Imagine two self-proclaimed experts on LinkedIn talking about workplace culture. (Not difficult, I admit.) Each has a different view about where culture is set and how it is driven.
EXPERT 1: “Your culture is how you deliver your strategy, so it has to be set by the leadership. You need clear purpose, goals and values and you need to communicate them regularly so everyone in the business knows and understands what is expected. Culture is top down.”
EXPERT 2: “Culture isn’t about the CEO. Culture is about “how we do things round here”. All the fancy internal comms in the world can’t change the reality of what people experience. Culture is bottom up.”
E1: “People need to know what the organisation stands for, and that comes from the senior leadership. It’s your responsibility as a senior leader to shape the narrative. Change can only come from the top down.”
E2: "Culture is the stories people tell each other about the organisation, and the beliefs they have about how things work. If you’re telling them one thing and they’re experiencing another, they’re not going to suddenly believe you. You can’t change culture from the top down.”
E1: “As a CEO you set the expectations – the worst behaviour you tolerate is what sets your culture!”
E2: “If you’re the CEO you’re too far removed from the reality of what goes on in your organisation to even know what the culture is!”
E1: "I should know, I've led 25 multi-billion pound businesses while still making time for my family!"
E2: "Well, I've been on 78 podcasts and worked with 5,000 companies in the past 6 months."
Who is right?
Well, they both are. Culture is quite a complex thing.
Many people use the iceberg metaphor to talk about culture – with the visible elements above the water being set by senior leadership and what happens beneath the surface being potentially hazardous.
I like this metaphor - I often use it myself - but I think it overlooks a crucial part of the picture. The filling in the sandwich, as it were.
The real drivers of culture in an organisation are the people in the middle: the managers.
These are the people that really shape the experience employees have. They are the people that are modelling behaviour, making decisions and enforcing what is and isn’t acceptable.
This is even more the case in a hybrid workplace, where senior leadership are usually less visible and people tend to interact mostly with their own team.
For example, an executive team can recognise the need for a growth mindset, to encourage learning and new approachs. But if line managers are scared of failure, their teams won’t be encouraged to try new things.
The HR team can see the value of offering flexible working and want this to be rolled out, but a manager who wants to keep tabs on their team at all times won’t know how to make that work.
Organisational values can talk about ‘kindness’ or ‘inclusion’ but managers need to feel confident and empowered to have those conversations within their teams.
In fact, I see many hybrid workplaces where the different approaches of different managers mean that the organisation becomes a set of micro-cultures. Which is far from ideal. When different employees are having different experiences this will play out in recruitment, retention, motivation and wellbeing - as well as in performance.
Any culture change programme has to focus on managers.
There is absolutely a strategic piece of work that needs to happen which identifies what culture is wanted and needed to drive business objectives. But this needs to be shared (or even co-created) with leaders at all levels, so that they understand and feel responsible for the role that they play.
And then managers need to be enabled and empowered to have conversations with their teams – whether that’s about flexibility, decision making or calling out behaviour that doesn’t fit the values of the organsiation.
Because real culture change needs to happen at all levels.
*It's ice, obviously, but I'm trying to stick with the metaphor.
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