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Ask a room full of Chief People Officers what their biggest culture challenges are, and the answers come quickly. Leadership accountability. Middle managers who aren’t equipped to carry culture forward. Skills gaps. Conversations that should be happening but aren’t. Employees who feel disconnected from their work and their organization.
Now ask those same CPOs how long those problems have been on the list.
That’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable. In this episode of Courage to Advance, Kim Bohr sits down with Scott McInnes, founder of Inspiring Change, to unpack what his research with Irish CPOs revealed about the barriers between the culture organizations have and the culture they need. The five challenges he found map almost exactly onto what SparkEffect’s own Trust Study surfaces across American organizations. Geography changes very little. These problems are consistent, persistent, and entirely fixable. The missing ingredient isn’t insight. It’s the sustained will to act.
🎧 LISTEN: Hear Scott McInnes’s Full Conversation Want the full episode?
Listen to Scott McInnes on Courage to Advance, where he and host Kim Bohr break down why the same five culture challenges keep showing up year after year, what “chief sense making” looks like in practice, and why trust isn’t a value you put on a poster but an outcome of doing what you say you’ll do.
The Research Behind the List
Scott surveyed Chief People Officers exclusively in Ireland, asking one question in ten minutes: what are the stumbling blocks stopping you from getting to the culture you need? When he brought a small group of respondents in to debrief the findings, he opened with a line that landed with uncomfortable accuracy: “There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is there are no surprises here. And the bad news is there are no surprises here.”
The room responded with wry smiles. Everyone recognized the list. Almost no one had cracked it.
About Scott McInnes
Scott McInnes is the founder of Inspiring Change, a consultancy based in Dublin working with organizations across Ireland, the UK, and Europe on culture, leadership, and internal communications. His career path into culture work started in communications, then moved into HR when he joined AIB, one of Ireland’s largest banks. That experience inside a 10,000-person organization gave him a front-row seat to how the gap between stated values and lived behaviors plays out at scale. He is also the host of the Building Better Cultures podcast, with over 150 episodes.
1. Leadership Skill and Will
The challenge
The first problem isn’t about strategy or structure. It’s about whether senior leaders have both the capability and the commitment to actively shape the culture their organization needs.
What Scott found
Leaders don’t own culture in any formal sense, but they do cast what Scott calls a “long shadow.” The higher up you are, the more visible your behavior is to everyone below you. When senior leaders don’t live the values they’ve asked their people to hold, the signal is unmistakable: it doesn’t actually matter.
Scott makes a distinction worth sitting with. Organizations talk endlessly about values. But values are abstract. Behaviors are visible. “I might not know your values,” he says. “But I can see your behaviors.” Accountability has to start there, at the behavioral level, beginning with the most senior people in the room.
Why it matters for trust
SparkEffect’s Trust Study found that employees trust their direct managers significantly more than senior leadership. That gap widens when senior leaders fail to model the behaviors the organization claims to value. Every misalignment between stated values and visible behavior erodes the credibility of the culture initiative from the top.
This is exactly the kind of alignment work that executive coaching and CEO and board advisory are designed to address: helping the most senior people in the room see their own shadow and decide what they want it to look like.
2. The "Permafrost Layer": Middle Managers
The challenge
Middle managers, the people actually running teams and getting work done, are not being equipped to do one of the most critical parts of their job: translating culture into something meaningful for the individuals on their teams.
Chief sense makers
Scott describes this as the “chief sense maker” role, and the framing is instructive. A message from the top of an organization has to fit everyone, which means it ends up truly connecting with no one. It’s too generic by necessity. The manager who knows your team intimately, who understands the pressures people are under, who knows that someone can’t take calls on Friday mornings and why, is the person who can take an organizational purpose and make it real for the specific people sitting in front of them.
He illustrates this with a story from a hospital CEO. A gardener wasn’t cutting the grass on the hospital grounds, and it was flagged as a problem. But the real question isn’t about the grass. It’s about whether that gardener understood what their work actually meant. If someone had just lost a loved one in that hospital and wanted to sit outside for a few moments of quiet, what would they want to experience? Whose responsibility is it to make sure that gardener understands that connection?
That’s chief sense making. That’s the work most organizations are leaving undone at the middle manager level.
Why it matters for trust
The Trust Study found that managers are the primary trust conduit between employees and the organization. When those managers can’t translate organizational purpose into something their team can feel, the disconnect shows up as disengagement, turnover, and quiet withdrawal.
Leadership development programs that focus on building this translation capability, helping managers connect everyday work to organizational purpose, are one of the highest-leverage investments an organization can make.
3. Skills for Today and Tomorrow
The challenge
If middle managers are being asked to carry culture, translate purpose, have developmental conversations with their teams, and handle constant change, they need the skills to do all of that. Most don’t have them.
The investment gap
Scott points to annual research that consistently finds people leaders lacking the skills and capability to do their jobs well at a cultural level. The finding isn’t new. What’s striking is that investment in closing that gap hasn’t followed. Organizations recognize the problem and then don’t fund the solution.
This extends beyond managers. Building a culture of continuous learning across the organization, at every level, is something most organizations talk about but few have operationalized. As Scott’s client keeps telling their teams: people have to be responsible for their own careers. But that only works if the organization has created an environment where development is genuinely supported, not just expected.
Why it matters for trust
When organizations say they invest in their people but don’t actually fund the skills development those people need, it creates a policy-to-practice gap that employees read clearly. SparkEffect’s research consistently finds that visible investment in people, not just the claim of investment, is one of the strongest trust builders available to leaders.
