Short Bursts:
Junior Members: The Key to Lasting Culture Change

By LCol Cameron Meikle, CD

The root cause of the Canadian Armed Forces’ difficulty in implementing lasting culture change is widely debated. One book in the latest Commander Canadian Army’s Reading List attributes this shortcoming to persistent toxic leadership.^{Footnote 1}   A second book faults a refusal to embrace education, which limits leaders’ critical thinking in solving complex problems, such as cultural evolution.^{Footnote 2}  While the challenge of culture change is multifaceted, a closer look into organizational change theory—i.e., what experts say organizations should do for lasting change—reveals an underutilized Canadian Army (CA) resource for accelerating and sustaining cultural evolution: ideas from junior members.

Organizational change theories emphasize that culture change cannot be solely driven from the top. While senior leaders’ vision and leadership are crucial for change, culture change expert Andrew Saffron promotes a “top-down, middle-out, and bottom-driven” approach. This departure from strictly top-down directives is a reaction to senior leaders’ messages often becoming diluted or stalling at middle management if these individuals are unclear on how to support the effort.^{Footnote 3}   Studies have shown that up to 87 percent of front-line workers are unaware of their organization’s future vision.^{Footnote 4}  Similarly, there is evidence that bottom-up approaches are necessary to create sufficient buy-in to support change initiatives.^{Footnote 5}  This evidence aligns with critics of culture change in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), who argue that the CAF’s only significant cultural changes have come from internal bottom-up advocacy or external pressure.^{Footnote 6}

Top-down decision making occurs when a leader or team at the top of a hierarchical structure makes decisions for lower-level personnel to execute. This approach is practical in many situations and has the benefit of identifying problems rapidly, determining solutions quickly, and ensuring a consistent message is disseminated across the organization. However, with only a small group of people making decisions, the reduced diversity of thought can result in fewer creative solutions. Furthermore, higher-level employees may not fully understand the challenges faced at lower levels, and the process creates a bottleneck as numerous complex problems must be analyzed and addressed by senior leaders with multiple competing responsibilities.^{Footnote 7}

A top-down, bottom-informed approach empowers personnel across an organization to be actively involved in identifying problems, developing solutions, and monitoring the effectiveness of the new changes. This is more than a one-time survey, town hall, or interview, as personnel must be able to explore a problem, generate innovative potential solutions, and share ideas with senior leaders. Unbounded by decades of doing things the same way, junior members can generate more creative solutions.

CAF leaders have emphasized the role of bottom-up initiatives in driving sustainable culture change. The final progress report on Operation HONOUR highlighted the significant influence of junior members on CAF culture, marking them as pivotal in determining the success of change initiatives.^{Footnote 8}  Additionally, following the 2021 allegations of inappropriate behaviour by several CAF leaders, senior military officials stressed the importance of incorporating suggestions from junior members in order to learn from them, guide actions, and identify solutions.^{Footnote 9}

While the definition of “junior member” can be quite open-ended, the sources quoted above are likely all referring to individuals who are not stuck in their way of thinking—a bias called “cognitive entrenchment,” which develops when someone repeatedly faces the same type of problem. Over time, individuals can become accustomed to using the same solutions and stop noticing more effective ways to address challenges.^{Footnote 10}  While junior non-commissioned members (master corporals and below) and junior officers (captains and below) may be a general rule of thumb for who constitutes a junior member, any member not influenced by the cognitive entrenchment unconscious bias would be considered a bottom-up idea contributor.

Despite recognizing the need for bottom-up solutions, the responsibility for developing the CAF’s culture evolution plan was assigned to the Chief Professional Conduct and Culture (CPCC). Roger Connors, a bestselling culture change author, warns that removing personnel from their units to form culture change teams is a common mistake.^{Footnote 11}  The risk with this approach is best summarized in General Eyre’s observation that Operation HONOUR’s recommendations felt out of touch, being perceived as “made in Ottawa for Ottawa.”^{Footnote 12}  

Creating an organization like the CPCC can also inadvertently allow other leaders to avoid addressing culture change and assuming it is being handled elsewhere. This could be why the CA has not issued any specific culture change orders since Operation HONOUR’s termination in May 2022. As evidence, the 5th Canadian Division’s Culture Evolution Committee has cited waiting for CPCC direction for its lack of updated formal guidance.

