A strong culture is vital for organizational success – as evidenced by the relationship between culture and leadership, employee commitment, customer satisfaction, and innovation. But “strong” doesn’t mean fixed. As the organizational goals and strategy change over time, so too should culture intentionally be changed. The best leaders ask, “Who do we need to be (culture) in order to achieve what we’re trying to do (strategic goals)?” But there’s one barrier that holds many organizations back from genuine and successful culture change: ownership. The first question to ask when culture change is on the horizon should not be, “How do we go about this?” but rather, “Who owns this?”

The answer is, too often, HR. Recently, I spent time with one of the world’s largest financial institutions, in the process of changing their culture. They have a significant call to change, an official remit to do it, yet one major challenge of ownership. And as with most medium-to-large organizations, official responsibility for shifting organizational culture lies in the hands of senior HR executives and their team.

While culture change can be an important and exciting project for HR, making it HR’s sole responsibility doesn’t work out as anyone had hoped. Too often, it devolves into a transactional “box-ticking” exercise. In this financial institution, for instance, it is often unjustly regarded as “just more to do from HR.” This isn’t through bad intention or lack of belief that the culture change matters. It’s usually because of competing priorities. So unless it’s the official responsibility of business unit leaders, it’s hard to move culture change to the top of their agenda when there are so many other formal responsibilities. Particularly when they know that HR, who tend to have greater skills and expertise in this area, is supposed to be leading the charge.

True culture change means altering the way the organization lives and breathes. It shapes the way people make decisions, get their work done, what they prioritize, and how they interact with colleagues, clients, and customers. It is really only successful and powerful when business leaders see it as their responsibility, and see HR as a resource for helping them achieve it. Consider a recently published longitudinal study by Anthony Boyce and colleagues that found culture “comes first” in predicting sales, as mediated by customer satisfaction. Surely creating that culture is just as much of a sales concern as an HR priority.

That’s why culture change has to be a collaborative project. HR leaders can help business executives successfully execute culture change by doing four things.

[Here’s the first:]

1. Facilitate the research phase. To move from A (existing culture) to B (desired, future culture) we often spend a lot of time and facilitate conversation and consultation deciding on B, but not enough time having a tangible, meaningful understanding of A. What do we look like now, at all levels — values, behaviors, processes, policies, artifacts? The larger the organization, the more variety we’ll get in what A really looks like across the firm. Business leaders need to know, and HR can be a huge resource in facilitating this process.