A leader comes to me and says they need to work on their culture.
They talk about accountability. People not taking ownership. Silos. Decisions constantly pushed upwards. A leadership team that agrees things in the room and then does something else.
They want me to work with the team.
My answer is usually: not yet.
Here is why.
“Never”
I spoke with the senior partner of a large partnership. He was frustrated. His best people kept being poached by firms offering better financial packages, and he was struggling with what he saw as a lack of loyalty, particularly given how heavily the firm had invested in developing them.
I asked how they decided who to promote.
At every level, he said, on the fees they brought in.
I asked whether someone’s ability to lead was taken into account.
He said: never.
There was a pause, and in it something became visible.
If the only thing you measure is fees, then fees are the only thing that matters here, and everybody knows it long before they could tell you how they know. The firm was not developing leaders. It was running a competition, and the prize was money. So when a competitor offered more money, it had already taught its best people exactly how to evaluate that offer.
They were not being disloyal. They were being consistent with what they had been taught.
And it goes further than the people you have. A firm like that gradually attracts people who put fees above everything else, because that is who thrives there. The culture begins recruiting for itself.
He saw it. For a few minutes, new possibilities were available to him.
As far as I know, nothing changed.
The firm is still successful. I have often wondered what it could look like if it kept its best people.
Every organisation teaches, constantly
That is the thing about culture that gets missed. It is not what you declare. It is what gets learnt, continuously, from three things.
What you reward. The loudest lesson, and the partnership is the clearest case. People read promotion criteria far more accurately than they read values statements, because promotion criteria have consequences. Whatever you promote on is what your organisation is actually for, whatever the website says. And once it is in the system, it no longer needs you present to keep teaching.
What you tolerate. If someone speaks to a colleague with contempt in a meeting and nothing happens, the standard has been set. Everybody watched, and the answer they got was that this is how we communicate here. You can spend two days agreeing a value called respect, but the real policy was established months earlier by a silence.
What makes this one difficult is that every individual instance is defensible. The person is high-performing. The conversation would be unpleasant. Raising it would make things worse this week. It is not quite bad enough yet. Each of those is a reason. Together they are a policy.
What you do. This one teaches without your intending anything at all. If you are consistently late, lateness is acceptable. If money is visibly what motivates you, money is what your people learn to prioritise. None of it requires a decision. It only requires repetition.
The version where the leader is trying
It would be comfortable to leave it there, with the problem belonging to leaders who have not thought about any of this. The harder case is the one where they have.
A client of mine had recently become a partner in a large consultancy. She genuinely wanted ideas to emerge through real exchange rather than deference to seniority. She read about collaborative leadership and applied it. She held back her own view, asked open questions, created more space in meetings.
The conversations did not change.
We looked at one meeting in detail. I asked what she had been listening for while her team spoke. Her first answer was the strongest idea. Then she stopped.
What she had actually been listening for was the moment the team reached the conclusion she already held.
Her questions were open in form. Her attention was not. When the discussion moved towards her preferred destination she became engaged and encouraging. When it moved away she grew quieter and more economical. She barely had to reject anything. The team had learnt to read the change in her.
They were not failing to contribute. They were navigating.
Her behaviour said this is open. The rest of her said but not too open.
Why nobody tells you
There is a reason this can run for years without anyone naming it.
The adjustment is never reported back. Most of it is not deliberate: a point not pressed, a proposal checked informally before it reaches you, an objection raised afterwards to a colleague rather than in the room. Nobody experiences that as concealment. They experience it as understanding how things work here.
Some of it is deliberate. People know exactly what they are not saying and have decided it is not worth it. The risk of telling you is theirs and arrives today. The gain is yours and arrives later, if at all.
So the position that gives you the most influence over the pattern gives you the least information about it. Your environment protects your ceiling through competence, loyalty and good manners rather than through dishonesty.
Which is worth remembering the next time you conclude that nobody has ever raised this with you.
Why the offsite didn’t hold
Now take that organisation away for two days.
There is a survey. People speak more honestly than they have in years. Values get agreed and behaviours defined. Everybody leaves feeling something has shifted, and something probably has.
For a while.
But the two days changed what people said they would do. They did not change what the organisation teaches.
The promotion criteria are the same on Monday. The behaviour tolerated last month is still tolerated. The same leader is still at the head of the table, listening for their own conclusion.
You cannot workshop your way out of a promotion criterion.
And the cost is not only the fortnight of everyone’s time. You have now taught the organisation that these initiatives change nothing. The second attempt is much harder than the first, because the cynicism you are working against is cynicism you created.
The questions that come first
Before asking how do we change our culture, I want a leader to sit with harder ones.
What does this business teach its people?
What do we actually promote on?
What have I decided not to say anything about?
What am I unwilling to let fail?
Which behaviours in others frustrate me most, and how might I be producing them?
What has made me successful that may now be limiting the people around me?
This is not about fixing a broken leader. It is about helping a successful one see the patterns that the success itself has made invisible.
Not their fault. Their part.
Why I say not yet
This is why I have a rule.
I will not undertake culture work with an organisation until I have first worked with the person leading it. My 90-Day Leadership Programme is the foundation for the culture work. Without it, the leader becomes the bottleneck in the very change they asked for.
That does not always mean the chief executive. If a CIO wants to change how their function operates, we start with the CIO. The work begins with whoever owns the culture in question.
And if I do not believe the shape of an engagement will produce what someone came for, I will say so and turn it down.
Because culture is not what you declare.
It is what you teach.