I spent several years in the c-suite believing I was open to challenge.
I took proposals into executive meetings convinced they had to be perfect. I never asked for help. And when colleagues disagreed with me, I felt judged and attacked rather than supported.
Nobody told me. And I didn’t see it.
Senior leaders are usually the arbiters of their own standards. They decide what good looks like. They set the tone. And, like the rest of us, they genuinely believe they’re doing it well. The gulf between that belief and the reality is often where organisational culture breaks down.
I’ve worked with enough c-suites to know this isn’t rare. Sadly, it’s often the norm.
Why the mirror stays covered
It’s risky to tell a senior leader they’re the problem. Careers have stalled for less and so feedback gets softened. Challenge gets swallowed. The CEO hears a version of the truth that’s been filtered through several layers of anxiety.
And the senior leader: intelligent, experienced, well-intentioned, carries on believing they’re open, curious, and receptive. Because nothing in their environment is telling them otherwise.
This is what makes culture change so difficult. You cannot cascade a behaviour that leadership hasn’t demonstrated. But if leaders don’t know which behaviours they’re failing to demonstrate, nothing changes.
What HR leaders can do
This is where senior HR leaders have a unique and uncomfortable role. This isn’t as the culture police. Not as the purveyor of values frameworks and engagement surveys. But as the person willing to hold up a mirror.
Done well, 360-degree feedback is one of the most powerful tools available. Done badly, which is often, it can be a vanity exercise. Vague, surface-level feedback that gets filed after a coaching conversation and never mentioned again.
For 360s to work, feedback has to be specific. The process has to be trusted. And most importantly, the organisation has to act on what it finds. Many lose their nerve at exactly that point.
Beyond 360s, that mirror can be held up in other ways. Through the questions a board is willing to ask. Through brave people willing to tell the CEO when something is wrong. Through holding the c-suite to the same standards expected of everyone else.
That last one sounds obvious. In practice, it rarely happens.
The need to have honest conversations
I understand why. It’s easier to build a new leadership framework than to sit opposite the CEO and tell them their behaviour is undermining the culture they claim to want.
I’ve had disagreements in the c-suite. Disagreements on where and how much to invest in our people. Different priorities. Different values. Eventually we called the differences out. We acknowledged we didn’t always agree and worked out how to disagree better. But it took longer than it should have, and the organisation paid a price in the meantime.
HR leaders who only work around the mirror problem, who treat symptoms rather than causes, will keep having the same conversations year after year. Different framework. Same culture.
So who does hold the mirror?
If not HR, then who? A trusted NED? A board that asks the right questions? An executive coach with enough access and backbone?
Sometimes it takes an outsider. Someone with nothing to lose and no hierarchy to navigate. But the most sustainable answer is an HR leader who has built enough trust, and enough courage, to be honest with the people at the top.
The leaders I admire in HR are the ones who’ve earned the credibility to say the difficult thing. Not aggressively. Not with a framework to hide behind. But directly, with care, and with the organisation’s best interests at heart.
That’s not a competency. It’s a choice.
The culture will only go as far as the senior team’s self-awareness allows. And self-awareness, at that level, rarely develops without someone willing to hold up the mirror.
If this resonates, my transformational CHRO mindset guide is a free resource exploring what it really takes to lead with impact at the top. Available to download for free here.
