Not The Culture You Wanted.
The One You Allowed.
You do not get to choose whether your organisation has a culture. You only choose whether you built it on purpose.
A woman came up to me after a session once and said something I have thought about ever since.
She said, I know exactly what our problem is. We do not have a culture here.
I understood what she meant. There was no stated set of values, no programme, nothing on the wall. But she had it backwards, and I think a lot of leaders have it backwards in the same way.
Every organisation has a culture. There is no version of a group of people working together that does not develop one.
If people arrive late and nothing happens, that is the culture. If standards get disregarded and nobody says anything, that is the culture. If the same person misses the same deadline for the fourth time and everybody works around it, that is the culture.
It may not be the culture you wanted. It is the culture you allowed.
Culture is what happens when nobody is watching
The definition I keep coming back to is simple. Culture is what is actually experienced in your workplace when no one is monitoring it. How people behave is your culture. Not what you say about how people behave.
Which means it is not written in a document. It is written in what you tolerate.
Every leader is publishing a standard continuously, and almost none of it comes out of their mouth. It comes out of what they walk past.
Culture is not written
in your values statement.
It is written in
what you walk past.
Why one unaddressed person is so expensive
There is a piece of research here that I think every leader should know, because it puts a number on something most of us have felt but never quantified.
Will Felps and colleagues ran an experiment with forty small teams given a business task. Into some of the teams they planted a trained actor playing one of three roles: the jerk, who was dismissive and insulting; the slacker, who made clear he had no intention of contributing; and the downer, who was relentlessly pessimistic about the task.
Teams with that one person performed 30 to 40 percent worse than the others.
But the finding that matters more is what happened to everyone else. The behaviour spread. On teams with a jerk, other people started being unpleasant too. With a slacker, others disengaged. With a pessimist, the rest of the group turned negative. Nobody stayed neutral.
That is the mechanism behind the culture you allowed. It is not that one person underperforms and everyone else carries on. It is that the group calibrates to whatever is permitted, quickly and without discussing it.
Your best people are the most sensitive to this, incidentally. They are the ones who notice that the standard is theoretical, and they are the ones with options.
The exception in the data
There is one more detail from that research that I find genuinely hopeful.
Among all those teams, there was one where the decline did not happen. The difference was not the group’s composition or their skill. It was that the person leading the group responded differently. They engaged with the behaviour instead of absorbing it, and the contagion stopped.
Which tells you the spread is not inevitable. It is just what happens by default, in the absence of somebody deciding otherwise.
Support is not the same as lowering the bar
This is where a lot of well-meaning leaders get stuck, so let me be direct about it.
When people hear that a leader should be supportive, they often hear that things should be made easier. That is not what support means. Support does not mean lowering the standard. It means giving people the coaching, the clarity, the tools and the belief they need to reach it.
Those are opposite things and they get confused constantly. Dropping the bar for somebody is not kindness. It usually communicates that you do not think they can clear it.
Compassionate leadership is having the conversation people need to hear rather than the one they want to hear. If you actually care about somebody, you help them fix the thing that is holding them back. Avoiding that conversation is more comfortable for you and worse for them.
Why the fun stuff does not work
None of this gets solved with energy.
The rah-rah leader can lift the room for an afternoon, and it fades on the drive home. A halftime speech is great, but without training and a strategy the team still loses the game.
Pizza parties are excellent, for about an hour. Then people go back to looking for another job, possibly one with better pizza.
Nothing wrong with any of it. It just is not culture. Culture is the accumulated answer to a question everybody is quietly asking, which is what actually happens around here when somebody does the wrong thing, or the right one.
The group calibrates
to whatever is permitted.
Quickly, and without
anyone discussing it.
Changing what gets allowed
- Name the thing you have been walking past. You already know what it is. Everyone else does too, which is precisely why leaving it costs you credibility every day it continues.
- Address behaviour early and quietly. The first conversation is small. The fourth one is a performance issue that has already reshaped the team, because by then everybody has adjusted around it.
- Hold the standard hardest for your best performers. Exceptions made for high producers are the fastest way to teach a team that the standard is negotiable and that results buy you out of it.
- Say what good looks like out loud. People cannot meet a standard nobody has described. Vague expectations are not a standard, they are a trap.
The part nobody enjoys
Culture work is usually described as though it is about adding things. Values, programmes, events, a new set of behaviours on a poster.
Most of the time it is about subtraction. It is about stopping something you have been letting happen, and having a conversation you have been putting off, probably with somebody you like.
That is why so few organisations actually change. Not because leaders do not know what is wrong. Because the fix is uncomfortable and personal and lands on a specific Tuesday with a specific person, and it is always easier to run another engagement survey.
You already have a culture. The only question is whether you chose it.
Every organisation has a culture whether or not anyone designed one, and it is written in what leaders walk past rather than what they announce. Research on negative team members found a single unaddressed person drops team performance by 30 to 40 percent, and worse, the behaviour spreads until the group calibrates to it. The one team where that did not happen had a leader who responded. Culture work is mostly subtraction, and it is mostly one conversation you have been avoiding.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris runs national healthcare staffing organizations and speaks to companies, associations, and health systems on culture, retention, and building workplaces people do not want to leave.
Response within one business day
The Team Playbook
A ready to run guide for turning this into real conversations with the people you lead. Free and printable, no email required.
