“A leader announces a culture programme. There is a lot of activity: workshops, new values on the wall, a speaking tour from the CEO. And six months later, the same problems exist. Usually because the real problem was never actually named.”
Athalie Williams has heard this story often enough to finish it. A global C-suite executive, and former CHRO, whose career spans senior roles at BHP and BT Group (British Telecommunications) as well as decades of transformation work in consulting and senior advisory roles, Williams draws a distinction that most leadership commentary avoids: the difference between genuine cultural change and culture language used to defer a harder decision about performance, structure, or leadership. She has been on both sides of it.
“There is a pattern I have seen across different industries,” she says. “You can usually tell quite quickly which one you are looking at.”
What Real Culture Change Requires
Williams’ experience at BHP, where she contributed to one of the resources sector’s most substantial inclusion and culture transformations, gives her a concrete baseline. When BHP committed to achieving gender balance by 2025, it was a business-wide transformation. It was not an HR initiative. Leadership accountability was tied to performance outcomes. The systemic barriers were named and addressed. Real culture change requires visible, sustained executive ownership, enablement, and role modelling. Trying to drive culture change without executive involvement is like trying to make jelly without a mould.
During Williams’ tenure at BHP, female representation increased from 17.6% in FY2017 to above 30% within five years. The company subsequently achieved its gender balance goal ahead of schedule. That progress was not the product of the culture programme itself, but of the decisions that underpinned it: clear targets, structural redesign of roles and workplaces, accountability embedded into performance reviews, and sustained leadership commitment across two successive CEOs.
The contrast with culture initiatives that stall is instructive. Culture is built through everyday conversations, specifically the conversations managers are willing to have and the ones they choose to avoid. An organisation that launches a new set of values without addressing why those values are not already present has misdiagnosed its own condition.
The Tell-Tale Signs
Williams is careful not to be dismissive of culture work. Her point is sharper than cynicism: culture initiatives are frequently used to do legitimate things, but they are also routinely deployed to avoid less comfortable ones.
The signs are recognisable. Accountability being invoked selectively, only in moments of failure, only toward those with least power, is a warning signal. So is a culture that confuses productive tension with conflict and quietly rewards silence over candour.
“When I see an organisation announce a culture transformation after a period of underperformance, or after a difficult leadership departure, my first question is: what decisions are actually being deferred here?” says Williams. “Is there a structural problem that needs to be named? Is there a performance issue with a specific leader that is not being addressed? Is there a strategic question that nobody wants to answer? Because culture language can be a way of creating the appearance of action without any of the discomfort that real change requires.”
Announcing new values and running workshops is not sufficient to embed lasting change. Williams adds that the timing of culture announcements is itself revealing. When the initiative arrives in the wake of a financial miss, a regulatory problem, or a leadership failure, the question to ask is whether the culture programme is the right diagnosis, or a more palatable version of it.
When Culture Is the Right Diagnosis
None of this means that culture is the wrong lever. Williams has led large-scale transformations where culture was, genuinely, the constraint. At both BHP and BT Group (British Telecommunications), reshaping how people worked, how decisions were made, and what behaviours were rewarded was essential to delivering business outcomes. The difference was that in those cases, the culture work was anchored to specific operational and strategic problems.
“The test I apply is whether the organisation can say, in plain terms, what the current culture is costing the business: in hard numbers, in risk outcomes, in talent and performance,” she says. “If they can answer that question clearly, the culture work is probably in the right place. If the answer is vague, then culture may be carrying the weight of a different conversation that has not happened yet.”
For boards and CEOs genuinely committed to change, Williams’ view is that the honest conversation about performance, accountability, or structural design is almost always a faster path than a culture programme that substitutes language for decision. Culture matters. But in organisations under pressure, it is often the last thing that needs diagnosing, and the first thing that gets announced.