Episode 20: Featuring Scott McInnes, Founder, Inspiring Change
Most organizations know exactly what their culture problems are. They’ve known for years. So why aren’t those problems getting fixed?
That’s the uncomfortable question at the center of Scott McInnes’s research, a study conducted exclusively with Chief People Officers in Ireland that set out to find the real stumbling blocks between the culture organizations have and the culture they actually need. When Scott debriefed a group of respondents on the findings, he opened with this: “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 patterns. Almost no one had cracked them.
What Scott found, and what makes this conversation particularly valuable for US-based leaders, is that the five culture challenges Irish CPOs named map almost exactly onto what SparkEffect’s own research surfaces across American organizations. Geography doesn’t seem to change much. The challenges are consistent, persistent, and in most cases, entirely fixable. The will to act is the missing piece.
In this episode, Scott and Kim Bohr compare research findings from both sides of the Atlantic, dig into why well-intentioned leaders still fall short on culture, and get specific about where to start when you’re ready to stop talking about it.
Watch
What You’ll Learn
- The five biggest culture challenges CPOs face today are the same ones they faced a decade ago, and what that actually tells us
- How senior leaders cast a “long shadow” that either builds or quietly dismantles the culture they say they want
- Why messages from the top of the organization tend to fit everybody and connect with nobody, and what middle managers have to do about it
- The difference between calling something a values problem versus a behavior problem, and why it changes everything about accountability
- How reframing “difficult conversations” as developmental ones shifts who shows up and how
- Why forcing everyone back to the office won’t fix disconnection, and what actually might
- The case for thinking about culture as an ambition rather than a destination
Episode Highlights
[00:00] The Culture Problem Organizations Already Know About: Kim frames the central problem: most organizations know they have a culture issue long before they do anything about it.
[04:38] Why Scott Surveyed Only Irish CPOs: The research was intentionally local. One question, ten minutes, focused on what’s actually blocking culture progress in Irish organizations.
[07:28] Good News and Bad News, No Surprises: Scott describes the debrief moment where CPOs recognized every finding with a wry smile. Same problems, different day.
[11:27] The Five Culture Challenges: Leadership skill and will, the “permafrost layer” of middle managers, skills for today and tomorrow, accountability for values, and disconnection.
[20:56] Middle Managers as Chief Sense Makers: Scott explains why the manager who knows someone can’t be reached on Friday mornings is the most important culture carrier, not the CEO.
[23:12] The Hospital Gardener Story: A CEO discovers a gardener not cutting the grass. Scott reframes what that failure actually means, and why purpose-making at the team level is not optional.
[34:30] Trust Is Not a Value, It’s an Outcome: Scott pushes back on organizations that put trust on a poster and call it a culture strategy.
[36:30] Culture Ambition, Not Culture Destination: Scott’s closing reframe, and the reason he deliberately chooses the word ambition over destination.
Key Takeaways for HR Leaders
The same culture problems keep showing up because organizations aren’t making time to fix them, not because they’re unfixable. Scott’s research found nothing that wasn’t already a known challenge a decade ago. The barrier isn’t complexity. It’s bandwidth, pace, and the tendency to move onto the next thing before the last thing gets addressed. These are solvable problems when they’re treated as priorities rather than background noise.
Senior leaders don’t just set culture, they are the culture, whether they intend to be or not. Scott’s “long shadow” framing is direct: 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 others to hold, the whole system quietly collapses. Role modeling isn’t a soft skill. It’s the mechanism.
Middle managers are your most important culture carriers, and most organizations are underinvesting in them.An organization-wide message has to fit everyone, so it ends up connecting with no one. Middle managers translate corporate purpose into something that actually means something to the person sitting across from them. That translation work, what Scott calls “chief sense making,” is what turns values into behavior.
Accountability for values only works when the values and behaviors have been clearly agreed on first. You can’t hold someone accountable for something that was never explicitly defined. Before launching any culture initiative, senior teams need to get aligned on what the behaviors look like day to day. Without that foundation, accountability conversations don’t have anything to stand on.
Trust isn’t something you put on a poster. It’s what happens when people consistently do what they say they’ll do.Trust is an output, not an input. The same goes for culture itself. Both are outcomes of behavior, which means they can be measured, shaped, and strengthened deliberately.
About Our Guest
Scott McInnes is the founder of Inspiring Change, a consultancy based in Dublin that works with organizations across Ireland, the UK, and Europe to build stronger, more aligned cultures. Over more than 25 years, his work has spanned internal communications, leadership development, and cultural change across both public and private sector organizations. His clients include Boots Ireland, the FAI, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, Bus Eireann, Enterprise Ireland, and VHI.
Scott founded Inspiring Change in 2017 with a clear focus: help organizations close the gap between the culture they say they have and the one they actually need to deliver on their strategy. He describes his working style as “professionally human” – a phrase that shows up in how he approaches both his client work and his research.
He is also the host of the Building Better Cultures podcast, where he speaks with leaders about culture, leadership, communications, and engagement across more than 150 episodes.
Connect with Scott McInnes
- Website: https://www.inspiringchange.ie
- Podcast: https://www.buildingbettercultures.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottwmcinnes/
Notable Quotes
Scott McInnes:
“I might not know your values. But I can see your behaviors.”
“Trust isn’t a value. It’s an outcome of us doing the things that we say we’ll do.”
Kim Bohr:
“Most organizations know they have a culture problem long before they do anything about it. And the longer they wait, the more it costs them in talent, in performance, and in trust.”
“If we can reframe difficult conversations as developmental conversations or support conversations, it changes everything about how people show up.”
Related Resources
Inspiring Change culture research report
Building Better Cultures podcast: Scott’s podcast, with more than 150 episodes on culture, leadership, and engagement.
Connect with Scott on LinkedIn
SparkEffect Trust Study: Research showing that 71% of organizations faced disruption in the last 24 months, but only 36% emerged stronger.
About Courage to Advance
Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, companies that prove business doesn’t have to be dehumanizing. Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, each episode features executives who refuse to accept that traditional corporate practices are inevitable, sharing the experiments, resistance, and breakthrough results of choosing human flourishing alongside business success.
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