SparkEffect’s leadership development and organizational development work helps organizations close this gap by building the skills infrastructure that turns culture ambition into daily capability.
4. Accountability for Values
The challenge
Organizations struggle to hold people accountable for values and behaviors, especially when that means having a hard conversation.
Reframing the conversation
Scott’s reframe here is practical and worth adopting. The term “difficult conversation” loads the interaction with adversarial weight before it even starts. His suggestion: call them what they actually are when done well. Developmental conversations. Support conversations. The goal isn’t to confront someone. It’s to help them do their best work. That reframe changes who shows up and how.
Psychological safety runs both directions
Psychological safety is part of this equation, and Scott is clear that it runs both ways:
- People need to feel safe enough to speak up
- Leaders need to respond well when they do
- The split-second reaction on a manager’s face when someone admits a mistake is what the rest of the team reads
- Get that reaction wrong and the signal travels fast: don’t say anything
The foundation that’s often missing
Scott makes one more important point about accountability: you can’t hold people accountable for something that was never clearly defined. Before any culture initiative can have teeth, the senior team has to get in a room and agree on what the values actually look like as specific, observable behaviors. Without that foundation, accountability conversations don’t have anything solid to stand on.
“If you don’t have that, it is incredibly hard to have accountability conversations with anybody, because they’re like, well, no one’s agreed what it is we’re doing, so how can you hold me to account for something that we haven’t agreed on?”
Why it matters for trust
SparkEffect’s Trust Study found that psychological safety is one of the most fragile domains measured, especially during disruption. When accountability is absent, trust erodes from two directions: employees stop speaking up because they don’t feel safe, and leaders stop having the conversations that would build safety because they don’t feel equipped.
This is where executive coaching becomes a multiplier. Coaching gives leaders a space to develop the skill and confidence to hold accountability conversations that strengthen relationships rather than damage them.
5. Disconnection
The challenge
The fifth and most recent challenge is disconnection. Employees feeling disconnected from their organizations, their teams, their work, and their sense of purpose. Scott says this one has moved to the foreground since the pandemic.
COVID didn’t create it. It amplified it.
Hybrid work has contributed to disconnection, but Scott’s read is more nuanced than a simple “people are home too much” argument. His view is that COVID didn’t create disconnection. It turned up the volume on what was already there. Where organizations had strong connections, those got stronger. Where there were cracks, those got wider.
The implication matters: pushing everyone back to the office isn’t a solution. If the disconnection was structural before the pandemic, it will be structural in the office too. The work is in building genuine connection, and that happens through purpose, through meaningful one-on-ones, through the chief sense making work middle managers do when they’re equipped and supported to do it.
Why it matters for trust
SparkEffect’s research found that organizations reporting high levels of disruption (71% in the last 24 months) that invested in post-crisis care and transparent communication were 6.5x more likely to have a clear future strategy. Disconnection isn’t a mood problem. It’s a strategic risk.
Organizational development work that addresses connection, purpose alignment, and team health is the intervention, not a return-to-office mandate.
Where to Start
When asked where a people leader should actually begin, Scott’s answer was clear:
- Start with the most senior people in the organization. Run an alignment workshop. Get everyone in the room. Get agreement on the culture the organization needs in order to deliver its strategy.
- Define behaviors, not just values. Values are abstract. Behaviors are visible and holdable. Get specific about what the values look like in practice.
- Hold people accountable for behavior. This is the foundation everything else rests on.
- Invest in middle managers as culture carriers. They are the chief sense makers. Equip them.
- Build continuous learning into the culture. Not as a program. As a way of operating.
And the ultimate measure of whether any of this is working? Trust.
“Trust isn’t a value. It’s an outcome of us doing the things that we say we’ll do.”
Culture, Scott argues, is the same kind of outcome. It’s not declared into existence. It’s built through what people actually do, day after day, especially when it’s hard. Which means it can be shaped, measured, and strengthened. It just has to be treated as a priority rather than background noise.
Related Resource
Download the Complete Research
Get the full SparkEffect Trust Study with detailed breakdowns by industry, organization size, and leadership level.
[Research link]
The Science of Trust in Coaching
Explore the neuroscience behind why trust is the foundation of every leadership breakthrough. Download the free ebook.
[Ebook link]
Leadership Development Programs
SparkEffect’s leadership development courses help organizations build the conditions where people actually stay, grow, and perform.
[Leadership Development link]
Organizational Development
SparkEffect helps organizations align culture, strategy, and leadership capability so that change efforts stick.
[Organizational Development Link]
Hear Scott McInnes’s Full Conversation
Listen to the complete Courage to Advance episode, including the hospital gardener story, why “culture ambition” is better than “culture destination,” and why the same five challenges keep showing up year after year.
[Hear Scott’s full epsiode]
Work with SparkEffect
If your organization is facing the kind of crisis Tammy inherited, or you want to build trust infrastructure before crisis hits, we can help. Schedule a conversation to explore how:
[Contact link]
About SparkEffect
SparkEffect helps organizations build trust that bends without breaking. Our Trust Performance Index and consulting services give leadership teams the tools to diagnose trust gaps and build the infrastructure required for lasting transformation.
The Courage to Advance podcast features leaders building the organizations they wish existed, proving that business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing.
Looking for more on what effective leadership development actually looks like in practice? Explore these conversations on the Courage to Advance podcast.
