Executives and HR leaders
How do we build a shared leadership framework across our organisation?
Most organisations don’t have a leadership culture problem. They have a consistency problem. Depending on which team you’re in, you get a completely different experience of what it means to work there. A shared framework doesn’t make everyone the same — it makes the minimum floor visible and gives people a common language for what good looks like.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: All five practices
Why frameworks fail at the consistency stage
The failure mode I’ve seen most often is a framework that was designed, launched with some fanfare, and then never reinforced. The problem is almost never the content. Leadership culture is not an announcement. It’s the cumulative product of a thousand interactions — in one-on-ones, in performance conversations, in the moment someone makes a decision under pressure when nobody’s watching. If the framework only lives in a workshop deck, it won’t survive contact with a quarterly deadline.
What actually works
Pick something simple enough to remember. A framework with twelve principles sounds thorough. Nobody holds twelve things in their head while running a difficult conversation. The Leadership Star has five practices for this reason. Your managers should be able to name them without looking at a card — and if they can’t, the framework hasn’t landed.
Embed it inside existing practice, not on top of it. One-on-ones become the vehicle for Care and Clarity. Team meetings become the vehicle for Context. Sprint planning becomes the vehicle for Clear the Way. If the framework requires new meetings to function, it will be deprioritised the moment things get busy.
Make the senior leaders go first. The fastest way to signal that a framework matters is for the people at the top to use it publicly and visibly. At Westpac and at Quantium, we built the company values explicitly into the annual performance review process. As CEO at Westpac, I would rate each person in my direct team against each individual value — and start every performance conversation by walking through those values one by one, highlighting where I’d seen them demonstrate it well and where there were things we needed to discuss about how they were showing up. When your team sees you doing that — using the framework as a genuine lens on behaviour, treating it as the actual management tool it is — the message travels fast. Line managers notice. They start doing the same thing with their own teams.
Build recognition into the rhythm, not the calendar. Celebrate is the practice most organisations treat as occasional — a formal awards night, a quarterly shoutout. Build a weekly recognition habit at every level. The goal is to make the framework visible in everyday language — in informal moments as much as formal ones.
Measure the right things. Training completion rates tell you whether people attended a workshop. They don’t tell you whether anything changed. The useful measures are: are managers having the conversations the framework requires, and can people tell you in their own words what their manager expects of them?
Where judgment matters
Shared frameworks work best when they describe how to lead, not what to decide. The moment a framework gets used as a decision-making tool — “the leadership principles say we should do X” — it has been taken somewhere it wasn’t designed to go and will produce bad outcomes. Keep it in its lane.
Does your organisation have a leadership language that managers actually use in conversation — or just a framework that lives in the onboarding pack?
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