To be clear, this constructive criticism of CAF’s culture evolution efforts is not saying that current initiatives are ineffective—all work has been necessary, long overdue, and will have positive effects. That said, this paper’s goal is to highlight the opportunity to achieve faster and lasting positive CAF culture change by operationalizing junior members’ ideas. However, as one should not bring problems but rather solutions, the following paragraphs will outline how to translate this vision into action. 

In order to create a top-down, bottom-informed plan for culture change, most units within the 6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade (6 CCSB) created surveys geared towards identifying challenges with unit/CAF culture. Armed with a list of issues, some units organized a Culture Day during which working groups were created to develop solutions. Groups working on the same problems shared ideas to drive further discussion and ultimately determine the unit’s solution to each identified problem: unit-wide solutions to unit-identified problems. When actions fell within the commanding officer’s authority, orders were issued to incorporate the ideas from the Culture Day, achieving a top-down, but bottom-informed culture evolution plan.

Unfortunately, the initiative encountered roadblocks when transmitting unit-level suggestions to the appropriate CA (or CAF) commander when solutions required authorities beyond the unit’s control. For instance, one suggestion to enhance inclusivity involved adding an optional field for preferred pronouns to the Global Address List in Outlook, allowing senders to check pronouns before using gendered terms. This initiative required approval beyond 6 CCSB’s authority. However, multiple staff-level inquiries to 7 Communication Group went unanswered, likely due to a lack of resources or structure to handle such inquiries. This kind of communication barrier prevents institutionalizing a top-down, bottom-informed approach to CAF culture change.

The unintended outcome of 6 CCSB’s exercise was that soldiers felt unheard, as many solutions received no traction or response. This example illustrates that if the CA wants to be serious about listening to its people, an efficient method for getting bottom-up suggestions to the appropriate decision makers is a critical missing step (read: not pushing briefing notes for every suggestion through commanders). This recommendation does not mean that every solution must be acted upon. Resource constraints or a better understanding of second-order effects may lead to a suggestion not being accepted. Still, soldiers need to feel heard and, most importantly, that their workable solutions can be adopted. 

The CAF must showcase its ability to address its people’s concerns to reduce the perception of the “Made in Ottawa for Ottawa” culture change efforts. For instance, the CAF’s Comprehensive Implementation Plan—the CAF’s roadmap released in July 2024 to drive culture change—has 194 recommendations to be addressed.^{Footnote 13}  From this list, only 19 items are labelled as focused on improving members’ well-being, with 15 of these solutions addressing senior leader promotions, Military Police reform, or improved engagement with advisory groups.^{Footnote 14}  The remaining 175 recommendations primarily address strategic-level reporting, structural changes, and policy amendments. While these recommendations are important, with only 30.4 percent of CAF members feeling the organization provides a reasonable quality of life, and some CAF leaders citing toxic leadership for our retention problems,^{Footnote 15}  one could argue that more emphasis should be placed on these well-being aspects.

The CA can enhance culture change efforts by adopting a top-down, bottom-informed approach. Implementing unit culture surveys to identify areas for improvement is crucial. Each unit should then hold a Culture Day where personnel develop solutions to their specific challenges—along with other military-culture-promoting activities. Solutions to challenges within the unit’s control can be implemented immediately. At the same time, those issues requiring higher authority should be efficiently communicated to decision makers without overburdening the chain of command. With each division required to have a Culture Evolution Officer, this position could be leveraged to facilitate a new process to manage these recommendations. With junior members driving change, the CA will have the buy-in that experts say is so difficult to achieve—we just need to listen to them.

About the Author

Cameron Meikle has over twenty years of experience as an Armoured Officer with Lord Strathcona’s Horse (Royal Canadians). He is a recent graduate from the United States Army School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and holds two master’s degrees. He is currently employed as the G5 for the 6 Canadian Combat Support Brigade in Kingston, Ontario.

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This article first appeared online in the Short Bursts section of the Canadian Army Journal (September 2025).