Maybe It’s Your Culture

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

How to reset a workplace culture that’s tanking the business

Every company has a culture. And no, we’re not talking about beanbag chairs and kombucha on tap. We’re talking about what you DO to get great work done. Not your plans and OKRs. How you treat each other. How you debate, disagree, and ultimately commit to decisions. Everywhere you look, people talk about the importance of getting culture right, of having good culture, because common sense tells us good culture = a thriving company.

Right? So, why do so many companies get it wrong? 

While there’s no one-size-fits-all “good” culture to aim for, we do know that toxic cultures are definitively not good for business. Toxic environments lead to unhealthy conflict, rampant distrust, detrimental internal competition, lower and slower results, poor decision-making, higher turnover, increased burnout...you get the idea. Bottomline, if left unaddressed, a toxic culture can rot a company from the inside out.

Thankfully, you can—and should—correct course. 

And you should start NOW. 

And it all starts with you.

1. Get Honest about the Culture You’ve Created

Imagine you’re a farmer. To have healthy crops that grow tall and produce lots of beautiful, tasty fruit and vegetables, you know you need good soil and the right amounts of sunlight and water. If one or more of those components is off—your soil isn’t rich or it hasn’t rained in three months—your corn isn’t going to be knee-high by the 4th of July. That kind of environment will not even support minimal growth, much less a large, flourishing harvest. 

So, what do you do? Do you blame the corn? Do you put your crops on a performance improvement plan? NO. You change what you can about their environment. You fertilize, you irrigate, etc. 

Culture has the same impact on employee growth and performance at work as the environmental factors have on crops in the field. Yet interestingly, many leaders don’t recognize the effect of culture on their team’s work. Nor do they take personal responsibility for their own role in shaping that culture. 

Often, when things aren’t going well leaders will blame and penalize their employees first. “People aren’t pulling their own weight. There’s no accountability. These aren’t A-Players.” These are the problems many prospective clients come to us with. But, we always put it right back on them first: How might the company culture you’ve created be impacting your employees’ ability to show up and do their best work. 

Leaders, you have to own it. You play a massive role in shaping culture. You set the tone. You reward and discourage certain behaviors, knowingly or not. You fertilize the field, or not. So, if your team is not performing, the question isn’t, “What’s wrong with the team?” but rather, “What am I doing, or not doing, to create a low-performance culture?” How are you inadvertently teaching your team not to take responsibility? How are you keeping them in fight or flight mode with constant, but avoidable, fire-drills? How have you taken A-players and treated them like C-players? 

Culture starts with you. Once you accept that responsibility and take a good honest look at the culture you’ve created, you’re ready to start making some changes.

2. Observe and Listen

So, then what? Before you can make any big changes, you need to first take time to observe the behaviors of your teams. Have honest conversations with them and truly listen to what they have to say. You need to understand what’s going on under the surface because, most often, your team’s behaviors are symptomatic of larger systemic issues. Intentionally observing what’s happening and listening to your team’s experiences will better allow you to identify the systemic issues at play and start making changes to address the root causes.

Note, however, that what you observe and what your team tells you may not match. If the current cultural dynamic has engendered distrust, fear, and/or burnout (or if you approach them aggressively), your team may not feel safe enough to share their real thoughts with you. This is the definition of low psychological safety. And that’s good information too. 

To start bridging that divide, approach these conversations with openness and humility. They shouldn’t feel like interrogations. Think less “What’s going on? Why is X happening?” and more “I’m noticing X. What’s your experience been?”

This process can take some time. It involves rebuilding trust and psychological safety. But it’s one of the most important investments you can make.

3. Acknowledge the Problem

Cultural change doesn’t happen on its own, and it certainly won’t happen faster or easier by keeping your intentions a secret. To cultivate a collaborative and energized culture, you need to talk about it proactively—especially when your behaviors as the leader have helped create the culture you’re trying to change.

Bring everyone into the fold. Address the full team to let them know… 

1. That you’re aware of the cultural issues

2. What you believe those issues to be 

3. That changing and improving the culture is a priority for you

By acknowledging the problem, humbly owning your part in it, and publicly committing to change, you demonstrate to your team that you’re serious, and you give them the ability to hold you accountable.

4. Involve the Team in Crafting a New Culture

After collecting all that data and taking responsibility to change things, your instinct might be to wall up for a few days and draft a new Cultural Manifesto. But that would be a mistake. To unify the team and create buy-in in the path forward, people need to feel involved, not told what the culture is going to be…again. 

Many CEOs hire a facilitator for this process. Someone with an objecting third-party lens can level the playing field across the executive team, defuse tensions, and help maintain the integrity of the conversation. But prepare yourself–a good facilitator will call out the CEO when he or she reverts to the behaviors that created the negative culture in the first place: speaking more than everyone, impatience with the process, belittling looks or commentary, etc. This might feel threatening to you as a leader, but it’s one of the best ways to build trust and give people faith in the integrity of the process. 

We facilitate these meetings for clients all the time. Our role is to help conduct a purposeful conversation about the culture, focusing on the gap between the culture you have and the culture you want. The goal is not to air grievances or determine how many ping-pong tables to distribute throughout the office. Rather, the goal is to identify the values you want to uphold in your company, and figure out what you need to do, and not do, to uphold your agreed-upon values. Essentially, how do you want to treat each other? Then, we create a real game plan for how you as a leadership team will “walk the talk” and stay accountable.

5. Reward What You Want to See More Of

Your organization’s culture boils down to the quality of conversations and level of accountability you have among you on a daily basis. It’s what you DO, not just what you agree to do. You can talk about values all you want, but if you don’t back those values up with behaviors, your “cultural change” will be dead in the water, as will your company’s health and success. 

Developmental psychology research (and basically every leadership book, including ours) tells us that rewarding the behaviors you want to see more of is more effective for promoting behavioral change than punishing the behaviors you want to see less of. Thus, your game plan should include setting up reward systems to amplify your culture carriers—team members exhibiting behaviors that align with your newly defined values. It can be everything from recognizing “Employees of the Month” to publicly praising people at All Hands when they’ve executed strong, culturally consistent processes (not just delivered strong results). 

It’s important that leaders at all levels participate in rewarding people, but it’s especially important that the CEO does. At the end of the day, people will see (and repeat) the behaviors the CEO rewards. If you reward Jim, who steals credit from his teammates, or Becky, who micromanages every project, others will also start to steal credit and micromanage. If, however, you reward Vivian, who celebrates the contributions of her teammates, and Stephen, who listens to all perspectives before making important decisions, others will start to do more of those things instead.

It’s really that easy.

A Final Word: Just Own Your Setbacks and Begin Again

Resetting a toxic culture is not like flipping a lightswitch. You and your team members have engrained habits. You’ve been operating under a certain set of rules, even if they were unspoken rules, for a long time. You will have setbacks. 

The important thing is to own them, choose a more culturally consistent path forward, and begin again. 

Your team, your customers, and your bottomline will thank you for it.