Study guide
8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture
APMG Change Management Foundation Exam
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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context
1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits
2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context
2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels
3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach
3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators
4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy
4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy
5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response
5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model
6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning
6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford
7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership
7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change
8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture
8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate
9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change
9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity
10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement
10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement
11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection
11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds
12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning
12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning
13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity
13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity
14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change
14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance
15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness
15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision
8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
Carolyn Taylor describes three mechanisms through which messages are communicated to shape culture: behaviours, symbols and systems
Behaviours are what leaders do, which people read as the real statement of what is expected
Symbols include patterns such as how leaders allocate time and resources, and storytelling about defining moments, heroes and villains
Systems are the mechanisms of management which control, plan, measure and reward the organisation and its people
Examples of systems include HR and performance management processes, customer processes, and organisational structure
Last updated: September 2026
Carolyn Taylor describes three mechanisms through which messages are communicated as a means of supporting changes of culture. The exam tests these as a set — most often as a NOT question offering a plausible fourth — so learn all three and be confident about what is not on the list.
- The three mechanisms
- Behaviours
What leaders actually do. Every action a leader takes is read by the organisation as a statement about what is genuinely expected, and where behaviour and words diverge, behaviour wins.
This overlaps directly with Schein's primary embedding mechanisms — how leaders spend their time, react to problems, allocate resources and reward or penalise people — and with the observation that words constitute only around 7 per cent of the message.
Symbols
Symbols are the patterns and stories that carry meaning beyond their literal content. CM3 gives two categories:
Patterns — as Taylor puts it, part of 'a larger pattern' , such as patterns in how leaders make choices about use of time or resource allocation . A leadership team that cancels the customer forum but never the budget review has communicated a priority, whatever it says about customer focus
Storytelling — following a pattern, as in the values in fairy stories and national legends. Storytelling talks about the defining moments of an organisation's history, together with its heroes and villains
Organisational stories are cultural instruments. The story about the engineer who stopped the production line and was backed by the director, retold for a decade, teaches more about what is valued than any policy document. Change managers can work with this deliberately: identifying which existing stories support the change and creating genuine new moments worth telling.
Systems
Taylor describes these as "those mechanisms of management which control, plan, measure and reward your organization and its people" . Examples include:
- The way HR systems, and especially performance management systems, operate
- Customer processes
Organisational structure — how many levels? How easy is access to senior-level people?
Systems are the mechanism most often forgotten and the most powerful of the three, because they operate continuously and impersonally on everyone. A leader's good behaviour affects the people who observe it; a performance management system affects everybody, every cycle, whether anyone is watching or not.
Why the three must work together
The practical lesson is that culture change attempted through one mechanism fails . The recognisable failure pattern:
The message The contradiction The result
"We are a collaborative organisation" Bonuses are allocated on individual targets ( systems ) Staff conclude collaboration is rhetoric
"We empower local decision-making" Every spend over £500 needs three approvals ( systems ) Empowerment is disbelieved
"We value learning from failure" The last person who raised a problem was removed from the project ( symbols and behaviours ) Nobody reports problems
In each case the stated message is correct, the communication is professional, and the culture does not move — because a system or a remembered story is saying the opposite continuously.
This gives change managers a specific and unglamorous piece of advice: before designing a culture-change communication campaign, audit the systems. Ask what the performance management process rewards, what the approval structure permits, and what the organisational structure implies about access. If any of these contradict the intended culture, the campaign will fail regardless of its quality, and fixing the system is the higher-value intervention.
It also explains why sponsor responsibility 4 — aligning the organisation's infrastructure, environment and reward systems with the change, especially the way performance is measured and managed — is so heavily weighted. That is a systems intervention, and only executive authority can make it.
Applying the three mechanisms
A useful planning exercise for any culture-relevant change is to answer three questions:
Behaviours — what specifically will leaders do differently, visibly, starting when?
Symbols — what pattern of time and resource allocation will demonstrate the priority, and what story from the change is worth telling and retelling?
Systems — which measurement, reward, approval or structural mechanism currently contradicts the intended culture, and who can change it?
Answering the third question honestly is usually what determines whether the culture element of a change is achievable at all.
Using stories deliberately
Symbols include storytelling, and change teams under-use it because it feels less rigorous than a communication plan. It is worth being deliberate about three moves.
Find the stories already circulating. Every organisation has them, and they encode what people actually believe about change here. The story about the last programme that was cancelled after go-live is doing more work than any reassurance you issue. Knowing which stories are in play tells you what you are arguing against.
Identify existing stories that support the change. Most organisations contain a genuine precedent — a team that already works the new way, a past change that went well. Retelling a true internal story is far stronger than an external case study, because the audience knows the people in it.
Create moments worth telling. The defining moments Taylor describes are made, not narrated. A leader who reverses a decision because a front-line objection was right has created a story about whether challenge is safe, and that story will travel further than a statement about psychological safety.
The caution from the hearts-and-minds material applies here too: stories, like metaphors, must resonate with the audience or they undermine the message they were meant to carry.