facilitate a cross-functional Culture Action Working Group responsible for identifying priorities and leading recommendations.
• Develop practical initiatives that translated cultural aspirations into everyday behaviours.
• Deliver leadership and manager development focused on creating consistency across the organization.
• Coach leaders throughout implementation while supporting communication, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Rather than treating culture as an HR initiative, we aimed to position culture as a leadership responsibility shared across every level of the organization.

After completing the engagement process with us, the municipality:

• Established a shared vision for its future culture.
• Created broad employee ownership through a representative Culture Action Working Group.
• Equipped managers to reinforce culture through everyday leadership practices.
• Strengthened alignment between executive leadership and employees.
• Built sustainable governance and accountability for ongoing culture development.
• Increased confidence that organizational culture could be intentionally shaped
  rather than left to chance.

As one member of the Culture Action Working Group reflected:

“When we started, I didn’t think culture could change. By the end of this process, I realized that we were changing it together.”